In the heart of the LGBTQ Castro district sits the Eureka Valley Recreation Center, a much-used San Francisco Recreation and Park facility. Inside the building on Collingwood Street is the Mark Bingham Gymnasium named in honor of the 31-year-old gay rugby player who lost his life fighting the hijackers on United Flight 93 during 9/11.
The rec center's outdoor baseball diamond at the corner of 19th and Collingwood streets is named in honor of Rikki Streicher, a lesbian who owned several bars catering to queer women in the city beginning in the 1960s. Streicher, who also helped to launch the Gay Games, lost a battle to cancer and died in 1994 at the age of 68.
At nearby Corona Heights Park, which overlooks the Castro district, is the Bill Kraus Meadow and Pathway. A gay man and congressional aide, Kraus played an instrumental role in organizing the city's LGBTQ community politically in the 1970s and 1980s until his death at age 38 in early 1986 after contracting meningitis.
While signage at the pair of city park sites bears the names of the three LGBTQ luminaries to designate the trio of park facilities, the online homes for the parks had been a different story. Until this week, neither website used the names of the people who are celebrated with the naming honors.
People landing on the homepage for the Eureka Valley Recreation Center had found generic names listed for its gymnasium and baseball diamond. Clicking on the link for the gym brought up a page that omits Bingham's name, which was approved in 2002, and merely refers to the Eureka Valley Recreation Center — Gymnasium.
The same omission of Streicher's name is found on the page for the athletic field. It uses the generic name of the Eureka Valley Baseball Diamond for it, though it was named after Streicher in 1996.
As for the official digital home of the Corona Heights Park, it had made no mention of the Bill Kraus Meadow and Pathway, which was so christened by park officials in 1986. Nor is the meadow or pathway designated on a trail map for the hillside locale.
The Kraus meadow is the triangular shaped patch of lawn at the park entrance on Museum Way and Roosevelt Way. The Kraus pathway begins at that intersection and leads toward a fenced-in, off-lease dog play area that has its own page on the park's website.
The Bay Area Reporter noticed the online omissions of the three park sites named for the local LGBTQ icons in covering the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission's decision to name the new greenspace set to open at Natoma and 11th streets as Rachele Sullivan Park. It is the first such recreational facility named after a leader in the leather and kink community. Sullivan, a cis straight ally and native San Franciscan, was a traditional Filipina healer and leatherwoman who died in 2022 at the age of 54.
Tamara Barak Aparton, deputy director of communications and public affairs for the city agency, said the online omission of the names was an oversight when asked about it August 20 by the B.A.R.
"Thanks for flagging, we're on it! Definitely not intentional," wrote Aparton in an emailed reply.
Online sites fixed
By late afternoon Tuesday, the agency had updated the main pages for the two park sites to include the names of the three LGBTQ honorees and brief bios for them. Now, when people land on the main site for the Eureka Valley rec center, they encounter a graph about Streicher.
"A silver-colored plaque is located on the south end of the Eureka Valley Playground, dedicated to Rikki Streicher, one of the founders of the Gay Olympics. The softball field was renamed to honor Streicher, and the plaque was dedicated on December 15, 1996," notes the site.
The graph for Bingham notes, "A simple plaque with his name gives a nod to the story of United Airlines Flight 93, where all of the jet's passengers, including Bingham, were killed on September 11, 2001 as part of a terrorist plot that also brought down the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York City and a portion of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Bingham and other passengers aboard the ill-fated flight thwarted hijackers' plans to direct the plane at other targets in D.C."
On the Corona park website the agency added a photo of a bulletin board that bears Kraus' name. Below it is a blurb explaining the image.
"Bill Kraus Meadow, a triangular shaped patch of lawn at the park entrance at Museum Way and Roosevelt Way, is named in honor of one of the city's most prominent political leaders and gay rights activists. Bill Kraus Pathway leads from the meadow towards the park's off-leash dog area. Both the meadow and pathway were dedicated in Kraus's honor in 1986," it states.
As of Tuesday evening, the individual webpages for people wanting to reserve the rec center's field and gym had yet to be updated to use their proper names. As for the online map of Corona Heights Park, it should be updated with mention of the Kraus meadow and pathway by week's end.
Aparton noted that across the agency's more than 230 parks, there are approximately 150 features honoring individuals. They run the gamut of various greenspaces, from hills, gardens, groves, and trails, to facilities such as playgrounds, maintenance yards, yacht harbors, carousels, gates, and stables. A number of the agency's athletic properties also are named after people, such as batting cages, tennis courts and golf courses, not to mention various benches, fountains, piazzas, and plazas.
"While not all of these park features are listed on our website, we recognize the stories of the people they commemorate are important to tell," wrote Aparton, who linked to several of the agency's social media posts about Bingham, including a 2021 one on Facebook. "We are currently working with our historian in residence to verify the details of many of our older renamings so we can expand our website to better reflect the diversity of those honored within our parks."
It is not the first time there has been hiccups with how city agencies are honoring LGBTQ place names. As the B.A.R. noted in 2013, a community effort had been launched that year to install signage about Kraus and the park amenities named after him. The bench with a plaque honoring Kraus that had been installed in the park ended up being painted over, leaving park users for years being unaware of the existence of the Bill Kraus Meadow and Pathway.
At San Francisco International Airport there continue to be questions about how the aviation facility is referring to its Harvey Milk Terminal 1 named after the late gay supervisor assassinated in 1978. As the B.A.R. reported in 2018, airport officials faced concerns about the wording and font size to be used for the Milk terminal signage, leading to there now being an impossible-to-miss sign for Harvey Milk Terminal 1 on the facade of the structure.
More recently, a B.A.R. reporter noticed that the narration used inside SFO's AirTrain ferrying people to the terminals did not use the official name for the Milk terminal and merely called it Terminal 1. Nor had it been updated to refer to the now-named Senator Dianne Feinstein International Terminal.
SFO also hasn't updated its online references to the Feinstein terminal. As of Tuesday, its webpage with information and maps about the airport's four terminals had yet to reflect the new name for the International Terminal. It had been changed to properly refer to the Milk terminal.
In June, SFO spokesman Doug Yakel had told the B.A.R. that airport officials had taken updating the AirTrain script under consideration. But this week, he said doing so wouldn't be possible, nor did the airport intend to update the online map.
"There are time constraints on the AirTrain announcements, so no plans to make a change there. Same goes for the static maps in the interest of simplified information," Yakel told the B.A.R. Tuesday.
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