Start where Buena Vista Park meets Haight Street, at Haight and Baker, two blocks east of Masonic. The wall of trees climbing the hill is Buena Vista Park, the oldest public park in San Francisco. The city set it aside in 1867, before Golden Gate Park existed.
Buena Vista is San Francisco’s fourth-highest hill. The summit is 588 feet. When the rest of the city was sand dunes, this hill had native trees and shrubs, which is why it was preserved. The views from the top, when there’s no fog, cover most of the city and the Golden Gate.
The kicker is in the gutters. The drainage gutters along the paths on the west side of the park were built by Works Progress Administration crews in the 1930s out of broken headstones. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors ordered the city’s Victorian cemeteries removed to Colma starting in 1914, calling them a nuisance and a public health threat. When the cemeteries were dug up over the following decades, thousands of headstones (some shattered, some intact) were left over. The WPA used them for gutter stone. A few were laid inscription-side up. If you look carefully you can still read names, dates, and fragments of epitaphs underfoot.
The park has a counterculture footnote too. In the late 1960s a small commune lived in the bushes on the east slope. Today it’s well-patrolled and busy with dog walkers. A full loop with the summit takes about 30 minutes and is covered as an optional spur at the end of this tour.