Douglass Playground

Love this park! Migrated over here since there has been a bunch of coyote sightings in my neighborhood dog park! It is a nice big space for my dog to run around! Closed on Wednesdays for maintenance though!

The Upper Dog Park just opened, and it is huge! If there are lots of dogs, it wouldn’t notice cause it is big. Dog fountain and also plenty of grass.
Thanks City!

A really wonderful park — gorgeous with a grassy hill to set out a blanket & enjoy lunch. Good restrooms. Great for young children — there are swings, an old school slide, and a fake «truck» with a big steering wheel to drive among other things. It feels very neighborhoody and homey. Two huge thumbs up.

On the list of great, underappreciated things that SF has going for it, beautiful, semi-​secret parks have to be near the top of the list. Douglass Playground is a terrific example. I’ve lived in the general vicinity for years and had no idea it existed.
The park starts on Diamond and 26^th. Though it’s called a «playground,» the playground is actually a small part of a larger park cut into the hill. There’s a huge, flat, grass-​covered field perfect for soccer or tossing a ball around. There’s a picnic area for food (just a table; no grill that I saw, though), plenty of trees for climbing, and a bunch of trails leading into the trees.
The «playground» half is completely separated from the Douglass Dog Park half higher up the hill, so if you find yourself surrounded by a bunch of labradors, you’re in the wrong place.

So when you’re a child trapped in a slightly-​larger-​than-​a-​child-​but-​only-​slightly body, people tend to give you funny looks if you try to play on a playground. And you also feel like an ass if you’re taking a swing away from some seven year old.
But here Douglass Playground comes in! I swung on the swings to my heart’s content, and the only other people I saw were a couple of dog walkers and two boys playing catch.
Monkey bars were too hard, though. I have not the upper body strength I had as a child…

Douglass Playground is a large park with an upper and lower field, the lower one containing the playground proper and the upper one being a dog park (which Angela C has reviewed under a separate entry). At first it appears the two are unconnected but there is in fact a steep and narrow trail you can follow. There is also a secret entrance to the park from the end of Carnelian Way.
This park has an excellent hillside location complete with beautiful trees and rock outcroppings, but the whole place has a kind of under-​utilized vibe. If only they would get rid of some of the fences (not to mention the batter’s box in the dog park) and make it more walker-​friendly, it would be a first-​class park.