Larkin Street, a small business corridor and cultural hub in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, will soon be revitalized with new safety features, art installations and community events meant to attract pedestrians back to an area hollowed out by the pandemic.
With crime rates in San Francisco dropping to historic lows, Larsen told the Chronicle in an interview Sunday that he felt it was time to invest in creating bustling streets and successful business corridors.
“Now it’s time to really think big — how can you go beyond anything that’s been there before?” Larsen said. “If the Tenderloin’s not doing well, the city’s not doing well.”
“San Francisco is at its best when everyone participates in our recovery,” Lurie said. “The Larkin Street Revival Project will create a safer, cleaner Tenderloin for the families, kids, and business owners who call the community home, while activating public spaces and storefronts across the neighborhood.”
One of the first steps in the project is to install decorative security gates at roughly 20 participating small businesses. They are meant to serve dual purposes: enhancing the street with colorful, patterned panels that will be backlit at night, and protecting storefronts from break-ins and vandalism.
Cultural events and activities, such as concerts or performance art, will pop up starting this spring, giving residents an opportunity to enjoy the neighborhood by day and night, Robinson said.
“We need people to know that the Tenderloin is the coolest place to go out — there are so many amazing and unique businesses and experiences,” she said. “They deserve to have lines out the door again.”
But the pandemic forced many restaurants and other small businesses to close their doors or move locations, creating vacant storefronts on Larkin Street that attracted crime and other problems.
Still, many resilient business owners remain rooted in the historic neighborhood, which includes cultural hubs for the Southeast Asian and LGBTQ+ communities, along with other refugee and immigrant populations, Robinson said.
Robinson said she hopes elements of the project are eventually expanded to other parts of the Tenderloin and the city at scale, but as one of the only small business coordinators in the area, Larkin Street “felt like the right starting place.”
Larsen said he and his wife, Lyna Lam, who is Cambodian, funded the project in part because of their connection to the Southeast Asian community. They used to dine frequently at restaurants in the Little Saigon neighborhood, but were disappointed to see the area decline despite “all that potential,” he said.