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Below looming high-rises, the new five-acre China Basin Park provides urban green space and views of San Francisco Bay in the rapidly developing Mission Bay neighborhood. A new snippet of Bay Trail wraps around the park’s edge, contributing to the vision of a greenway along San Francisco’s southeastern waterfront.
Open as of April 2024, the park was created by the Mission Rock Partners development team, a collaboration between the Tishman Speyer real estate development company, the San Francisco Giants, and the Port of San Francisco, which owns the property. The park is part of the greater Mission Rock development project, 14 years in the making, which includes two commercial buildings and two residential towers on what was previously a parking lot.
“This park was conceived to not only serve the project, and the office workers and residents that will live on the project, but also the surrounding neighborhood,” says Phil Williamson, senior project manager for the Port of San Francisco’s real estate and development division.
The Mission Bay neighborhood was once just that—a bay within the Bay. Before European settlement, the 150-acre expanse between Mission Creek and Potrero Point was a tidal marsh teeming with oysters, clams, and birds. Back then, what is now the Chase Center basketball arena, UCSF’s Medical Center campus, and the foundations of Highway 280 as it merges into the Bay Bridge would have all been underwater.
The new development’s namesake, Mission Rock, was previously an outcropping of serpentine at the mouth of the former Mission Bay. The rock was built upon and eventually engulfed by the construction of Pier 50 and is no longer visible today. From the 1860s to the 1910s, the city of San Francisco filled in Mission Bay with millions of cubic yards of earthquake debris, garbage, and sand from the hills graded down to flatten what would become Market Street. Mission Bay became an industrial zone, home to sprawling shipyards, railroads, garbage dumps, and warehouses.
Now, China Basin Park’s landscaping brings green space into the area, including some California native species, such as coast live oaks, island oaks, Monterey cypress, and coyote bush (Baccharis pilularis). On the park’s southern edge, a boardwalk zigzags over a stormwater garden planted with shrubs, including feltleaf ceanothus (Ceanothus arboreus), fernleaf Catalina ironwood (Lyonothamnus floribundus ssp. asplenifolius), and toyon berry (Heteromeles arbutifolia).
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“I feel like a park is never done, because it’s always growing,” says John Rabago, landscape architect at SCAPE, an urban design firm that collaborated on China Basin Park’s design and landscaping. “It’s a living, breathing thing, and it changes with the city.”
