Golden Gate Park

Golden Gate Park stretches 4.1 square kilometers across the western half of San Francisco, from dense residential neighborhoods to the Pacific dunes, making it roughly a quarter larger than Central Park in New York. It was carved from windswept sand dunes beginning in 1870, landscape engineer William Hammond Hall gradually transforming barren ground into a layered English-style park. Today it contains the de Young Museum of American art, the California Academy of Sciences with its living rooftop, a Japanese Tea Garden dating to 1894, and a small bison paddock that nods to the vanished North American prairie. On Sundays, John F. Kennedy Drive closes to cars, turning into a promenade of cyclists, skaters, and joggers weaving through rhododendron groves and past the Victorian-glass Conservatory of Flowers.