Sunset Dunes Is Getting Its First Playground, Shipwreck Cove, Later This Year

Sunset Dunes, the car-free park on the former upper Great Highway, has a skate area, a bike pump track, outdoor fitness equipment, benches and hammocks. It does not yet have a playground. That is what Shipwreck Cove is meant to fix, and it is under construction at the park now.

What Rec and Park has said

Stacy Radine Bradley, director of the capital and planning division at San Francisco Recreation and Parks, told The San Francisco Standard on September 7 that Shipwreck Cove “is under construction and expected to open this year.” The department tracks the project on its own Shipwreck Cove update page. No opening date has been published.

The same Standard piece has Estefania Pihen Gonzalez, chief of education and learning at the California Academy of Sciences, describing what she does at Sunset Dunes with her four-year-old in the absence of a play structure: walking in the sand and the fog and talking about native plants.

Where it fits among the city’s playgrounds

San Francisco has more than 170 playgrounds across its green spaces, most of them maintained by Rec and Park. The oldest is Koret Children’s Quarter in Golden Gate Park, between Kezar Stadium and Robin Williams Meadow, which opened in 1888 and was the first permanent large-scale playground in the country. The newest opened in August 2026 at the Gene Friend Recreation Center in SoMa.

A playground has been on the list for Sunset Dunes since the park opened. The park drew more than 1.7 million visits in its first year, and at least 13,000 people came on opening day, April 12, 2025.

Proposition G is on the November ballot

The park’s layout is not settled. On July 23, 2026, the Department of Elections certified a signature petition, reported by KQED and CBS News Bay Area, that put Proposition G on the November 2026 ballot. The measure would reopen the two-mile stretch to cars and trucks on weekdays while keeping it closed to motor vehicles on weekends and holidays. It would partly reverse Proposition K, which voters passed in 2024 and which closed the road for the park.

Opponents of Proposition G say passage would mean removing park features including picnic areas, seating and the skate area. An analysis by the SFMTA and Rec and Park, obtained by Mission Local, put the cost of that removal at $14 million. Supervisor Alan Wong, who represents District 4 in the Sunset, supports reopening the road on weekdays.

Visiting

Sunset Dunes runs about two miles along Ocean Beach, from Lincoln Way south to Sloat Boulevard. It is open daily from 5am to midnight, and there is no admission charge.

Muni’s N Judah light rail ends at Lincoln Way near Ocean Beach, at the north end of the park. The 18 46th Avenue bus runs along the west side of the Sunset next to the park. Ocean Beach is one of the foggier parts of the city, so summer and early autumn mornings on the coast are often grey and cold.

For background on the park itself, see our guide to Sunset Dunes. For what else is on around the city this month, see our September 2026 guide.

Photo: BriefEdits, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.