✕The new Herz Recreation Center, a 12,500-square-foot building in San Francisco’s Sunnydale neighborhood, has architectural amenities that any community would envy. Yet its story may be less about its architectural execution than its public purpose—to help rehabilitate a neglected neighborhood. The old concrete structures had become moldy, leaky, and infested with rodents, earning Sunnydale the nickname “The Swamp.” And the neighborhood was “quite possibly the most dangerous, depressed, and decrepit area of the city,” according to a 2008 SFGATE article. “In the 1980s residents would have late-night vigils on this corner,” says LMSA principal Gregg Novicoff, “because there was so much gunfire.”