Mission Local26%
SoMa’s only indoor recreational space slated to reopen soon 31%
By Aaliyah Español-Rivas11%
7/24/2026, 11:00:00 AM
Keywords: Soma
BS Summary: This article contains 23 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Optimism Bias, and Pessimism Bias, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 15.1% saturation with 117 hits. Analysis detected 943 faulty-reasoning hits from 777 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 40.6% and a BS Rank of 31% (15,133 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 69.10% of the article peer group.
Since February 2024, when the Gene Friend Recreation Center at 270 Sixth St. closed for demolition, hundreds of SoMa’s kids and teens have waited for one of the few public places where local parents trust leaving their kids to re-open.
The wait will soon be over.
On July 22, San Francisco Parks and Recreation announced the center will open its doors on Thursday, Aug. 13, just in time for the beginning of the San Francisco Unified School District school year.
For the kids in SoMa’s summer programs, it can’t come soon enough.
At noon, Victoria Manalo Draves Park in SoMa is packed with children.
In the playground area, five-year-olds scramble over faded red structures.
In the basketball courts, middle schoolers yell “Watch out!”
every 10 seconds, as basketballs fly through the air.
Every nook and cranny in the park has a pod of high schoolers practicing TikTok dances.
“It’s so crowded,” said Angelina, an incoming seventh-grade student at Bessie Carmichael Middle School.
“There’s not a lot of space here to run around and play.”
Victoria Manalo Draves Park is one of three public playgrounds in SoMa, and has been heavily used since it opened in 2006.
It is the nearest green space to the only public elementary school in the district, Bessie Carmichael, and its nearby middle school campus.
The park is also one of the only outdoor play spaces available to SoMa kids and teens enrolled in summer and after-school programs.
SoMa has some of the lowest rates of open space and public parks in the city.
According to the San Francisco Planning Department, Western SoMa, where the center is located, has 0.027 acres of open space per thousand residents and 0.23 acres of public parks.
Neither of Bessie Carmichael’s campuses has its own sports field or gymnasium.
The park is also, like many parts of SoMa, not a particularly comfortable place for children.
On a recent afternoon, several adults were sleeping in the park, and others were passed out next to discarded needles around the perimeter.
Summer school program staff make rounds in the park and ensure gates to the playground remain closed so adults stay outside the play areas.
Staff at the programs, run by United Playaz and West Bay Pilipino Multi Service Center, say they won’t let any of the young children walk to and from the park alone.
When the Gene Friend Recreation Center was open, many local kids visited every day, sometimes for hours.
They go for after-school programs, community events, and sports, or just to do their homework.
“It was the only place we could go to that had enough space for everyone from little Bessie and big Bessie,” Angelina said, using the local nickname for Bessie Carmichael’s two campuses.
“Now everyone meets here at the park, but it’s too many people.”
Local kids old enough to leave the neighborhood often do so once the park’s after-school programs are over, Angelina explained.
Middle school students hang out at Pier 39 or at “The Mix,” an area of the public library’s main branch reserved exclusively for 12- to 18-year-olds.
Many high-school kids, said 18-year-old Jared Ines, hop on the bus and go south to Stonestown Galleria.
"It's just been more lively there.
It’s the place to hang out now.”
Resourceful neighborhood kids had once used shopping areas like the Westfield Center as spillover hangout spaces, Ines said, but “downtown just kind of died in general.
The area has been kind of inhospitable for kids.”
“There’s definitely a hole the rec center left,” said Ines, who volunteers every summer as a youth staff member at West Bay Pilipino Multi-Service Center.
“There’s not many places we can go safely with so many students.”
The renovated rec center will include a double-court gymnasium, two large multi-purpose rooms, a larger exercise room, a playground, outdoor half court, adult exercise equipment, and a new walking path and picnic area.
The city of San Francisco also purchased a two-story commercial building adjacent to the rec center in hopes of a future expansion, but no date has been set.
Rudy Corpuz, the executive director of United Playaz, is optimistic about what the reopening will bring to the community.
“We’ve been in talks and developing this for years,” said Corpuz.
"We've built this center in a way where we know it’s safe for our people who live directly in this neighborhood.
”
The kids and teens of SoMa will be waiting eagerly.
“The neighborhood feels so small now,” Angelina said.
“I just want to hang out with my friends in our old place.
It feels like we’re missing our home.”
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