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A pedestrian bridge that connects the Chinese Culture Center to Portsmouth Square is seen above Kearny Street in San Francisco is little used.

A rendering of Portsmouth Square after its planned redesign and removal of the Kearny Street Pedestrian Bridge.

People walk through the main area of Portsmouth Square in San Francisco.

A pedestrian bridge that connects the Chinese Culture Center to Portsmouth Square is seen above Kearny Street in San Francisco. Portsmouth Square is a city park in Chinatown about to undergo a $66 million renovation. Part of the plan is to demolish the pedestrian footbridge that crosses Kearny Street to connect the park to the Chinese Culture Center in the Hilton hotel.

Pigeons perch on a pedestrian bridge that connects the Chinese Culture Center to Portsmouth Square in San Francisco.

A rendering of Portsmouth Square after its planned redesign and removal of the Kearny Street Pedestrian Bridge.

A pedestrian bridge that connects the Chinese Culture Center to Portsmouth Square is seen above Kearny Street in San Francisco. Portsmouth Square is a city park in Chinatown about to undergo a $66 million renovation. Part of the plan is to demolish the pedestrian footbridge that crosses Kearny Street to connect the park to the Chinese Culture Center in the Hilton hotel.

Anni Chung, President of Chinatown's Self-Help for the Elderly, stands on the pedestrian bridge that connects the Chinese Culture Center to Portsmouth Square in San Francisco. The bridge will be demolished as part of a $66 million renovation to Portsmouth Square.

Leaving her office at Self-Help for the Elderly in Chinatown, Anni Chung walked across the footbridge that connects the park at Portsmouth Square to the Chinese Cultural Center in the Hilton hotel. Crossing over three lanes of Kearny Street, the span is wide enough for truck traffic, but only Chung and some pigeons were using it.

“This bridge has to come down,” she said. “It makes the park dark and wet and not desirable. We never use it as part of Portsmouth Square.”

Chung’s dismissal was expressed by 77% of Chinatown residents who responded to a recent survey by the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. They, too, would like to see the Kearny Street pedestrian bridge, as it’s unofficially known, demolished and never replaced. So that is the plan.

Dismantling the concrete bridge is the first step of a $66 million project to redesign Portsmouth Square, in the works since 2013. Expected to be completed in 2025, the project will call for demolition of every surface in the fragmented 1.5-acre park and a complete rebuild as a cohesive park in the sunshine.

The bridge cuts off a quarter of the park, casts a long shadow and bisects the view of Coit Tower for motorists going north on Kearny. The renovation plan, including bridge removal, finally moved forward in August, but construction isn’t likely to start until next year.

In January, the Planning Commission is expected to certify an environmental impact report. Then it will move to the Recreation and Park Commission for a public hearing and vote in February.

The Portsmouth Square redesign has been rated a “core project” for prioritization of funds through Proposition A, the 2020 Health, Safety and Recovery Bond passed by voters. More than 100 meetings and six community workshops have been held over the past four years. To date, more than $2 million has been spent on studies alone.

Anni Chung, president of Chinatown’s Self-Help for the Elderly, looks out on the little-used pedestrian bridge.

“This has been one of the most studied park projects in the last 10 years,” said real estate attorney and recently termed-out park Commissioner Allan Low. “Chinatown is the most densely populated area of the country outside of Manhattan. Residents live in overcrowded conditions, and Portsmouth Square is their access to outdoor space.”

An estimated 8,000 to 9,000 people live in single-room occupancy hotels in Chinatown, according to Malcolm Yeung of the Chinatown Community Development Center. Their rooms are tiny and everything is communal, including outdoor space, primarily at Portsmouth Square.

“This really is the living room for Chinatown,” Chung said on a recent tour of the bustling park, with every table occupied, mostly by men deep into card games. But the living room is chopped up and segmented off. The renovation “will open up Kearny Street for sure and make the park really nice,” she said. “It will be a little bit like Union Square with a seating area where the elderly can sit out in the sunlight and watch their grandkids. We’ve waited for this for 50 years.”

