What’s special about San Francisco’s Glen Park Neighborhood.

Let’s look for a minute, at what a perfect day spent in the neighborhood of Glen Park, San Francisco might entail. 

Glen Park is a spot where if you’ve got good wandering around weather, you could easily spend a day in and out of shops, parks and restaurants. The day could pass by in a flash, and before you know it, you’ve gotta head home. Let’s touch on a few spots you’d have to go check out. 

You can start by scratching that breakfast itch at Glen Park Café. Big stacks of pancakes, satiating hash browns, solid classic American breakfast. 

You will be full AF. Maybe you should try to walk it off. There’s a great place to get those steps nearby! Glen Canyon Park has about 70 acres of nature and hiking trails. You can walk your dog, jog the deep canyon trails, and if you’ve got kids there are fun playground areas. There are beautiful wildflowers, streams and really cool rock outcroppings to explore or pop a squat and catch your breath. 

Now if your dog is hungry from the walk and you’ve gotta find him a quick bite, there happens to be a famous pet store in Glen Park called Critter Fritters. They’ve got cute kitschy pet stuff of all kinds, like treats to hide the dog meds called Pill Pockets, and dog and cat cake mix for the home baker in your life. You just can’t make this stuff up. 

Now you need bottled water. You have got to check out the local grocery place in the neighborhood. That sounds basic and unexceptional, the title grocery store. It just doesn’t do Canyon Market justice for his much it has goin on. Canyon Market has award winning sandwiches, fresh fish, full deli, excellent bakery, high quality great selection of wine and spirits, organic beauty products, espresso and more. 

For lunch there is a pizza joint touted one of the best in the entire city! Gialina is not to be missed, they offer Moroccan lamb as a pizza topping, heck yes, we want to eat that! 

There is great bookstores to peruse such as Bird and Beckett. Open since 1999, they host tiny concerts of local artists and sell both new and used books and records. 

In the evening you have got to get yourself to The Station. When we call this an “old” San Francisco bar it is not an ironic term. The Station has been serving that classic San Francisco bar vibe since 1926. 

Glen Park, also nick named the Village, really embodies a ton of this so called “old” San Francisco essence. Most of its shops, cafes and restaurants are original buildings put up in 1906 right after a big earthquake leveled so much of the city. 

It manages to feel like an intimate, quaint neighborhood, even though it’s really located in the heart of things. 

The parks really are a special feature of the area. The Glen Park Greenway is a walking trail that runs through this part of the city.

Both the Greenway and the Canyon are part of the San Francisco Cross town trail. This is a 17-mile walking path that connects Candlestick point to land End. It’s possible for sure to do that trail in a day, but that’s a lot. Generally, people do little bits at a time. There are spots with incredible Golden Gate Bridge views. 

There is a great Rec center in the Canyon that offers the usual stuff like basketball, pickle ball and tennis, but it also has a public rock-climbing wall. That is a one-of-a-kind feature, there are lots of climbing walls you pay to get after, but a public one? The only one offered in the city. 

The history of how the name came to be starts in the mid 1800s. A man named Baldwin was running a 145-acre zoological garden he called Glen park. He put on circus shows and sporting events and for a time it was quite popular. Because of difficulty managing Glen Park Zoo in 1922 the land was transferred to the city and county of San Francisco. The name for the area remained. 

Glen Park is a stop on the BART, so if you ride the train, you can get off right all up in the heart of things. You can also get there on one of 7 different MUNI bus lines. If you’re driving your car, you’d use highway 280. The adjacent neighborhoods that touch Glen Parks borders are the Excelsior, the mission district, Bernal Heights and Noe Valley. Saying it’s in the heart of the action ain’t a stretch, that’s a whole lot of iconic SF neighborhood names right there! 

If you’ve got any holiday time off coming up, or if you’ve got super, very very last-minute gift shopping to do, go check out. You'll be glad you did.