A GARDEN BUILT BY NEIGHBORS FOR NEIGHBORS
Welcome to the Tompkins Stairway Garden
As you plan your charitable giving, we hope you’ll include a contribution to the Garden. If you support bringing green spaces to urban places, this is your opportunity to make a real difference – right here in the neighborhood!
Once a trash-covered hillside, San Francisco’s Tompkins Stairway Garden is now a safe and welcoming street park, featuring a drought-tolerant garden in year-round bloom and a colorful tiled stairway. Dedicated attention from surrounding neighbors has transformed the site into a community greenspace and pedestrian corridor serving the Alemany Farmers’ Market and nearby schools and shopping districts.
We completed our garden implementation in spring 2019 and celebrated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on June 8 (see our news page). The San Francisco Chronicle calls our new garden “stunning,” “gorgeous,” and a “cheerful splash of public art that will probably become a photo hot spot.”
In addition, San Francisco Beautiful honored us with the 2019 Placemaking Award for creating a sense of identity in a public space. We are grateful to Andre Rothblatt, founding member of Tompkins Stairway Garden, for our multicolored, zigzag tile design, inspired by the “Steps to Peace” painted by youth in the Syrian town of Deir Atiyah. Arterra Landscape Architects generously provided our landscape design.
The stairs link Tompkins Avenue between Nevada and Putnam Streets in the southeast area of Bernal Heights. The next time you’re in the neighborhood, stop by!
JOIN US
We’re a group of neighbors in Bernal Heights who enjoy and care for the Tompkins Stairway Garden.
Join us on the first Saturday of each month, 10 a.m. to noon, as we weed, trim, and clean up the garden. Tools and work gloves provided! If you’d like to help out or learn more, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
Click on the image below for tickets
The Tompkins Stairway Garden is a vibrant community greening initiative that transforms an urban stairway into a flourishing green space. As part of the Greening Projects network, this garden represents the power of grassroots environmental action, where neighbors come together to create beauty and ecological value in unexpected places. Through careful cultivation of native plants, sustainable gardening practices, and community stewardship, the Tompkins Stairway Garden serves as both a peaceful retreat for residents and a living example of how small-scale urban interventions can make a meaningful impact on local biodiversity and community well-being. This project demonstrates that even the most overlooked urban spaces can be reimagined as thriving green sanctuaries that benefit both people and the environment.