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Lafayette Park, a place to meet you neighbor and get a tan.

In a city flooding with condominiums, single-family homes, and a vast array of shops Lafayette Park provides the community the indispensable green to contrast the grey-scale of the congested city streets.

“Lafayette Park is one of the treasures of the neighborhood, a great open space with grass so green it looks electrified on a sunny day,” says Thomas Reynolds, editor of the New Fillmore newspaper.

Lafayette Park sits on the crest of Pacific Heights; the park is boarded by Washington Street and Sacramento Street (north to south) as well as Gough Street and Laguna Street (east to west). The north side of the park offers visitors with a birds-eye view of the Marina district and the San Francisco bay.

Kim Barnes, director of “Friends of Lafayette Park” explains that, “Lafayette Park has become the communal backyard to the Pacific Heights community.”

The park has been a staple in the Pacific Heights community since its inception in 1867. The park provides a necessary place for the residents to get away from the daily grind of the city life. The grassy hillside landscape offers an ideal place for park goers to play fetch with their k-9 companions or to lay out on sunny days and work on their tans. The park is also family friendly; with a playground for the kids to play on and picnic tables as well as many open grass areas for the family picnics.

“If the weather is right, this place is great to come to and lay out with a book and enjoy the natural beauty of the park,” says Akeem Little, a park visitor.

Though the park is city owned, the park relies mostly on a concerned group of residents to help with its up keep. The city’s budget is simply stretched too thin and cannot provide much financial help for the parks.

“Friends of Lafayette Park” gets together the first weekend of every month to help clean the park as well as help it grow with adding new plants and helping with the gardening. The “Friends of Lafayette Park” also allows for people in the community to meet other people from the area that they normally wouldn’t have met.

During these cleaning parties, Kim explains, they do have to sometimes pick-up what is left behind by the homeless and other night-time park visitors. On some occasions the group will have to pick up the needles and prophylactics that are amongst the bushes, remnants from the night before.

Despite these seldom occasions of obvious illegal night time antics; most within the community and leaders of the parks programs would agree that there is not a huge problem with homeless and/or illegal activities at the park. Just as in most other neighborhood parks, there are bound to be homeless people looking for a comfortable place to sleep for the night as well as random night-time issues.

Don’t let these sparse occasions shy you away from Lafayette Park. The majority of the people who visit the park are pleasant and welcoming.