Glen Park Keeps Painting Its Canyon Onto Concrete, and the Street Corners Are Next

A great horned owl sits at the T-intersection of Elk and Chenery. It's painted on the retaining wall beside the Glen Canyon Park ball field, at the point where the 200-foot mural "Our Canyon" turns the corner. A few blocks east, another great horned owl looks out from a utility box at Bosworth and Diamond. This one is framed like Art Nouveau stained glass, with Glen Park BART behind it.

Different artists painted the two owls, and both were finished within weeks of each other in 2025. Both came from the same small volunteer group, Glen Park Beautiful, and both tell the same story. Seen together, the neighborhood's public art reads as one long project. Each piece takes a stretch of bare public concrete and paints the canyon and the creek back onto it. Every piece funded so far for 2027 carries that project into the street.

The same story, told on different walls

Glen Park Beautiful is the work of three neighbors, Renee Berger, Libby Reder and Beth O'Leary. The Glen Park Association has written that they've "shown a knack for finding ugly and making it pretty." They took that knack to whatever surface the city left plain: a two-story retaining wall, a long low wall along a ballfield, two utility boxes, a gray pedestrian overpass.

The subject matter stays remarkably steady. The Burnside mural is titled "Reclaiming Islais Creek." Its main wall shows Glen Canyon's wildlife and plants. The tiled stair beside it turns Islais Creek into a blue stream that runs down the steps, with fish, flowers, butterflies and the reflections of birds. The Elk Street wall shows the park's plants and animals, including large birds and a gopher nearly two feet long. The creek is also the subject of a proposed mural for the I-280 underpass, the Islais Creek Watershed Storytelling Project from the Bernal Cut Project. The Glen Park Association wrote a letter supporting it this fall.

Four stops, in the order they were built

The pieces were finished one by one over four years. Walking them in that order shows how the approach grew, from one wall painted by hired muralists to a bridge decorated with the school next door.

1. Burnside Mural+, at Burnside and Paradise avenues. "Reclaiming Islais Creek" fills a publicly owned retaining wall at the end of the cul-de-sac. Elaine Chu and Marina Perez-Wong of Twin Walls Mural Company painted it, finishing in September 2022. The side wall covers neighborhood history from Indigenous peoples to present-day businesses, including the Gum Tree Girls. Beside it, the 69-step public stair was tiled by Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher. Neighbors made more than 300 of its tiles at a community event, and donors added legacy tiles. The steps opened with a ribbon-cutting on October 27, 2024. The San Francisco Chronicle placed the stair three blocks from downtown Glen Park, on the Crosstown Trail.

2. "Our Canyon," at Elk and Chenery. Sirron Norris designed it from neighborhood input. Renee Berger and Suzanne Ginsburg organized the painting day, and the Glen Park Association reported about 100 volunteer painters. They painted on April 27, 2025, and the mural was finished that May. Along with the wildlife, it shows the park's public rock-climbing wall and the building that houses the co-op preschool and camp.

3. The BART utility boxes, on Diamond. Vanessa Shive painted both boxes in June 2025: the owl facing Bosworth and a giant butterfly at Diamond and Monterey. The funding came from the Civic Joy Fund's Paint the City program, which transformed 322 utility boxes with 49 local artists across San Francisco. Glen Park's two boxes are a small share of that citywide total, and they still pick up the owl from the Elk Street wall.

4. The Bosworth pedestrian bridge, at Bosworth and Lippard. The span and ramps are now blue. The five pillars carry more than 400 square feet of mosaic, and the tallest pillar stands 17 feet. Ross Holzman of the Create Peace Project made the mosaics with students from the school next to the bridge, using abstract designs based on Indigenous patterns from around the world. Public Works painted the bridge in March 2026, and the mosaics went up in May.

Funding for each stop came from a different mix of sources. Burnside drew on a Community Challenge Grant, District 8, the San Francisco Arts Commission and individual donors. The San Francisco Parks Alliance served as fiscal sponsor for the mural. The Elk Street mural and the bridge list individual contributors as funders. The steady thread across all four is the people who organized them.

The bridge got its celebration this fall

On September 26, Glen Park Beautiful held a celebration at the bridge. The group's event page lists District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, Public Works Director Carla Short and Ross Holzman among those who attended. The team unveiled a plaque that will be placed near the bridge entrance. Gus's Canyon Market donated food, the kids got face painting, and the bluegrass band the Peach Pies played.

The bridge also marks a turn in what the group works on. Each of the four stops was a stretch of concrete off to the side of daily life: a dead-end wall, a ballfield edge, a box, an overpass. The projects now funded sit in the busiest spots in the neighborhood, at the commercial corner and on the street itself.

Next, the art moves into the street

This year, Glen Park won more than $65,000 in grants from Avenue Greenlight, according to the Glen Park Association. Avenue Greenlight describes itself as a philanthropically funded initiative that gives grants to San Francisco merchant and community groups. Two of those grants pay for the next round of art.

Glen Park Beautiful's $25,000 covers a refresh of the "Welcome to Glen Park" sign on Bosworth at Diamond and a mural on the fence next to it. The sign project grew out of a neighborhood community art survey that raised concerns about the sign's condition. The fence piece will be a mosaic at the back of the patio next to 2860 Diamond Street, made possible by the private owners of 2852 to 2860 Diamond.

The Glen Park Association's own $25,000 grant goes to the Arlington Slow Street, which runs four blocks. It pays for murals and planters through SFMTA's new Community Corners program, which the SFMTA board approved in June. According to the association, the program turns "daylighted" corners, where state rules now bar parking, into space for art, and it notes that it doesn't remove parking or change traffic patterns. SFMTA's pilot materials describe a 24-month program for murals and planters at painted safety zones on low-volume, stop-sign-controlled streets. On Slow Streets, the agency may add safety zones specifically to hold murals or planters.

At the association's fall meeting on October 20, the update was that SFMTA is drawing the dimensions of the area that can be painted. Dahlia Gustafson, an artist who grew up on Arlington, will design the corners and fold in neighborhood feedback. John Francis, one of the project's lead organizers, told the Glen Park Association, "This grant will really help us expand who feels comfortable using the Slow Street." The association added that the street is a "bike bus" route to school.

The welcome sign and patio mural will sit at the commercial corner, a few steps from the owl on the BART box. If the Arlington corners and the underpass mural follow, the creek and canyon theme that began on a dead-end wall at Burnside will run along the routes people already take to BART.

Who keeps the tiles swept

Finished work still needs looking after, and Glen Park Beautiful runs that through volunteers. Art stewards spend an hour or two a month sweeping the Burnside steps, cutting back ivy that creeps over the Burnside mural, keeping the area around the Bosworth bridge clean, and reporting graffiti or damage. Garden stewards tend the plantings around the installations once or twice a month, an hour or two each time. The group also calls on a volunteer crew for one-time art days, gardening days and community input sessions. Sign-up is through the contact form on its volunteer page.

Neighborhood volunteers made each of the four stops on this walk. The pieces planned for 2027 are being designed the same way, with input from the people who walk past them.

At Highrises2Homes, we follow what neighbors are building on these corners because it shapes how a block feels long before any listing does. If you'd like to talk through Glen Park, from the Burnside steps to the streets around BART, we're glad to schedule a consultation.