Cayuga Park Wasn't Designed. It Was Carved, One Gardener at a Time.

Walk into Cayuga Park from Naglee Avenue and the first carved figure appears before you've cleared the entrance gates, half hidden in a stand of shrubs like it grew there. Keep walking past the tennis courts and the baseball diamond and more of them turn up along the trails: totem poles, wooden animals, small observation decks tucked into the hillside, more than 375 pieces scattered across four acres. None of it was in a master plan. None of it went through a design review process or a community input session. One city gardener built almost all of it, working alone, over roughly two decades, and the Recreation and Park Department's own facility page for Cayuga Playground now credits him by name for shaping the park most people in the Outer Mission think of as a hidden gem.

That gardener was Demetrio Braceros, who emigrated from the Philippines in 1973. He worked briefly at a San Francisco law firm before applying for a gardening job with the Recreation and Park Department, and once he landed at Cayuga, he kept going well past the edges of a normal maintenance job. Over more than 20 years he turned a fairly plain hillside park into a set of themed gardens filled with wood carvings, and his work eventually drew outside attention: a segment on the PBS series "California's Golden Parks" and coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle. None of that recognition came from a city arts program deciding to commission a sculpture garden. It came after the fact, once word got around about what one employee had been doing on his own time and initiative.

What the City Did Instead of Clearing It Out

Parks departments renovate things. Play structures age out, courts crack, irrigation systems fail, and eventually a capital project comes through to bring a park up to current standards. Cayuga Park got exactly that kind of renovation, run by San Francisco Public Works on behalf of Recreation and Parks. The project scope covered the play area, the tennis and basketball courts, the pathways, the irrigation and lighting systems, accessibility, and general reconditioning of the landscape and sitting areas. What makes the project unusual is what it didn't do. Rather than clearing out two decades of unofficial wood carving to make room for a standard-issue renovation, Public Works worked with the San Francisco Arts Commission to restore many of Braceros' existing sculptures as part of the rebuild.

The city also physically grew the park during that process. Public Works vacated and transferred part of Cayuga Avenue back to the park, adding 8,400 square feet to its footprint. The new clubhouse includes a 1,671-square-foot living roof over the multipurpose room, along with natural lighting features. At the entrance, the plain gates were replaced with a painted steel public art installation designed by artist Eric Powell, commissioned in 2009 and unveiled when the renovated park reopened in August 2013. Neighbors who followed the project at the time put the total cost at roughly $9.4 million, a renovation large enough to rebuild courts, pathways, and a clubhouse from scratch, and the city still chose to build it around one gardener's decades of unauthorized carving instead of replacing it with something more conventional.

What's There Now, and What It Isn't

The park today runs on the same footprint that renovation set up more than a decade ago: a playground with a roller slide and a rope climbing structure, an outdoor basketball court, tennis courts, a walking track, a baseball diamond, a picnic area, a multipurpose turf field, community rooms, and bathrooms, all open from sunrise to sunset at 301 Naglee Avenue. It sits inside the small residential pocket of the Outer Mission bounded by Geneva Avenue, Interstate 280, Mission Street, and the Daly City line, a few blocks from the historic Muni streetcar car barn that marks the neighborhood's northern corner. On neighborhood forums, residents mention Cayuga Park alongside Alice Chalmers Playground as two of the better dog-walking loops in the area, the kind of routine reference that only comes from people who actually live close enough to use both regularly.

It's worth being precise about one thing, because the names get confused constantly. Cayuga Park is not Balboa Park. Balboa Park is a separate, larger park about a mile north near the Mission Terrace border, next to the BART and Muni hub that shares its name. They're unrelated except for proximity, and if a search turns up news about "Balboa Park," it isn't describing the sculpture garden on Naglee Avenue.

A Mile North, the City Is Still Deciding How to Rebuild a Train Platform

That distinction matters more once you look at how differently the city handles change at each site. Cayuga Park's defining feature came from one employee's decades of independent work, formalized only after the fact through a single renovation cycle. A short walk north, Balboa Park Station has been moving through a formal planning process since 2009, when the Board of Supervisors adopted the Balboa Park Station Area Plan. A capacity and engineering study followed in 2012 to turn that plan into something buildable. More recently, SFMTA's M-Ocean View Transit and Safety Project, aimed at rebuilding a single boarding platform at the station, went through proposal rounds in September 2022, May 2023, August 2023, November 2023, and January 2024 before the SFMTA Board finally approved a final design in February 2024. Construction on that platform rebuild is expected to begin sometime this year, more than a decade after the area plan that set the whole process in motion. BART, separately, is still working through its own multi-phase modernization of the station's headhouse and wayfinding signage.

None of that is a complaint about either project. Transit infrastructure serving a station with heavy daily ridership needs that level of review, and Cayuga Park's carvings needed none of it precisely because nobody was moving trains through them. But the contrast says something real about how change happens in this corner of the city. One project took a formal decade-plus of area plans, capacity studies, and board approvals to rebuild a single platform. The other took one gardener with a knife and free time, and the city's only real intervention, when it finally came, was to build the renovation around what he'd already made rather than clear it away.

That's a useful thing to know if Cayuga Park has been part of your weekend rotation without much thought to how it got that way. The next time a wooden figure catches your eye on the trail, it isn't set dressing from a parks department contractor. It's what one person decided to build, one carving at a time, long before anyone in city government signed off on any of it.

The Bonn Webb Team keeps an eye on the parts of San Francisco that don't make anyone's official list, Cayuga Park included. If your walk through the Outer Mission has turned up a corner with its own story, we'd like to hear about it.