A pedestrian bridge that connects the Chinese Culture Center to Portsmouth Square is seen above Kearny Street in San Francisco. Portsmouth Square is a city park in Chinatown about to undergo a $66 million renovation. Part of the plan is to demolish the pedestrian footbridge that crosses Kearny Street to connect the park to the Chinese Culture Center in the Hilton hotel.

That dates to 1971, when the bridge was completed to become the main entrance to the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, a community nonprofit that opened in 1973 and operates an art gallery on the third floor of the Hilton San Francisco Financial District hotel. The Chinese Culture Center can be reached from the hotel lobby by elevator, but most of its visitors come across the bridge and up a stairway.

“The redesign is a supremely important project and the CCC is here to support the community,” said Leung. “We’re still in design talks to make sure there is access to the arts for the community.”

The bigger question is whether the Hilton will put up resistance based on the fact that it paid for the construction of the pedestrian bridge and still owns it. A street encroachment permit from the Department of Public Works allows the bridge to cross over Kearny. But that permit is revocable. If it came to that, the Hilton would have 30 days to remove its bridge.

Scott Baublitz, director of marketing for Hilton San Francisco Financial District, said the chain was aware of the plan to remove the bridge but had no comment on it.

A rendering of Portsmouth Square after its planned redesign and removal of the Kearny Street Pedestrian Bridge.

A project of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, the bridge was designed by John Carl Warnecke with the consultation of Chinese American architect Chi-Kwan Chen. Decorated in bronze lanterns that depict Chinese symbols, the span is 240 feet long and 28 feet wide and will take six months to dismantle piece by piece, with one lane of Kearny Street closed.

“It’s the bridge to nowhere,” said Tan Chow of the Chinatown Community Development Center. “It didn’t turn out the way the architect envisioned it.”

Portsmouth Square started out as a gathering place for the settlement of Yerba Buena, dating to the 1830s when the shoreline was called Yerba Buena Cove, just east of where Kearny is now. U.S. Navy Capt. John Montgomery planted the American flag here on July 9, 1846, and named the square for the ship he sailed in on, the USS Portsmouth.

One of 11 historic plaques and statues in the park identifies the square as the site of California’s first public school, built in 1847. Eventually all squares, including Portsmouth, came under the jurisdiction of Rec and Park when it was created in 1900.

A rendering of Portsmouth Square after its planned redesign and removal of the Kearny Street Pedestrian Bridge show an area that allows plenty of sunlight in. Construction of the park in San Francisco’s Chinatown isn’t expected to begin until next year, after the old park is demolished.

In 1962, the sloping property was leveled off to fit a four-level underground parking garage. The garage will stay. Everything atop it goes, including the clubhouse that uses the footbridge as its rooftop. It is dark and damp inside with no ventilation. The windows have been covered to maintain some distance between the senior programs that use the room and the homeless population that likes to gather on the patio outside.

The small clubhouse will be replaced by an 8,000-square-foot, two-story building to be available for senior classes and youths. There will be a new multigenerational playground that combines adult exercise equipment with a customized play structure for kids. The theme is the Gold Mountain, which was the Chinese nickname for the city during the Gold Rush. The shade trees atop the garage must be removed for construction. When the square reopens, shade will be supplied by a sculptural trellis.

“My goal is to remove all of the nooks and crannies so everything is more open and connected,” said project manager Cara Ruppert.

Resistance to the planned bridge demolition is expected from defenders of Brutalist architecture and, possibly, the skateboarders who like to scrape up its concrete benches, but probably few others.

During a noontime assessment of the bridge’s traffic, a few people came onto the span to eat lunch. Nobody used it to get to the other side.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF

Sam Whiting has been a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle since 1988. He started as a feature writer in the People section, which was anchored by Herb Caen's column, and has written about people ever since. He is a general assignment reporter with a focus on writing feature-length obituaries. He lives in San Francisco and walks three miles a day on the steep city streets.