Golden Gate Park’s last public piano faces damage, nonprofit seeks repairs

Edward Young stopped by the lakeside pianos in Golden Gate Park and found one of the city’s smallest public amenities carrying an outsized emotional weight. The 80-year-old San Francisco resident said playing the instruments helped him slow down his dementia, and that quiet use case now sits at the center of a larger fight over who gets to shape public space in the city.

Illuminate, the nonprofit behind the outdoor piano project along JFK Drive and JFK Promenade, launched a campaign to raise $50,000 to restore more donated pianos and harden the coverings that protect them from weather and vandalism. By late April, the park was down to its last public piano after another instrument, the one in front of the Conservatory of Flowers, was flipped over on April 18 and left unusable. Illuminate said the damage marked the third piano lost to vandalism in its four-year effort.

The group has restored and placed donated pianos along the 1.5-mile Golden Mile, part of a broader JFK Promenade transformation in Golden Gate Park. Illuminate said it has restored 12 pianos since the project began four years ago, but several have already been destroyed, and there have been stretches when only one playable piano remained. The problem has not been limited to deliberate damage. Fog, rain and salt air have repeatedly taken a toll on the instruments, even when vandals did not strike.

Ben Davis, Illuminate’s founder, has framed the project as a second life for used instruments and a way to build community around music in a public setting that belongs to everyone. That vision has helped make the pianos a familiar part of the promenade’s daily life, but it has also left the nonprofit dependent on constant repairs, stronger materials and enough support to keep the project from fading out.

The stakes reach beyond one damaged piano. Since JFK Drive became permanently car-free in the fall of 2022, the Golden Mile initiative has helped turn the corridor into a more active civic space, with street art, live performances and open-play pianos. Patricia Suflita Wilson, identified as the director of the Golden Mile, said the pianos have become weekly community hangouts and impromptu concerts. She also cited data showing Golden Gate Park attendance has risen 36 percent, topping 10 million visitors.

San Francisco Recreation and Parks has continued to feature JFK Promenade as a site for public art and temporary activations, underscoring how much the city has invested in the area’s new identity. Whether the last piano survives may now depend on whether residents, donors and city leaders treat low-cost, spontaneous arts access as a core public good, or as something expendable until it is almost gone.