so good morning everybody. welcome to george christopher playground. a playground that was dedicated by the way 50 years ago in 1971 by mayor's alioto and christopher. so we're so delighted to have our very special guest, the 2021 mayor of san francisco going to say a few words in a little bit. my name is phil ginsburg and, yes, this is an actual and not a virtual opening. i haven't -- i haven't seen -- we vnt done one of these and i haven't seen this many people in one place so i'm kind of

nervous and shy and not used to it so forgive me. one thing the pandemic has taught us is how essential and open spaces and parks have been to our physical and mental health and well being. let's be honest, this project took a number of years in the making. wasn't fully funded. we had design changes and wonderful advocacy of support and then there was that pandemic that got in the way for about a year. so to be here today is really wonderful. today, we have our mayor, we have supervisor mandelman. we have commissioner mcdonald and some community champions to help us celebrate. so i will be brief. this is a $5.3 million effort. the scope of the work includes a lot of the stuff you can see. but i'm going to highlight two

things. one are the original playground elements that you see out to your left, to my right which really happened because of community advocacy and a really important desire and as we know, and thank you mayor and supervisor mandelman for all your support in helping us preserve these other elements. and then, the other thing i want to highlight very quickly is the nature exploration area to my left and your right and it kind of rambles and meanders through this beautiful space and i'm so impressed with the work of our design, you know, the design team and i'm going to acknowledge people in a second. but it's an acknowledgement of just how important nature is for our kids and to have an opportunity for all of our wonderful kids both behind me at the knowy valley nursery

school and here at the eureka valley care facility to have them be able to touch plants, explore nature, to get dirty, and hop and skip on these lovely wood stumps is really a treat. all right. none of these projects happen in a vacuum and happened without people. so i want to acknowledge our mayor and supervisor mandelman for your support and for championing this project. i also want to thank and acknowledge former district supervisors scott weaner. i want to acknowledge our dedicated rec and park commissioners and vice chair eric mcdonald who's here along with commissioner hallisee who's joining us today. nick maloney.

along with robert bruss. we have sarah cass highman. they have been outstanding partners in realizing our let's play initiative. and, of course, all of you, all the community members deserve the real thanks and accolades. i want to acknowledge a few people. breonna mcnulty. kathryn king, eureka valley arts and the property manager of donna real estate. a shout out to our construction team mike clancy and barry duarty from treaty construction. and it goes without saying that rec and park and i really want to thank and acknowledge b.p.w. specifically jasmine call and,

of course, d.p.w.'s allory. and without further adieu and you're going to hear from a lot of other speakers and i'll be here to acknowledge my staff at the end. a big warm welcome for our mayor who has steered us through this pandemic and keeping kids in mind all along the way, mayor breed. >> thank you, phil. first of all, i know we're in a playground and there's no way if i were a kid that i could sit here and listen to a bunch of grown-ups talk when i want to play. so i'm going to say to all the kids here today, go ahead and play. enjoy the playground. we can work around you. they've been waiting for a long time to be out here not just in this playground, but playgrounds all over the city. so we've got to let these kids have a good time. feel free to play. we'll work around you. we are in a playground, we're

celebrating and we're so grateful to be here. it's been a rough year for so many of us. this pandemic has tested our city and our country and the entire world like never before, but i want to say how proud i am of san francisco and what we've done and what you all have helped us to accomplish and that is even though we're one of the densest cities in the countries, we had one of the lowest infection rates and one of the lowest death rates in the country and we should be very proud for all of you and what we all did together to make this happen. yay. that's what i'm talking about. when i was a kid, it was margaret hayward playground and the western addition. i lived in that playground. i played every day. i slid down the slide. when the swing broke, we were creative in putting things

together in order to keep the swing in tact. and when i think about all the incredible work that's been done over the years with friends of this playground with the different organizations and the parks and all these great advocates and people who raised private dollars in order to make sure we generate enough money to invest in making these playgrounds the kind of place that kids can enjoy and remember their childhood in such a fascinating way. it makes me feel so good. i just want to say to the rec and park team and phil ginsburg, the work you have done all through the years, you all should be proud and we're so grateful to have a rec and park team that spends so much time on taking care of the trees and the grass and sand is not at every playground, but the fact is we want to make sure that these playgrounds are in tiptop shape for our children. and i also want to say to the

friends of the george christopher playground as well. thank you for your support, your advocacy and your work and you'll hear from so many people today that had a lot to do with why this playground is here. over $5 million. 120 jobs created during a global pandemic and also a lot of patience from the diamond heights community as we dealt with the construction, i know supervisor mandelman probably heard it a lot from many of you. but here we are, thank you to the kids. thank you to the families. thank you to this incredible community. because of you, we are able to bring this playground back to life especially as we began to re-open our city and come back stronger than ever. our parks and playgrounds are going to continue to play a critical role in that. and, with that, i'd like to really take this opportunity,

ms. eddie, i have a certificate if you would come up, to honor you in the community. on behalf of the city and county of san francisco. i've been vaccinated. the president said i could take my mask off for something like this. thank you so much for your work and effort and for caring so much about kids in san francisco and making sure they have this wonderful playground. >> thank you so much. this is wonderful. thank you. >> with that. i wanted to introduce your supervisor rafael mandelman. >> thank you mayor. everywhere we go, there are thousands of people who are alive in san francisco and we kept our hospitals open and our emergency rooms able to serve people and this could have gone

