Today, SoMa's Victoria Manalo Draves Park is a 2-acre space where residents picnic, play softball and hone their swing in newly-installed batting cages. But who is the park at Folsom and Sherman named for?
From 1999 to 2006, members of SoMa's Filipino community lobbied the city to honor the accomplishments of a woman who made her way from a disadvantaged San Francisco neighborhood to winning two gold medals for diving at the 1948 London Olympics.
Born in 1924 to an English mother and a Filipino father, Vicki Manolo was raised in SoMa with two sisters and attended the former Franklin Elementary School at 8th and Harrison streets.
She didn’t start diving until she was 16 years old, but was clearly a natural, competing in her first national championship only three years later. She was initially coached by Phil Patterson at the Fairmont Swimming and Diving Club in Nob Hill.
To get around the club's racial discrimination, Patterson persuaded her to compete under her mother’s English name, Taylor, and created a separate diving club for her to participate.
Her parents never saw her dive in her early career, said MC Canlas, an historian with SoMa Pilipinas, a Filipino-American cultural district established by the Board of Supervisors in 2016.
In 1944, Manalo started training under Lyle Draves at Athens Athletic Club in Oakland. Her new coach quickly recognized her skill and encouraged her to pursue a diving career, teaching her platform diving in addition to her existing springboard repertoire.
Draves and Manalo were married in 1946, the same year she won her first national championship.
Draves left SoMa in the late 1940s to pursue her diving career in Southern California, eventually winning five national diving championships. In 1948, she earned two gold medals in the London Olympics.
When she took the stand, she was only 23 years old, the first female diver of Asian descent to win Olympic gold, and the first woman to earn gold medals for springboard and platform diving in the same games.
Draves' victory "was not well celebrated in San Francisco, but in her father's hometown in the Philippines, there were extensive celebrations,” Canlas said.
She was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Ft. Lauderdale in 1969, but still hasn’t been added to the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame, Canlas said. But it was a win to get the park named in her honor, he added.
In 1999, community activists started lobbying the city to honor Draves by renaming the Gene Friend Recreation Center for her, said Canlas, but it became clear it would be difficult to rename an existing park.
After learning that Rec and Parks was developing a new two-acre park on the old site of Columbia Square Park, where Draves once played, Canlas and his partners began working in 2002 to have the new park named after Draves.
Although the school Draves attended at 8th and Harrison was razed to make way for the 101 in the 1950s, a new community school — the Bessie Carmichael Elementary/Filipino Education Center— was built nearby that offers the city’s only Filipino-bilingual program. The school is named after Drave’s principal at the old Franklin Elementary School.
“Victoria was a student of Bessie Carmichael and there are many strong connections between those women, the park and the school,” Canlas said.
