This week, we’re highlighting a project just getting started and a volunteer who’s been at this work for years. First, a look at the Gateway Community Garden, a stretch of unused land on Cortland about to become a shared green space. Then, a visit with longtime resident Karen Rhodes, whose work turning a neglected stairway into a garden is a pretty good reminder of what one determined neighbor can do. Plus, a few ways to get outside and get involved this month.
Project Highlight: Gateway Community Garden
There’s a stretch of land between Cortland Avenue and Santa Marina Street that most people walk past without a second look. It’s a leftover sliver of public right-of-way, the kind of space cities tend to forget about. That’s about to change.
That overlooked strip is becoming the Gateway Community Garden, and it’s shaping up to be one of the more quietly ambitious projects happening in Bernal Heights this year.
From Forgotten Lot to Neighborhood Anchor
The idea is straightforward enough: take a piece of land nobody’s using and turn it into a place that works. Let the rain soak in instead of rushing straight into the storm drains. Give people a reason to be outside. Along the way, maybe you actually meet the people who live two doors down.
Walk the site today, and you can already see the outline of what’s coming. The garden’s footprint is expanding, with more plots for more households, not just the folks who’ve been on the waitlist for years. A new rain garden at the Cortland Avenue entrance will do double duty, welcoming people into the space while quietly soaking up stormwater before it can carry street pollutants into the sewer system. There’s also room being carved out for workshops, meetups, and the kind of low-key social time that turns “the people who garden near me” into people you actually know, plus a handful of new fruit and nut trees that will keep producing for years to come.
More Than a Place to Grow Food
Not everyone who ends up with a plot here is going to grow vegetables. Some will grow flowers, some herbs, some whatever their grandmother used to plant. That’s part of the point. Gateway isn’t trying to solve food security on its own; it’s trying to be something more durable than that, a small patch of ground that manages stormwater, keeps some green and living soil in a mostly paved corridor, and gives people a reason to be outside with their hands in the dirt, near people they might not otherwise meet. That last part is easy to overlook, but it’s often the thing people end up valuing most.
How to Get Involved
Gateway is still taking shape, and getting it there will take more than planners. If you’ve ever walked past that stretch of Cortland and wondered what it could be, this is your chance to help answer that. Volunteers will be needed for planting days, build days, and ongoing upkeep. Donations, even small ones, help this lot get there faster.
Help Us Grow a Greener, Healthier San Francisco
Have a story, memory, or hope for this space? We’d love to include neighbor voices in a future issue. Reach out and let us know.
Walking the Talk: Karen Rhodes and the Greening of Bernal Heights
A longtime San Francisco resident transforms neighborhood stairways into community gardens while advocating for walkable streets.
At Greening Projects, we’re fortunate to work alongside volunteers who pour real time and care into making San Francisco’s public spaces more beautiful, more accessible, and more alive. Karen Rhodes is one of those people. Her work on the Tompkins Stairway Garden, along with a long list of other efforts, is a reminder that a neighborhood changes when a resident decides to stop waiting for someone else to do it.
When Rhodes retired in 2017 after decades at UC Berkeley, she didn’t slow down. Now 71 and still very much a fixture of Bernal Heights, she’s spent the years since chasing a fairly specific goal: a neighborhood where you’d actually want to walk somewhere.
“After retirement, I decided to focus on getting more involved in San Francisco,” Rhodes says. “I noticed the numerous open spaces in Bernal, particularly the concentration of public stairways, and recognized opportunities for neighborhood beautification and greening.”
From Newcomer to Neighborhood Steward
Rhodes has called Bernal Heights home since 1988, when she landed near Holly Park fresh out of UC Santa Cruz. She’s watched the neighborhood shift and change for close to four decades and put down deep roots of her own in the pocket of streets near Precita Park.
“I’ve never been attached to a neighborhood staying the same,” she says, a useful outlook for someone who’s spent this much of her life watching a place evolve. When she and her husband first moved in, Bernal had a reputation for being a little rough around the edges. That was already starting to shift.
She found her way into neighborhood organizing through a local block club, the kind that puts out a newsletter and tries to get people talking to each other. The Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center was doing similar work supporting Cortland’s small businesses, and up on Bernal Hill, volunteers were running habitat restoration days, pulling out non-native plants and putting native species back where they belonged. None of it made headlines, but it’s the kind of volunteer work that quietly adds up over years.
Cultivating the Tompkins Stairway Garden
Rhodes’s most visible legacy in the neighborhood is the Tompkins Stairway Garden. After connecting with neighbor Vicky Rideout and a handful of others in 2017, she took on the less exciting parts of the job herself: planning, fundraising, grant writing. About two and a half years later, in June 2019, a stairway that most people had stopped noticing reopened as a thriving green space.
It says something about how Rhodes works. She notices a piece of public space nobody’s paying attention to, then spends the next several years making sure enough neighbors care about it for the work to actually get done. Bernal Heights, with its hills and its unusually dense network of public stairways, turned out to have that kind of opportunity around nearly every corner.
Advocating Beyond the Neighborhood
Rhodes’s interest in walkability doesn’t stop at her own block. She sits on the boards of Walk San Francisco and the Bay Area Ridge Trail, pushing for pedestrian safety citywide and helping build out a continuous trail network across the Bay Area. She’s also part of the San Francisco Crosstown Trail team, mapping routes and leading guided walks, including their newest 38-mile Roundabout.
She started out noticing a few empty stairways near her house. Eight years later, boards, trail networks, and a good chunk of the city’s public space have her fingerprints on them.
Know a neighbor doing work like Karen’s? We’d love to feature them. Reach out and tell us their story.
Upcoming Events
Bernal Heights: Tompkins Stairway Garden Work Day
Sep 5: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Bernal Heights Pop-Up Town Square Bench Painting
Sep 12: 9:30 am - 12:00 pm
Birdhouse Painting at Ogden Avenue Gardens
Sep 12: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm