By James Sword, HANC Board Member (@sandDadSf on Twitter)

In case you haven’t heard, the Panhandle Playground is getting a $3.5 million refresh. After 2 years of planning, lots of scrutiny of the process and policies involved, the construction is scheduled to start in April and run through the end of the year, possibly into 2020. The playground will be updated for the first time in decades and many of the current features will be preserved, but modernized (the final design can be found here: https://sfrecpark.org/wp-content/uploads/Panhandle-Playground_Construction-Plan_90-percent.pdf).  There will be swings, slides, a new climbing structure and some cool new elements laid on top of a rubber floor – we successfully fought to have a sand box included, but a sand surface throughout was not realistic (if you want to know more about the sand fight throughout the city, visit https://savethesandsf.wixsite.com/savethesand).

Now that we are in the construction phase there is little more that can be changed, except the name.  The Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council was approached by a neighborhood residents and close friends of the Vardakastanis family and asked if we would help push for the Panhandle Playground to be named after a long time neighborhood stalwart who was tragically killed in September 2017, Konstantinos Vardakastanis, or as everybody in San Francisco called him, “Gus.”

Since Gus was a neighborhood icon, always kind to the children of the neighborhood, and in many ways embodied the spirit of the Haight-Ashbury, the HANC Board thought it was appropriate to help honor him in this way.  The Board voted unanimously in February to endorse the naming of the playground after Gus.  There is a multi-pronged effort in the neighborhood to make this happen.  We will provide updates throughout the construction process and hope that at the end of 2019 we will all get to enjoy the Konstantinos “Gus” Vardakastanis playground – the board also agreed to pay for any additional costs for a sign due to the length of his name.