Thankful for our neighbors

Retaining wall in progress

Happy thanksgiving everyone. Today we're feeling grateful to our friends and neighbors on the street who have come together to help make this project happen.

This week contractor Mike Glynn has been hard at work with his crew installing the retaining wall - as you can see the wooden supports are also now almost complete.

Next week he'll be removing some asphalt and back-filling the retaining wall to create a slightly sloped area we can plant on. The design for this wall was donated by geotechnical engineer Bryce Neuman, and all the hardcore storm water calculations and intense water flow math was donated by landscape architect Andrea Alfonso.  Jerad Wiener and Sandra Zuniga at DPW cleared the path for us to make this project happen, and DPW Director Mohammed Nuru gave us the nod when others said it couldn't be done. heck, even Mayor Ed Lee said he wanted to see this happen when he came by the project site!

Steve Schweigerdt and Maria D'Angelico at the San Francisco Parks Alliance helped us through the painful grant process, and kept us going when we wanted to give up.

Richie Hart and Eamonn Herlihy who own the Dorsett & Jackson property on the street will be donating a 5' tall, approx 200' long redwood fence to go on top of the retaining wall in case anyone things driving over the edge is a good idea, and it should mitigate a little of the noise from the train track as well.

On November 30th our pals Heidi and Doug at Friends of the Urban Forest will be delivering our trees to the Regent's Cab parking lot at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue - thanks Steve Anton for letting us use that space! December 1st is tree planting day - we hope to see everyone there! (Put December 8th and 15th on your calendars too - it's a 3 workday series and we need as much help as we can get!)

And yesterday James Fregosi of Fregosi Paints gave us a key to his water bib so the very awesome  Emily Gogol and I could perform a water pressure and flow test last night (it's looking good!) He's giving us water for the new trees.

Thank you all (and everyone else who's been involved in any way at all - there are many more!) for helping us with this project. It's going to be so darned cool when it's done.

Groundbreaking info

DPW has removed all the homeless encampments and cut down the weeds on the street per our request (and the requests of countless other residents and businesses) and we're delighted to announce that our contractor Mike Glynn will be starting work on the retaining wall at the north end of the street in the next 10 days. 

We will be reaching out to businesses on the street to ensure accessibility can be maintained as much as possible, and regular street parking will be affected - please bear with us during this work phase and contact annie at psgsf.org or emily at psgsf.org if and issues come up.

We will be having three work days in December where volunteers can join us in making this project happen. We're volunteer led and believe in the power of the community to get things like this done, so please come out and help! Volunteer days are as follows:

Dec. 1st. 10am-1pm:
Tree planting with Friends of the Urban Forest - FILLED (more always welcome!)

Dec. 8th. 10am-1pm:
Building the sidewalk: installing edging and landscape fabric, and putting in decomposed grantite - NEEDS VOLUNTEERS

Dec. 15th. 10am-1pm:
Installing sidewalk edging rocks as wheel stops to prevent cars driving on the sidewalk  - NEEDS VOLUNTEERS

We hope you can join us - please sign up here to get involved (there will be drinks and snacks for everyone, as well as buckets of good karma to take home!)  http://pennsylvaniagarden.blogspot.com/p/volunteer.html