Earth Day at the Bernal Heights Rec Center Pop-Up
I’ll be honest — events like this take lots of planning, and you never quite know how they’ll come together until the morning arrives. It started a little grey and drizzly. But when neighbors started showing up to the Bernal Heights Recreation Center plaza last Saturday, ready to get creative, it made every bit of the work worth it.
We at Greening Projects were proud to host the Earth Day Celebration pop-up alongside our partners at Civic Joy Fund, San Francisco Recreation & Parks, and the Friends of Bernal Heights Rec Center. The event ran from 10 a.m. to noon at the rec center near the intersection of Moultrie, Cortland, and Jarboe streets, and the turnout and community energy were everything we’d hoped for.
We Colored Our Neighborhood Green, and Blue, and Purple, and…
The centerpiece of the morning was a community art project: we handed out chalk and invited neighbors of all ages to color in a brand-new bike track design on the blacktop, created by local artist Tanya Wischerath. Tanya is a Bernal Heights neighbor herself. She moved back to her childhood neighborhood in 2018 and is a gifted painter and muralist with deep roots in the community. Watching kids crouch down over her design and fill it in color by color, section by section, was exactly the kind of moment we organize these events for.
The bike track is part of a much larger vision for this space. New amenities have been arriving on the blacktop — trees for shade, seating, a Nature Exploration Area, and greenery to make the plaza more welcoming for kids and adults alike. With the playground currently closed, we want to give families a meaningful resource right now, while offering a real preview of what this site can become.
Beyond the coloring, the Bernal Heights Library ran family-friendly activities, we shared updates on greening projects happening across the neighborhood, and, because no morning event is complete without it, we kept everyone fueled with free coffee and pastries.
At Greening Projects, this is exactly the kind of work we live for. These pop-up town squares are designed as pilot projects, an iterative, community-driven process to understand what a space can be, build local buy-in, and develop the stewardship that makes change last. We don’t want to just build things for a neighborhood. We want to build things with it.
Saturday morning was a beautiful reminder of what Bernal Heights is capable of when we come together. We can’t wait for what comes next.