Stand on Joost Avenue between Edna and Baden streets and face south. The octagonal glass roof of the Sunnyside Conservatory is below you, its ridge line sitting at the Monterey Boulevard sidewalk grade on the far side. You are one block uphill. The roof is at your feet. USGS elevation data puts the difference at roughly twenty-two feet; San Francisco Stairways measures the rear stairway at fifteen. Most Sunnyside residents register this tilt with their calves, not their eyes. But that fifteen-to-twenty-foot drop between two parallel streets is the first piece of evidence for a pattern that repeats across the neighborhood's smaller public spaces. Sunnyside's parks and planted stairways occupy steep or leftover land the street grid could not absorb. They became legible as public places only through visible, repeated acts of care: planting, naming, maintaining, opening a gate.
The walk that follows tests this claim at three locations across roughly a hundred feet of elevation gain and forty-five minutes of uphill effort. The terrain disclosure belongs here, at the start, because the hill is not incidental to the argument. It is the argument's foundation.
Joost Avenue Between Edna and Baden
The rear entrance to the Conservatory grounds sits on Joost Avenue, where a short stairway of roughly a dozen steps descends from the sidewalk into the garden. Rec and Park's photo gallery labels it "Rear Entrance on Joost Avenue." The label is accurate. What it does not say is more interesting.
A building with one entrance on Monterey Boulevard is a Monterey Boulevard amenity. Add a second entrance on Joost Avenue, fifteen to twenty feet higher, and the building becomes a through-connection between two streets at different elevations. The Conservatory, designated Landmark No. 78 in 1975 and acquired by Rec and Park in 1980, spans the tilt between them. The grade made a second entrance structurally possible; someone's decision to build steps and unlock a gate made it actual. Terrain created the opportunity. A choice, renewed every time the gate opens, created the entrance.
246 Joost Avenue
Two blocks west on Joost, between Baden and Congo streets, the uphill side of the street opens into a planted stairway. This is the lower entrance to Joost and Baden Mini Park. Rec and Park describes it as "a landscape Sunnyside stairway" with drought-tolerant and native species. DataSF's parks inventory records its size as 0.14 acres, roughly the footprint of two modest residential lots laid end to end.
The inventory records something else the landscape does not announce. The parcel's owner is listed not as Recreation and Park but as the PUC's Clean Water Program, the agency responsible for the city's sewer and stormwater systems. The land belongs to water infrastructure. As the Glen Park Association has noted, San Francisco's mini parks were often built on exactly this kind of site: vacant parcels or city-owned utility land where maintenance crews might need underground access. The lot could not hold a house. It could hold a pipe. And above the pipe, beginning around 1974 according to the Glen Park Association's community reporting, it began to hold a garden.
A PUC parcel number is not the kind of origin story that gets told at dedication ceremonies. But it encodes a particular sequence of decisions: a slope too steep for the street grid, a utility easement that kept the lot vacant, and then someone looking at that vacant corridor between backyards and seeing a garden where the city saw a maintenance easement. The 0.14-acre figure in the DataSF inventory is the documentary residue of that moment.
Joost to Mangels
Now climb. The stairway rises approximately forty feet from Joost to Mangels, according to San Francisco Stairways. Published step counts vary: the Glen Park Association recorded 54; an independent stairway blog counted 45. Count them yourself if the number matters to you. What matters to the argument is what flanks the steps.
The plantings along this climb are more considered than the site would predict. You are walking through a corridor between private lots, residential backyards visible on either side, on public infrastructure land, up a grade that defeated the street grid. A decorative tile wall faces the stairway partway up. Drought-tolerant shrubs and native grasses line the path, trimmed back from the steps with a regularity that suggests a schedule rather than an impulse. The Glen Park Association's 2016 survey describes the route as "a gently graded easement" flanked by plantings and shrubbery, with the empty lot at 149 Mangels on one side. The butterfly habitat that a group of seven Sunnyside friends built, also documented in that same Glen Park Association piece, occupies a section of the corridor that in July should show the low, dense planting characteristic of habitat gardens designed for specific species rather than general ornament.
The 2026 Rec and Park maintenance report gave Joost and Baden Mini Park a 99 percent score, placing it among the city's ten best-maintained parks. For a 0.14-acre utility parcel on a hillside, that number compresses decades of accumulated, mostly anonymous attention into a single metric. The Glen Park Association credits Sally Ross with early involvement in the park's creation and names the group of seven Sunnyside friends who developed the butterfly habitat. Rec and Park crews maintain the plantings. Others are visible only through their effects: a shrub trimmed, a step swept, a planting replaced. The maintenance score is the documentary record's way of capturing what no single filing can: sustained care, performed by people whose names mostly do not appear in any public database, over a span of years long enough that the care itself has become the landscape.
