It took more than six years from the time neighbors began lobbying for their worn-out playground in San Francisco's Dolores Park to be replaced to the grand opening celebration two months ago that drew hundreds of kids eager to scale the new climbing structures, glide down the new slides and bounce on the colorful rubbery ground.

It took vandals just one day to mark the new playground with graffiti, and only a few weeks more for instruments in the whimsical music garden there to be damaged, most notably with the removal of six of the 14 metal keys from the popular xylophone.

"It burns me up," said Tim Wirth, who serves on the steering committee of the Friends of Dolores Park Playground and whose children helped design the $3.5 million overhaul. "So much effort went into getting the playground built, so many kids are using it now, and then it gets vandalized."

Doug Woo shares that frustration. As president of Friends of Duboce Park, he and his neighbors have worked with the city on park improvements - creating a dog-play area, the nifty Scott Street walking labyrinth and most recently a new children's playground that opened May 19 and was covered with graffiti on May 20.

"It shows a total disregard and disrespect for all the hard work that's gone into improving the park," Woo said. "It's a real slap in the face."

An 'urban' problem

In the past five years, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department has spent nearly $1.8 million repairing and replacing equipment, buildings and even trees, lawns and flowers damaged or destroyed by hooligans.

In all, 17,108 incidents of vandalism were reported from Jan. 1, 2007, through Dec. 31, 2011. Work crews spent 22,266 hours of labor fixing the damage. Already this year, more than 1,400 vandalism-related incidents have been attended to, costing the city more than $156,000.

Park vandalism isn't San Francisco's to deal with alone. White papers have been written on the subject; a whole industry has cropped up to deal with it. For example, there are special graffiti-resistant coatings for playground equipment, as well as park benches made of materials that are difficult to carve.

"It's just part of having a park system in an urban environment. That's the reality," said Mary Kay Clunies-Ross, Berkeley's public information officer.

Joe Padilla grew up using the city's gyms, ball fields and playgrounds, and now works as paint shop supervisor for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. He's been on the job for 15 years.

"I've seen it all," he said of the sabotage and defacement: restrooms set afire, tennis nets cut, urinals and sinks bashed with baseball bats, toilets and water fountains intentionally clogged with sand and rubbish, roofs torn apart and their shingles tossed like Frisbees, park benches yanked from their anchors, lights smashed.

Denny Kern, director of operations for the department, added to the list: the fire set at the newly renovated South Sunset playground that burned hot enough to melt the hard plastic play structure and the ground cover, the four-wheel drive vehicle that tore apart three greens at the Golden Gate Park golf course, the rash of destruction to rose bushes and young trees in Golden Gate Park.

"All of them defy reason," Kern said.

2 full-time workers

Graffiti remains the most extensive irritant in the system that includes 220 parks, 178 playgrounds, 25 recreation centers and nine swimming pools. The department has assigned two workers full time to cleaning up the thousands of tags each year.

The facilities with the worst graffiti problems are Golden Gate Park, Dolores Park, McLaren Park, Buena Vista Park, St. Mary's Recreation Center, Crocker-Amazon Playground, Glen Canyon Park, Holly Park and Sigmund Stern Grove, according to data compiled by the department.

But the people who love and respect their parks in every community are fighting back. Wirth, the Dolores Park neighbor, is helping to organize a "respect-your-park" campaign aimed at getting people to clean up their trash and stop breaking bottles that daily sully the public grounds. Woo, who lives near Duboce Park, keeps a can of city-provided paint handy to cover graffiti himself.

"It can be incredibly frustrating," Woo said. "But we're not going to give in."