Sunday Streets turns Valencia into 1.5-mile-long block party

Elisse Azofeifa watched her 2-year-old daughter, Avery, gingerly pick up a jump rope as if it were a live snake and then toddle over to a bucket filled with confetti, flinging the vibrant pieces of tissue paper into the air.

“She loves to play outside,” Azofeifa said. “She can run around and play with other kids in a safe environment here. And anything free in the city we love to try.”

They were among thousands of people in San Francisco’s Mission District on Sunday for the year’s first Sunday Streets festival. The 11-year-old roving event turns ordinarily car-clogged streets into multi-block parties.

Under sunny skies, a 1.5-mile stretch of Valencia Street from Duboce Avenue to 26th Street was closed to traffic from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. so people could walk, dance, skate, bike or scooter its length. Nine more Sunday Streets, roughly one a month, will happen around the city throughout the year.

“It brings people together to encourage active living and healthy eating,” said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, which co-sponsors the temporary linear parks. “This is my neighborhood, and I love to see it full of kids playing with chalk and bubbles. There’s no dodging Ubers today.”

Instead, there were people shooting hoops, dancing the Cha Cha Slide, playing dominoes, juggling, grooving to tunes, walking a tightwire, balancing on rola bolas, assembling Legos, playing drums on buckets, hula-hooping and decorating get-well cards for hospitalized children.

There were plenty of booths and tables offering information about various city services, gathering petition signatures, and giving away freebies.

Many had to do with health, such as a booth offering free glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol screenings.

“I came rushing over,” Elaine Lu, who’s in her 60s, said as she sat in a folding chair undergoing the tests. “I’ve been worried about my blood sugar.”

Her results were fine. “Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing great,” Michael Liu, a third-year nursing student at San Francisco State, said after he asked Lu about her eating and exercise habits. “Maybe just consider walking a little more.”

Livable City is working on a pilot program to encourage neighborhoods to run their own block-long Play Streets events, a little sibling of Sunday Streets.

“Play Streets lets residents transform their block into a play space on a regular basis,” said Katy Birnbaum, development and program developer at Livable City. “They can do it once a month or even daily.”

As the Mission rapidly gentrifies, it’s important to have events like Sunday Streets that offer a chance for all of its inhabitants to spend time together, Radulovich said. “Residents need to see that it’s their street, too.”

Outside Valencia Gardens, an affordable complex that’s home to hundreds of low-income residents, representatives of Mission Housing Development Corp., which runs the complex and co-sponsored the event, echoed that theme.

“We want our families and residents to enjoy and explore their neighborhood,” said Chirag Bhakta, senior community engagement coordinator for Mission Housing — and DJ for the day. “Just because these are affordable, they aren’t separate from the community; they exist in it.”

At that moment, the music blaring from speakers ended. “Let me switch a song real quick before YouTube starts playing ads,” he said, swiping the screen of his iPhone.

Down the street, volunteers from Finding a Best Friend Rescue were showcasing 17 dogs, ranging from tiny Chihuahuas to stocky bulldogs, available for adoption.

“Anything we can do in the Bay Area is great,” said Regina Sanchez, founder of the Stockton organization, which works with abused and neglected animals. “This is a much more animal-friendly city.”

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition was collecting petition signatures for additional protected bike lanes, an issue that took on extra urgency this week after 30-year-old bicyclist Tess Rothstein of Berkeley was run over and killed by a truck on Howard Street near Sixth Street on Friday morning.

While Valencia Street has some protected bike lanes, it’s not enough, said Rafael Mandelman, supervisor of District Eight, which includes the Mission.

“We want to get them all the way end to end, post haste, especially in light of the sad events this week,” he said. “The streets are too dangerous for people not in cars.”

Ed Reiskin, director of transportation at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, another Sunday Streets sponsor, noted that the streets of San Francisco take up one-quarter of the city’s land area.

“This is about democratizing our streets with a different way people can enjoy them, not just passing through them or storing cars on them,” he said, leaning against an electric Ford GoBike he’d ridden over from the MTA office near Civic Center. “It’s a great way to reclaim a part of that 25 percent of San Francisco.”