At the top of the stairway, Mangels Avenue at Nordhoff Street. Turn left on Mangels and walk downhill toward Monterey Boulevard. The route so far covers about half a mile and sixty feet of elevation gain, all on paved surfaces and maintained steps.
If you continue, the terrain gets steeper and the argument encounters its first real resistance.
Mangels Avenue Near Baden Street
Walk south on Mangels toward Baden. The grade increases. Near the intersection, look for what The Frisc described in August 2025 as something that "looks like a private driveway." This is the entrance to Dorothy Erskine Park.
Both the Glen Park Association and Amy O'Hair's Sunnyside History Project have written about these spaces, and the Glen Park Association appears as a source for both Joost and Baden Mini Park and Dorothy Erskine Park. This is worth noting because it reflects something about the spaces themselves. These parks sit on the terrain that forms the boundary between Sunnyside and Glen Park. The shared stewardship across neighborhood lines follows the same logic as the thesis: spaces this ambiguous in terrain are sometimes ambiguous in neighborhood identity, claimed by the people who care for them rather than by the grid that couldn't absorb them.
The thesis claims that leftover land becomes legible as public through visible acts of care. Dorothy Erskine Park tests that claim harder than anything on the route so far. The park carries the name of one of the Bay Area's most significant conservationists. It was dedicated in February 1979 with Mayor Dianne Feinstein presiding and Dorothy Erskine herself in attendance; Ken Hoegger of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association served as master of ceremonies, as the Sunnyside History Project has documented. It was preserved through a neighborhood campaign involving the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association, the Glen Park Association, and conservation advocates who fought what a 1979 Chronicle account called "road cuts and further development." The naming, the dedication, the political organizing, the preservation: every act of care the thesis describes was performed here, and performed publicly.
And yet you can walk past the entrance without knowing it exists.
Rec and Park's website lists the park's hours as "6 to 11 a.m." Whether this reflects an intentional access restriction or a data entry artifact is unclear; the Park Code default is 5 a.m. to midnight. The Frisc's walking piece from August 2025 describes entering the park without mentioning restricted hours or a locked gate, but that was nearly a year ago. Check the entrance for posted signage or a physical barrier before committing to the climb. The ambiguity is itself a kind of evidence. A dedication ceremony, a mayoral appearance, a conservationist's name on the sign, an advocacy campaign documented in the Chronicle and preserved by Amy O'Hair's research. All of that, and the entrance still reads as a driveway. The slope resists legibility even after the naming.
Dorothy Erskine Park
If the park is accessible, the path climbs steeply through 1.6 acres of rocky hillside, reaching elevations above 380 feet according to DataSF's contour data. Eucalyptus, native grassland, scrub habitat. Little built infrastructure. The Glen Park Association's 2016 survey described the path as a corkscrew winding around the small hill, the south side feeling bright and inviting, the north side above Stillings Avenue and Martha Avenue dimmer and more difficult. Views open east toward the city. The surface is dirt, uneven in places, and the Glen Park Association noted that accessibility could be an issue on the steeper sections.
Amy O'Hair's research for the Sunnyside History Project provides the origin story with the kind of precision that patient archival work makes possible. The land was part of the Crocker Estate Tract, divided into private lots in the early 1900s. The lots remained undeveloped through the 1960s because the steep slopes made housing construction, in the History Project's word, "daunting." When the city's Open Space Fund, approved by voters in 1974, made acquisition money available, neighborhood associations pushed the city to buy the parcels. The purchase went through in 1978. The dedication followed in February 1979. The specific road or development proposal behind the Chronicle's phrase "road cuts and further development" is not named in the public sources the Sunnyside History Project cites, but the threat was real enough to mobilize residents from three neighborhood associations.
The sequence repays attention. Private lots platted in the early 1900s. Six decades of emptiness because the terrain defeated builders. A voter-approved fund in 1974. A purchase in 1978. A dedication in 1979. The terrain that made the lots unbuildable became, through that sequence of civic decisions and neighborhood organizing, the terrain that justified a park.
The Descent
Walk back down. The return is faster, and the changed perspective is useful. From the Mangels/Nordhoff vantage where the stairway garden meets the street, the Conservatory's glass roof is visible below and to the east, sitting at the Monterey Boulevard grade. The stairway you just climbed disappears behind you into the backyards that flank it, invisible from above. What the walk has traced becomes visible as a system rather than a sequence of stops. The Conservatory's rear entrance exists because fifteen feet of grade created the structural opportunity for a second door. Joost and Baden Mini Park exists because a utility parcel on an unbuildable slope left a corridor that volunteers transformed into a garden now scoring 99 percent on the city's maintenance evaluation. Dorothy Erskine Park exists because private lots platted in the early twentieth century sat empty for six decades, too steep to build on, until neighbors and a voter-approved fund turned unbuildable terrain into preserved land.
