Bad Conditions at Tenderloin Playground Keep Families Away

Six years ago, the City created the Turk-Hyde Mini-Park from what was then a parking lot. To use the word “park” would be a misnomer, which connotes large open spaces with grass and trees. The Turk Hyde Mini-Park is a 70-foot by 70-foot area with rubber surfacing instead of grass. But it isn’t the size of the park or its lack of grass that has residents complaining. It’s the failure of the Parks Department to keep it a clean and secure environment. Today the playground is just as important to the children of the community as it was six years ago when it opened, but now it’s no “jewel” in the heart of the Tenderloin. It’s practically unusable.

Due to its comparatively lower rents and close proximity to downtown jobs, the Tenderloin has one of the highest concentrations of families in San Francisco. There are few areas for children to play in this urban environment, but the least the city can do is to keep the areas that are in place secure. Due to the poor conditions at Turk-Hyde, some parents feel safer letting their children play inside their cramped apartments.

The Turk-Hyde Mini-Park, supposedly locked at night and re-opened in the morning, has been repeatedly broken into. Prostitutes and drug dealers use the playground after dark. In the morning, families literally have to scour the playground for needles and used condoms to dispose of before their children find them.

Trash is all over the place, routinely tossed into the playground through spaces in the fence. There are two Muni stops directly in front of the playground, which attracts loitering. People publicly drink alcohol on the sidewalk and two streetlights are broken.

Martha Perez, a mother and Tenderloin resident, stopped going to Turk-Hyde after an incident on a Sunday a few months ago. “It was the middle of the afternoon,” she said through a translator, “and there was a group of young people smoking crack in front of the park entrance. There was a couple kissing and touching each other, and while we were in the park a number of drug dealers and users came in off the street. They were hiding from the police and they began dealing drugs out of the park with my children playing right there.”

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