Join San Francisco City Guides for a tour around Golden Gate Park’s East End featuring flowers, tunnels, and bears, oh my!

It was the 1860s, and everyone had heard about New York City’s Central Park — a spacious plot of green that contrasted sharply with the metallic landscape beyond. To recreate such a space in San Francisco, city officials looked west, where the unincorporated Outside Lands lied dormant and unused. By the turn of the century, Golden Gate Park had developed into an enormous playground for a recreation-starved city, earning its nickname as the “Lungs of San Francisco”.

Extending from the Conservatory of Flowers to the Music Concourse, the East End is home to sites both historically significant and contemporarily beautiful — including AIDS Grove, the Shakespeare Garden, Children’s Playground and the Music Concourse.