In 2025, Holly Park might be San Francisco’s most low-key, drama-free public space.

Even with a full-time job exploring the city, I didn’t know the park existed until two years ago, when I stumbled upon it. The people there — mostly local residents — seem uniformly calm. The dogs are eerily well-behaved. Check with your doctor first, but a walk around the clean, 7.5-acre oval seems like a good substitute for high blood pressure medication.

But despite its reassuring present, the green space in the shadow of Bernal Heights Park has a chaotic, eventful history. Holly Park is eight years older than Golden Gate Park. And nothing about how it got here was easy.

The center of Holly Park is a full baseball field, a big flat top on a flan-shaped hill.

Despite being just 270 feet above sea level, the stadium offers 360-degree views of the city, including Bernal Heights, Bayview Park and San Francisco Bay, the top of Salesforce Tower, Glen Park Canyon and Sutro Tower. On a clear day you can see beyond Twin Peaks to the Marin Headlands.

But this plateau, arguably the second-best sports field in the city for its spectacular views, was a complete accident.

The history of the space dates back to before San Francisco was incorporated in 1850. A San Francisco Chronicle article published in 1890 described a much larger peaked hill (120 meters high or more) with a racetrack formed around it.

“Old residents remember seeing the hill covered with people,” the Chronicle reported, “while on the track around its base cowboys raced their wild horses, and at stake were Mexican dollars, saddles, bridles and even the horses themselves.”

There are conflicting reports about what happened next. But when Bernal Heights became a residential place toward the end of the Gold Rush, wealthy residents, including railroad lawyer Harvey S. Brown, bought the land and in 1862 gave it to the city for a park.

In 1863 St. Mary’s College was founded nearby (later moved to Moraga), and in 1870 a reservoir was added. But for its first 20 years there was no attempt to develop the land into something of importance, and it was used as a dumping ground on the west end and excavated for rock and gravel on the east.

By 1889, Bernal Heights was growing and a group representing 4,000 property owners went to the Board of Supervisors to demand a park where one had been promised, pointing out that the space contained not a single tree.

The Chronicle took up their cause the following year and sent a reporter to discover that the hill now had a huge cut in it, as if the city property had been strip-mined by Sierra Nevada gold seekers.

“A Park in Ruins,” the Chronicle headline proclaimed. “Residents of Bernal Heights Outraged.”

The Chronicle of December 3, 1890, called it “a park in name only.”

“The tract of land which constitutes it is a rocky, barren hill on which no tree or shrub grows,” the article continued, “and on the east side of which the prisoners of the city House of Correction have cut a large hole to secure rocky soil for paving Mission (Street).”

The Chronicle article said that damage to the hill caused by illegal excavations would take at least two or three years to repair. It turned out to be more than a decade. Neighborhood groups had stopped the park from being completely destroyed, but they were unable to save the top of the hill. The top was leveled to the height of the damaged east side.

When the 1906 earthquake hit and Bernal Heights continued to grow from a cattle grazing area to a residential neighborhood (with dozens of shacks to protect against the quake), Holly Park was needed more than ever. In 1911, the city located Junipero Serra Elementary School next to the park, planted dozens of trees, and in 1940, built the Holly Court housing project, the first low-cost federal housing on the West Coast, just north of the park.

Walking through Holly Park in 2025, there are few traces of the turmoil that existed during the first half-century of its existence. It seems perfectly planned and as immaculately kept as any city park.

I arrived on a recent afternoon, took the BART to 24th Street and an easy uphill bike ride through La Lengua, passing more than a dozen excellent Mexican, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan restaurants during the slow climb. Casual walkers may prefer the 24 Divisadero Muni line, which stops a block away and