Down on Monterey Boulevard, Sunnyside Playground occupies flat ground, carries clear signage, and reads unmistakably as a park from every approach. Nobody walks past it wondering whether it is public. The spaces on this walk were different. They were found in the gaps the grid left behind, and made public through repeated acts of attention that the documentary record captures only in aggregate: a maintenance score, a landmark designation number, a dedication date, a PUC parcel listing that reveals the infrastructure underneath the garden.
On the way down, notice how the grade that made these spaces possible also makes them easy to miss. The rear entrance you have to know about. The stairway garden tucked between backyards. The park entrance that reads as a driveway. The public character of these places was never a given. It was built, maintained, and documented by people working against the persistent fact of the slope. What they made looks like a butterfly habitat on a utility easement, or a rocky knoll where nothing could be built that now carries a conservationist's name.
Field Reference: Steep and Leftover
Route: Conservatory rear entrance (Joost Ave) → Joost and Baden Mini Park → Dorothy Erskine Park
Distance: ~0.7 mi | Elevation gain: ~100 ft | Time: 40–50 min at looking pace
Surface: Sidewalk, maintained park stairs, dirt path (final segment). Not wheelchair accessible. Bail-out at Mangels/Nordhoff (halfway; turn left downhill to Monterey Blvd).
Waypoint 1 — Conservatory Rear Gate Joost Ave between Edna and Baden Look for stairway descending into the Conservatory garden. Glass roof of the late-1890s conservatory visible below at Monterey Blvd level. If the thesis holds: the entrance exists because the grade between Monterey and Joost is 15–20 feet. A building on a slope gets two doors. The second one required a decision to build steps and open a gate.
Waypoint 2 — Joost and Baden Mini Park, Lower Entrance 246 Joost Ave, between Baden and Congo Look for planted stairway entrance on the uphill (south) side of Joost. Drought-tolerant plantings, native species. If the thesis holds: this is PUC/Clean Water land, city water infrastructure, not a planned park. The slope made it unbuildable; the planting made it public.
Waypoint 3 — Mini Park Stairway Climb 246 Joost Ave to Mangels Ave at Nordhoff St Approximately 40 ft of climb, 45–54 steps (counts vary by source). Look for decorative tile wall, maintained plantings, butterfly-habitat species flanking the steps. Backyards visible on both sides. If the thesis holds: the care visible here is what separates a utility parcel from a neighborhood garden. Rec and Park scored it 99% in 2026.
Waypoint 4 — Dorothy Erskine Park Entrance Mangels Ave near Baden St Look for an entrance that reads as a private driveway. Check posted hours at the entrance (Rec and Park website lists 6–11 a.m.; may not reflect current access; look for gate or signage). If the thesis holds: even a named, dedicated park struggles to announce itself when the terrain is this steep and the entrance this ambiguous. The thesis complicates here. Care was performed. The slope still obscures.
Waypoint 5 — Dorothy Erskine Park Hilltop Enter from Mangels/Baden side; park address is 7 Martha Ave. 1.6 acres. Dirt path, steep, corkscrewing around the hill. Eucalyptus, native grassland, scrub. South side brighter; north side above Stillings/Martha dimmer and steeper. Look for views east. If the thesis holds: private lots platted in the 1900s sat empty sixty years because the slope defeated builders. Neighbors and the 1974 Open Space Fund turned unbuildable terrain into preserved land. Named for conservationist Dorothy Erskine. Dedicated February 1979.
- The Conservatory's two entrances: The dual feature on the Sunnyside Conservatory will examine the two-entrance question in depth, including the unresolved construction-date discrepancy between Rec and Park's 1898 and Public Works' 1891.
- Detroit Steps as parallel case: The Detroit Steps Project transformed a neglected 186-step public right-of-way into a painted stairway and community landmark through a similar pattern of volunteer care making steep infrastructure legible as public space.
- Monterey Boulevard's corridor history: The street that bisects this walk was once Sunnyside Avenue, renamed as it extended west, and the Western Neighborhoods Project traces its evolution from electric streetcar route to the pedestrian-safety corridor now under redesign.
- Dorothy Erskine's conservation legacy: The park's namesake founded what became the Greenbelt Alliance, and the Sunnyside History Project's account of the 1979 dedication documents how three neighborhood associations used the 1974 Open Space Fund to preserve the rocky knoll from development.