Is this the most underrated park in S.F.? It survived a century of stupidity to get here

“The city’s part of Bayview Hill is listed as a park, but in fact it is a lonely top where only explorers and neckers and car thieves go,” legendary editor and columnist Rosenbaum wrote. “Police recently surprised a gang stripping down six stolen Chevies.”

Bayview Park survived in the southeastern corner of San Francisco, and remains the most underrated open space in the city. It’s a speakeasy of a park, with just one concealed entrance providing a steep and quiet hike accompanied by few human beings and filled with many surprises. Acre for acre, it offers the best views in the city.

It’s also a miracle, surviving countless incursions and near-death experiences by a combination of luck, timing and self-interested people accidentally doing good things. Wealthy NIMBYs have killed a lot of potential for positive change in San Francisco, but more than 100 years ago, they saved Bayview Park.

We’ll tell that story in a bit. First let’s go for a walk through a park I didn’t know was accessible until I spoke with ultrarunner Luke Wicker , an authority on Bay Area hills. Wicker ran 76 San Francisco peaks in one 65-mile challenge in 2021, and raved about Bayview Park, calling it the most underrated in the city.

“It’s truly incredible. The view is almost 360. You look out and see downtown, see Mt. Davidson, the bay, the freeways,” Wicker said on a March 2021 Total SF podcast . “And yet, it’s so quiet and so green at the top. The more I explored that place the more I realized how underrated it is.”

There’s no proper trailhead to Bayview Park, just an unmarked road that appears out of nowhere at the end of Key Avenue in the Bayview District.

The rewards are immediate: You look to the left to see the Hunters Point Crane ( on its own all-time underrated list ) and glance behind you to enjoy an increasingly striking view of downtown San Francisco.

That’s the amuse bouche as you enter an area forested with Eucalyptus, old oaks and scattered groves of cherry trees. As you take a quarter mile loop around the top of the 500-foot incline, the trees part like cinema curtains, offering slideshow-style views of the Bay Area both ancient and brand new. The ruins of Candlestick Park appear straight below, and the mighty Cow Palace gets a cameo 50 yards later. Highway 101 never looked so picturesque.

Looking up the hill has its own rewards. Stone walls and staircases from the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s remain, along with jagged rock formations reaching skyward and offering the ultimate top-of-the-world views.

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After the Ohlone and Spanish conquerors were gone, the space’s 1800s owner was George Hearst, William Randolph’s father, who hoped to turn it into a sort of Piedmont-of-the-Peninsula. Luxury homes were planned. A boat harbor and horse-and-buggy road from downtown were built.

But in the 1860s and 1870s, Butchertown emerged to the west, blowing manure dust and the acidic smell of slaughterhouse blood and guts up the hill. Hearst’s Bay View Land Company in 1901 abandoned the prospect of mansions and sold the property to the city at $1,000 an acre, where city leaders pledged to build a “pest house,” basically a hospice home for citizens dying of horrible communicable diseases.

“The Board of Health will be asked to make an estimate of the cost of necessary buildings for accommodation of the lepers,” The Chronicle reported that year.

Another very wealthy man, Charles Crocker, put a stop to that in 1915, worried about the impact the leprosy hospital would have on his own development property in Visitacion Valley. He donated his half of Bayview Hill, 17 acres, to the city on the condition the rest would remain a park.

Over the years, there were more threats to the space, which local parks officials cared little about preserving. For decades it was suggested for any undesired city project, including a failed attempt to build a jail there in the 1930s. When Candlestick Park was built for the Giants in the 1950s, developers shaved the southern 1.5 acres of Bayview Park off like the end of a Christmas ham, using the red rock to add nine acres of bayfill at Candlestick Point.

(It went to create the Candlestick Park parking lot and flooded often. I never wore my good shoes to Giants games.)

When some wind engineers in the 1960s suggested gusts blowing down the hill might be responsible for wandering fly balls in center field, Chronicle writers and fans rallied to raze Bayview Park to the ground — having the nerve to suggest it would make San Francisco more beautiful. The Chonicle’s Rosenbaum, a beloved figure who didn’t get many things wrong, wrote a column about it on July 13, 1965.

“If the entire hill were to be leveled, it might further divert the wind and provide landscaped beauty for the benefit of baseball customers and property owners,” he wrote.

The immense cost, not cooler heads, prevailed. And it was uphill from there for Bayview Park. The south end, which was shaved in ugly angular tiers like a working quarry, eventually grew to something more natural. It’s the first San Francisco land you see traveling north on Highway 101, and worthy of that honor. (Candlestick Park was leveled in 2014, and remains undeveloped.)

San Francisco figured out the value of the southeastern quadrant of the city. The Recreation and Parks Department has focused efforts on the area, improving McLaren Park and currently working on a Bayview super-park at India Basin shoreline .

Talking to me for a different story last year , Recreation and Park General Manager Phil Ginsburg said that after decades of neglect parks in the Bayview are a clear department priority.

And Bayview Park? It gets more beautiful every year, as park officials give it more care, and the sins of the past gain more distance. The slaughterhouses are gone now. Giants centerfielders have roamed China Basin since 1999.

All that’s left from those times is the all-but-forgotten 44-acre gem of a park, which you can visit today.

Peter Hartlaub (he/him) is The San Francisco Chronicle’s culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub