A beloved farmers market’s tenure in U.N. Plaza is nearing an end. 

City officials have elected to move the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market, a staple of Civic Center for 42 years, to the nearby Fulton Street parking lot, making room for a skate area, chess boards, pingpong tables and Teqball (a sport similar to table tennis) tables, according to a press release from the farmers market.

The market will move one street over to Fulton Street between Larkin and Hyde on Sept. 3, and construction of the recreation area is set to wrap up in November. The decision is an attempt at revitalization, with hopes that a vibrant hub of activity will make the area safer, as U.N. Plaza is known as a site for the sale and purchasing of drugs. 

The farmers market, which is open Wednesdays and Sundays, rain or shine, has operated out of U.N. Plaza since 1981, providing fresh produce in a low-income neighborhood where full-service grocery stores are scarce. (A Whole Foods near Civic Center closed within a year of opening.) According to the market’s press release, it has served more than 20,000 unique CalFresh participants in the past 12 months, distributing more than $2 million in vouchers for free produce. 

“Nobody has a food access program as large as ours,” Steve Pulliam, the market’s executive director, told SFGATE. “Certainly not in California. We have the numbers to prove that.”

Pulliam cited a host of issues with the new location. Compared to the U.N. Plaza location, Fulton Street’s space is limited. He pointed out that in the new location, vendors won’t be able to park their vehicles behind their stalls, leaving them exposed to smashed windows and break-ins. This also puts merchandise at risk, since some vendors use their vehicles to store extra produce. 

“We will probably have to set load-in and load-out times, but we haven’t worked that out yet,” Pulliam said. “It’s going to be a nightmare.”

Another issue is that vendors will be located farther from the nearest BART elevator, a significant hurdle for shoppers in wheelchairs. “That’s going to be quite a hump for them to get to our farthest vendors,” Pulliam said. At the new location, the farthest vendors will be up to 0.3 mile away from the Civic Center BART station’s elevators.

A message sent to the Recreation and Park Department was not returned before publication. However, Phil Ginsburg, general manager of San Francisco Recreation and Park, told the farmers market’s Board of Directors that the recreation area is an experiment and that the vendors will be allowed to return if the project does not improve the public health issues in U.N. Plaza.