The Hidden Reservoir Loop Russian Hill Has Been Walking in Pieces

What do you do when you find a 150-pound stone face buried under your own backyard?

That's the question Greg Gatwood and Judy Gittelsohn had to answer this August, after yard work at their two-story Russian Hill home turned up a carved limestone sculpture nearly two feet underground. The piece measures about two feet wide and nine inches thick. Nobody knows who made it, when it went into the ground, or why. Gatwood is keeping it as a garden feature while Gittelsohn tracks down art historians who might recognize the carving. For now it just sits there, a face with no name, pulled out of a hill that has apparently been holding onto more than anyone realized.

It's a strange story, but it's also a useful way into a bigger point about this neighborhood. Russian Hill's best public spaces were not designed as parks. They were built as water infrastructure, buried and forgotten for decades, then dug back up and handed to the neighborhood one project at a time. Most residents have walked pieces of that system without ever connecting them into the loop they actually form.

The Tennis Courts Sit on Top of a Working Reservoir

Start at the Alice Marble Tennis Courts, at the top of George Sterling Park. Most people who play there know the courts were rebuilt recently. Fewer know why: the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission tore up and replaced the reservoir sitting directly beneath the court surface. That reservoir dates back to the 1860s, and the rebuilt version still does real work. It supplies drinking water to the Marina and doubles as an emergency source for firefighting.

So the flat ground you're standing on for a set of tennis isn't landscaping. It's a lid on active city infrastructure, wrapped in a park that the neighborhood group Friends of Sterling Park has spent recent years upgrading with new benches and paths. The park is technically owned by the SFPUC's water department, while the courts themselves fall under San Francisco Recreation and Parks. Two different agencies, one hill, one reservoir underneath both of them.

George Sterling Park itself is named for the early-20th-century poet who anchored one of Russian Hill's bohemian salons, the same social circle that later gave rise to the Bohemian Club. A few blocks away, Ina Coolbrith Park at Taylor and Vallejo carries the name of another poet from that same circle. You can walk between two parks named for two people who used to gather in someone's living room a few streets over, and most of the walk is uphill on stairs.

Twelve Years, One Park

Head north and downhill from Sterling Park and you'll eventually hit Francisco Park, a 4.5-acre bay-view space built on what used to be the Francisco Street Reservoir. That reservoir ran from the 1860s under the Spring Valley Water Company and later the city's own water department, until it was decommissioned in 1940 when the Lombard Street Reservoir took over the job.

The site then sat unused for over seventy years. What changed it was a coalition, not a single agency. Four neighborhood groups, Aquatic Park Neighbors, North Beach Neighbors, the Russian Hill Improvement Association, and Russian Hill Neighbors, worked with the district supervisor's office to get San Francisco Recreation and Parks to take the land from the SFPUC. That deal was formalized in August 2014, when the two city departments signed a twelve-year memorandum of understanding to transfer the 3.29-acre reservoir site into parkland.

Do the math and that agreement quietly reaches the end of its original term this month. The park it produced now has an ADA-accessible path running up from Bay Street, a central lawn, a children's playground, a picnic area, and a fenced dog play area, all sitting on a footprint that spent most of the last century behind a fence with a "no trespassing" sign instead of a gate.

If you've taken your dog to Francisco Park without knowing any of that, you've been walking on the same twelve-year civic project the rest of the neighborhood has been quietly finishing around you.

The Stairways That Actually Connect It

None of this works as a loop unless you know which stairs link one reservoir park to the next, and Russian Hill has more of these than most residents ever use on purpose.

The Vallejo Street Steps start at a stone balustrade on the paved east end of the 1000 block of Vallejo and zig-zag down to Taylor Street, passing a run of the hill's older buildings on the way. A few blocks over, what locals call the Greenwich Stairway begins where the hill starts sloping down toward Larkin. It used to be an overgrown patch of nothing. Neighbors turned it into a flower garden that blooms along the steps themselves, which is not something most cities let happen to their public stairways.

Between the two sits Macondray Lane, a quiet stretch of stone path lined with Edwardian cottages that also happens to be the real-world location Armistead Maupin used as the model for Barbary Lane in Tales of the City. It reads as a private garden path. It's actually a public right-of-way that most tourists never find because it doesn't look like it goes anywhere.

If you want a guided version of this instead of piecing it together yourself, San Francisco City Guides runs a free Russian Hill Stairways walk that meets at Mason and Vallejo, at the base of the Vallejo Street Steps. The route folds in Macondray Lane and Lombard Street and usually finishes at either Francisco Park or the San Francisco Art Institute, and the guides work in local history on figures like architect Willis Polk and poet Ina Coolbrith along the way. The next one is Saturday, August 29, at 10 a.m.

Walking the Loop End to End

Put it together and you get a route that most Russian Hill residents already know in fragments: up from Mason and Vallejo, through Ina Coolbrith Park, along the Vallejo Street Steps toward Taylor, a detour through Macondray Lane, uphill again to the Alice Marble Courts and George Sterling Park, then down toward Francisco Park and the bay views at the north edge of the hill near Ghirardelli Square and Aquatic Park.

Adah Bakalinsky's Stairway Walks in San Francisco counted more than 350 stairways citywide and dedicated two separate routes just to Russian Hill's share of them. That's not a coincidence of terrain. It's what happens when a neighborhood this steep keeps repurposing its old water infrastructure instead of paving over it, and lets its stairway network fill in the gaps between projects that were never designed to connect to each other.

The sculpture in Gatwood and Gittelsohn's backyard doesn't explain any of this. But it's a fair symbol for a neighborhood where the ground keeps turning up things nobody built on purpose to be found. A reservoir becomes a tennis court. A decommissioned water site becomes a dog park twelve years after the paperwork got signed. A stone face surfaces during ordinary yard work with no explanation attached. Russian Hill's summit sits at 343 feet, and from ground level none of this is visible. You have to walk it, or dig into your own yard, to find out what's actually holding the hill together.

If you already treat this walk as part of your week, you know the version of Russian Hill that doesn't show up in a listing photo. If you're weighing a move within the neighborhood, curious what a reservoir-adjacent property near Sterling Park is actually worth, or thinking about buying somewhere on this hill for the first time, Steve Giannone knows this terrain block by block, stairway by stairway. Schedule a strategy call when you're ready to talk specifics.