Golden Gate Park's east-west road formerly known as JFK Drive, now known as JFK Promenade, celebrated its five-year anniversary as a car-free thoroughfare with a Sunday party.

It’s hard to believe that it’s now been five years since Golden Gate Park's JFK Drive went car-free, mostly because there have been so many controversies around it that we forget when it originally closed to cars. The cars were kicked off JFK Drive just about a month into the pandemic, and after a couple years of Sturm und Drang, the SF Board of Supervisors approved making it permanently car-free after a marathon 12-hour debate in April 2022.

Angry drivers brought a ballot measure to let the cars back later that year, but SF voters shot that ballot measure down by a 65%-35% margin, and cars were banned for good on what we now call JFK Promenade.  

And so on Sunday, NBC Bay Area reports that lovers of car-free spaces had a five-year anniversary of car-free JFK Promenade to celebrate the occasion.

"We are celebrating five years of this amazing car-free safe space for people here in Golden Gate Park," Walk SF communications director Marta Lindsey told NBC Bay Area. "We’re in a city where three people are hit every day while walking, so we need safe spaces like this."

And since these car-free activists are no strangers to controversy, they even had a Drag Queen Story Hour as part of Sunday’s celebration.

Drivers may still be grumbling about not being able to take their cars onto JFK Drive anymore, but obviously, the car-free Great Highway is now the controversy du jour on the west side of town. That car-free area is now a park called Sunset Dunes, but the car crowd is still seeking their revenge, and trying to recall Supervisor Joel Engardio for having sponsored November’s ballot measure that took cars off the Great Highway.

Related: JFK Promenade’s Summer Pop-Up Beer and Wine Garden Returns, Now With Cocktails and Called ‘The Whale’s Tail’

Image: @SFMTA_Muni via Twitter