The single basketball court that SoMa squeezed into a concrete bunker in 1990 is gone. In its place, opening to the public Thursday, stands a $62 million, glass-walled building with two full-length courts — and a mayor eager to claim it.

Mayor Daniel Lurie on Wednesday celebrated the reopening of the rebuilt Eugene L. Friend Recreation Center at 77 Harriet Street, the marquee deliverable so far of his "Family Opportunity Agenda." The new center is nearly 25,000 square feet — more than 50% larger than the building it replaces — and lands in the SoMa Pilipinas Filipino Cultural Heritage District, a neighborhood whose population has grown sharply since the original gym opened 36 years ago. It is a genuine upgrade for one of the city's most park-poor neighborhoods. It is also, unmistakably, a piece of political staging.

For decades, the Gene Friend Recreation Center was SoMa's only indoor rec facility: a windowless 1990 gym that fit exactly one basketball court into a concrete shell. Its replacement, which the city says cost $62 million, is a sleek, glass-walled structure whose central feature is a double gymnasium — two full courts that a sliding divider can merge into one large gym — plus flexible multipurpose rooms, an exercise room, a kitchenette, and a new main entrance on Harriet Street.

"It's bigger than the old gym because SoMa has had huge population growth," Recreation and Park Department project manager Melinda Sullivan told the San Francisco Chronicle during a sneak-peek tour this week. "From the beginning of planning, the desire was to create a sanctuary for youth in the neighborhood."

That "sanctuary for youth" framing is doing heavy lifting. The center will house programming for youth sports, after-school activities, dance, senior programs and adaptive recreation, including a dedicated adaptive sports night. Two of SoMa's best-known youth nonprofits, United Playaz and West Bay, rely on the space daily — a dependency that made the years-long closure during construction more than an inconvenience for the kids those groups serve.

The reopening is being packaged as the centerpiece of Lurie's family-focused pitch for the city. In the administration's telling, it joins a run of park deliverables — the Portsmouth Square groundbreaking earlier this summer, the reopened Tenderloin Recreation Center children's play area in May — that the mayor is threading into a single narrative about making San Francisco livable for families.

"San Francisco is known around the world for its beautiful parks. But the 'Rec' in Rec and Park matters just as much," Lurie said in a statement, casting the gym as the place "where a kid discovers a love of basketball" and "where working parents know there's a safe, affordable place for their child to go."

District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who represents SoMa, was blunter about the stakes for a neighborhood short on private space. "For a neighborhood that doesn't have a lot of backyards, the Gene Friend Rec Center is our backyard, and today we're giving it back to the community bigger and better than ever," Dorsey said, name-checking United Playaz and West Bay as groups that "fought to make this happen."

What the celebration glides past is the ledger. City officials are touting the square footage and the amenities, but the release announcing the reopening does not dwell on the $62 million price tag, the funding source, or how long SoMa went without its only indoor gym while the project was built. Those are the questions that decide whether a rec center is a bargain or a cautionary tale — and they are worth pinning down before the next ribbon-cutting.

For now, the doors open Thursday. "We want to really let people know that this is open and welcoming to the public," Sullivan told the Chronicle — an invitation, and a reminder that the real test of a $62 million building is who actually walks through it.