India Basin Shoreline Park

A Public’s Park

In Bayview Hunters Point, a new park connects community, history, ecology and place.

Time and Place

A story with many chapters, India Basin Shoreline Park brings into focus a community-driven vision for a long-neglected stretch of waterfront in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point district. Once abuzz with waterfront industry, the bay shore today sits cut off from the neighborhood by chain link fences, a formidable thoroughfare, and a legacy of environmental contamination. JENSEN, as part of a team led by landscape architecture firm GGN, is working with the Trust for Public Land and San Francisco Recreation and Parks—in partnership with SF Parks Alliance, A. Philip Randolph Institute, and the community—to remake the shoreline as a place of and for Bayview Hunters Point.

A Missing Piece

The project unites an underused park with a historic boatyard where shipwrights once built scow-schooners, a fixture of early California’s commerce. With its frontage on Innes Avenue and place in the region’s rise, the boatyard represents both the missing physical opening to the neighborhood and a reminder of the site’s layers of history, connection, and promise. The design leaves legible the boatyard’s remnants, including the landmarked Shipwright’s Cottage, and weaves in new purpose, native landscapes, and pathways. Vital access to open space merges with neighborhood memories, a rare piece of indigenous wetlands, community-serving uses, and links to the San Francisco Bay Trail and the Blue Greenway.

History Repeats

JENSEN is restoring the Shipwright’s Cottage—as a welcome center and classroom—and designing a food pavilion, community “shop” and other structures. These new buildings echo the gabled roof of the Shipwright’s Cottage and the materials of the waterfront’s industrial roots. Wrapped in translucent and perforated-metal panels, the pared down forms take on an ethereal presence in the landscape––subtly luminescent by day and glowing at night. Flexible and open, the buildings let activities spill outside and anticipate changing community desires over time.

A New Chapter

Since the Ohlone people first settled here, San Francisco’s southeastern shoreline has supported the land’s inhabitants, and each chapter tells a story of loss and birth. India Basin Shoreline Park offers a lesson in authorship. In GGN’s words: “This project has been teaching us about the urgency of local access and local agency in bringing spatial justice to underserved communities of color. We have also been learning about the central importance of supporting youth and integrating local job opportunities into all facets of park process, design, and operation. These things in turn energize and enrich the design.”