very differently. so thank you, madam mayor, for your tremendous leadership. this is an exciting day for district 8. it is a long time coming. i do, you know, i want to acknowledge an elected official who is here and a diamond heights neighbor, jenny lam from the school board. getting the kids back in school. so this was a long project. this was 10 years in the making and it happened because, i mean, lots of great folks made it happen. phil ginsburg, and the parks alliance and everyone, but it really happened because the community up here demanded that it happen and betsy eddie just got an acknowledgement. she deserves a thousand acknowledgements. i generally say with respect to things having to do with diamond heights, if i just ask betsy what to do, i'll be in

pretty good shape. betsy has been bossing us around the last 10 years. the play structures are here because of the advocacy of betsy eddie and brenda mcnulty. betsy thought we needed some lights over by the tennis courts and said, supervisor, make it happen. so we did that. we had some fights about bathrooms where she was telling us all what to do and we are so much better for it and then brenna with the friends of christopher park, thank you so much for all of your work on this and to my predecessors, you know, senator weaner and supervisor shehe. but the folks at rec and park brought it home to us and thank you to all the other people who i'm not thanking and i should. and i do want to thank eric

mundy legislative aid and. with that, i'm so excited for this. this is great. thanks everyone who got us here. >> a little rough former supervisor jeff shehe and i overlooked our i know that you're a neighbor with two kids so you use this space and this is near and dear to your heart. next up representing our rec and park commission that also keeps an eye on community advocacy and making sure this project meets our community needs is vice chair eric mcdonald. >> good afternoon everyone.

here we go again. it's excitingtor here with you to open this amazing space. one of the roles that the commission plays in this process is that we listen to and review the conceptual design plans and one of the important elements of that is ensuring that we hear your voices, hear your interest, appreciate what's important to you and hopefully create a design that plays back what you actually told us. so we hope that today as we give you your park back that it represents what you've held as vision and we also, as we said before want to acknowledge has been a long time coming. 2012 bond. 2015 beginning of conceptual designs. 2017, we finally said, yes, we think this is the right design. then we got started and then we had to stop.

under the commission, we say thank you for entrusting us as that's already been done. we could not have done this without continued leadership from our mayor breed. continued stewardship from supervisor mandelman. and, today, we are pleased to give you back your park. thank you so much. >> thank you, commissioner. as the mayor and supervisor mandelman and commissioner mcdonald noted, this is your park, it's a community driven design. community driven advocacy and so it's time to hear from two of your community leaders. i'm honored and pleased to bring up brianna mcnulty and betsy eddie. >> how exciting to get to speak out my mask.

that's wonderful. good afternoon everyone or good morning. but this is definitely an exciting day for diamond heights. it's an exciting day for the surrounding community and all the children that are going to love this beautiful new playground and i am so grateful to all the many people that work so hard to get us to this great day today. i'm grateful to rec and park for adding george christopher playground to the 2012 park bond. what happened was, we noticed that this park and also glenn park, glenn canyon park was not on the original park bond list. so michael rice, the former president of the glenn park association and i backed by our diamond heights community association advocated for -- to

have us included in the 2012 park bond and we're so grateful for that. as you can see today. and so i'm grateful for all the program managers at rec and park that worked with the neighborhoods on the park design. those program managers, they listened to community input and they developed their design based on that input. matt jasmine started off the plan followed by irene and lead the park and she did an important thing. she led the park through the negotiations with the historic preservation commission. and then more funding into the park. then jackie ho helped us resolve some issues our neighborhood folks had. and then we really thank as

well lauren chavez who expertly managed the construction for the last one and a half years and we also appreciate the work of lamont bishop because even though he wasn't as visible to the neighborhood and to us, we knew he was behind the scenes managing everything and making sure that the construction went well. and then i'm grateful to alice stroud. she was the first coordinator of friends of christopher park. she worked -- she was a parent with the knowy valley nursery school that's right behind us. so the parents and teachers there along with the diamond heights association, we put the friends group together so that there would be a coordinated way to work with rec and park for the community input we thought that was so important. and we thank alice straud. she has a vision for this emergency, i mean, for this imagination garden over there.

and, i think as phil said, this is the first in any of our parks. and i'm grateful to ed shaffner for taking on the role of facilitation of friends of christopher park until brenna mcnulty stepped up. brenna had a huge impact on the development of this park working on the final design plans and it was just wonderful. one of the things she did was save the three historic play structures that are over there and that was convincing supervisor mandelman to appropriate the money for that. and then, not only did brenna create a lot of events that brought people in to the park, she coordinated two amazing where in the world is

christopher park festivals. and the last festival in 2018 brought 1,400 people to this whole area. and i'm so grateful to phil ginsburg and rec and park because rec and park added much more funding beyond the $2.8 million that was in the park bond. some examples are the new fencing around the ball diamond. the pave, the resurfaced path from duncan street. path in the community garden and then down to the park and also which is going to happen soon are the new lights for the tennis courts and resurfacing the tennis courts. so it was just wonderful to have all these additional things that the neighborhood had been advocating for. i'm just immensely grateful to the rec and park staff and everyone here who works so hard

to make this happen today. it's a great day. thank you, very much. >> hello, i'm brenna mcnulty and i'm delighted to be here. this is so exciting and so much has been said and it's hot so i'm going to trim down my acknowledgements. but i want to emphasize that this really is a beautiful example of community driven design and that our district eight offices and supervisors through the years and their staff and the rec and park project management staff consistently showed up met with us, looked for funding to fund things out of scope. listen to our crazy ideas. thank you for getting these funky old sculptures i