With commentary by John King, the guest speaker at our Spring meeting in 2024 and the leader of our walking tour of the Ferry Building, etc. this next Thursday, June 12th.
Made quickly and with minimal fuss, a park for skateboarders revived a downtown site — and offered a few lessons for urban revitalization.
By Conor Dougherty
Photographs and Video by Loren Elliott
Conor Dougherty has been chased by police and cited for skateboarding in San Francisco.
May 30, 2025 - NY Times
Two years ago, United Nations Plaza was vying for the title of “Saddest Place in San Francisco.” A sunny brick promenade surrounded by government buildings, the plaza had become a trash-strewn dumping ground for the city’s most vexing problems.
A typical weekday scene might have included a team of paramedics reviving a limp teenager overdosing on fentanyl, against a backdrop of merchants selling stolen cellphones and a fountain being repurposed as a toilet.
For a city struggling to recover after the Covid-19 pandemic, the images of suffering and bedlam could not have been more inconveniently placed: U.N. Plaza, a block from City Hall, has a busy rail station and is bordered by Market Street, a major thoroughfare that double-decker tour buses cruise daily. In 2023, after a big, international conference announced that it was coming to the hobbled city, the parks department scrambled to find a new life for the site.
That turned out to be a skateboard park. On a recent sunny morning, kids in baggy pants slid the railings around a flagpole and cruised over a volcano-shaped embankment. The old granite ledges that used to be illegal to skate on were now open to grind and slide.
Inviting a bunch of skaters to rip around, scuffing ledges, is not the use San Francisco had in mind in 1975 when the plaza was dedicated to commemorate the founding of the United Nations in the city. U.N. Plaza was part of a larger redevelopment meant to attract affluent shoppers to San Francisco from the suburbs. Instead, for the next four decades, the city produced regular reports of failure that highlighted assaults and drug use on the plaza, and high vacancies in the buildings surrounding it. For all the thought that went into the open design and gushing fountain, it was never clear what people were supposed to do there.
A defining feature of the new skate park (or skate plaza, the name the city and skaters prefer) is that it’s a retreat from the grandeur that characterized earlier efforts. It also seems to be working better, with a $2 million price tag and just a few months of planning, than the catalog of failed projects, costing hundreds of millions, that preceded it.
Nobody is saying the plaza’s makeover has solved the deep, systemic problems that made the area a hub for addicts and homeless people. The dealers who previously congregated there have migrated to a spot near the very next train stop.
What the transformation of U.N. Plaza does show, however, is that attempts at urban revival can go a long way for relatively little money when they attract a natural constituency of users. Obvious as that may sound, it’s the opposite of how planners in San Francisco and elsewhere have historically operated. The notion that a great public space is defined by architecture first, people second, was so ingrained in the city’s thinking that it took the squalor brought on by the pandemic to reverse it.
“U.N. Plaza was created with all these wrongheaded urban-planning ideas of the 1960s, that you need grand plazas and grand connectors, which works great for eight parades a year and kind of fails otherwise,” said John King, an author and a former architecture critic for The San Francisco Chronicle.
“The smart thing here,” he added, “was the city realizing that a good way to get people somewhere is to create a looser space where certain types of people just want to be, in this case skateboarders.”
A San Francisco Plaza Was Down and Out. Then Skaters Moved In.
Greg