A friend came over after lunch and we set off to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon walking in the San Francisco hills. After an hour or so of talking and climbing and panting we stopped to rest at Douglass Playground on the border between Noe Valley and Diamond Heights. The lower level of this steep site is for children and the upper level (pictured above) for dogs.
Later I discovered that Douglass Playground originated in the 1930s as a WPA project (pictured below). The agency underwrote the job of converting an abandoned rock quarry on a hilltop into an urban amenity. In the picture a crew is at work setting in 130,000 ice plants to prevent erosion. The story is told on a UC Berkeley web site, the Living New Deal.
