One of San Francisco’s long-elusive recreational goals — a large and lively waterfront park on the city’s southeastern edge — is $25 million closer to becoming reality.

The grant from the John Pritzker Family Fund, a local foundation, will pay for environmental remediation as well as design and partial construction of an 8-acre park along India Basin, in the Bayview district.

Outside of the Presidio, which is part of the national park system, this is the largest grant ever for open space improvements in San Francisco.

“This really kick-starts a project that has been in the works for years,” said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the city’s Recreation and Park Department. “It’s a remarkable investment in the Bayview and environmental justice, as well as open space.”

The grant is to be announced Tuesday by Mayor London Breed and voted on Thursday by the city Recreation and Park Commission.

The focus of the money is a beguiling but battered stretch of waterfront roughly two miles north of where Candlestick Park once stood.

The planned space will include a makeover of India Basin Shoreline Park, which opened in 2000, and a closed boat-repair complex at 900 Innes Ave. that the city purchased in 2014.

The 900 Innes site includes a cottage from 1875, when flat-bottom boats were built there, but other structures on the property are dilapidated and the soil has been contaminated by decades of industrial activity. As for the existing park, Rec and Park staff have ranked it in “poor” condition.

Illegal dumping is an ongoing problem.

The Pritzker grant, which will be paid out over a five-year period, will fund the environmental cleanup of the repair facility. It will also finance the completion of design work by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, the Seattle landscape architect firm selected for the project in a 2016 competition, and a portion of the new park’s construction costs.

Beyond such attractions as basketball courts, floating piers and an adventure play area, the new park’s significance is how it fits into a larger open space network. It is the most accessible link in a 1.7-mile long chain of parks, one existing and the others planned as part of private development projects, that together could give the Bayview a waterfront green space on the scale of the Presidio’s Crissy Field.

When combined with recent government grants, such as $5 million from the Bay Restoration Authority, the Pritzker grant means that the city has roughly one-third of the estimated cost of transforming what is billed as India Basin Park. The goal is to raise half of the expected $120 million budget from private sources and the other half from government agencies.

While the Pritzker Family Fund has invested in Bayview playgrounds, the scale of this donation is striking — especially since it’s going to a much different setting than the Presidio, which is rimmed by affluent neighborhoods. The Bayview has high poverty rates and relatively few private funding resources to draw on.

“Gifts like this are what make a project happen,” said Alejandra Chiesa, Bay Area program director for the Trust for Public Land. “It’s a signal that a large donor believes in the importance of investing in the wider community.”

The notion of lining India Basin with top-flight parks has been an aim of community groups and the city since 2009. When Gustafson Guthrie Nichol was selected, officials said the redone parks would open as early as 2018.

The current schedule calls for the cleanup at the boatyard to begin later this year and conclude by 2021. The conceptual designs will be fleshed out to working drawings, and the existing public spaces will be activated with temporary programming.

Under this scenario, construction would begin in 2021 on the central piece at 900 Innes Ave. When it’s ready for public use, reconstruction of the existing park would get under way. The target completion date is 2025.

The Trust for Public Land is expected to help manage aspects of the design effort and community engagement, while the San Francisco Parks Alliance will assist with programming.

A city-owned park directly to the south, the 6-acre India Basin Open Space, will be upgraded and redesigned as part of an adjacent private development.

“First and foremost, we need to clean the land and the water so that we can restore tidal marshes and wildlife habitat,” Ginsburg said. “We need to remedy the industrial legacy and some of the mistakes that have been made on the waterfront in the past.”

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron