Balboa Park

The new playground at Balboa Park opened in August 2012 and we completed work on the new skatepark in September. Other renovations are still in progress. Read updates on our construction journal.

The 25-acre Balboa Park is located in the Excelsior neighborhood, a community with the highest concentration of children in San Francisco. For nearly a century, the park has been a much loved, heavily-used neighborhood resource-and work in progress. It draws people from all over the city with its large sport fields and pool, but many of the elements that make for a friendly neighborhood park, such as picnic areas, pathways and landscaping, were not included. The Trust for Public Land, in partnership with the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, led a community-driven design process to envision new elements of the park that would help build community. New amenities include a new play area for school-age children, renovated tennis courts, a new picnic area, new landscaping, walking paths, and new art elements.

You can see the improvements—from one-of-a-kind handmade mosaics to kid-approved playground equipment—in this footage from the August grand opening in the video above.