Tucked into the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, near Kezar Drive, one of San Francisco’s happiest heirlooms is still spinning. The carousel at the Koret Children’s Quarter is a 1914 Herschell-Spillman original, with 62 hand-carved animals – horses, ostriches, frogs and even a sea dragon – turning to the music of a German band organ.
The setting is historic in its own right. The playground around it opened in 1888 as the nation’s first public playground, created for children and their mothers when public play space was a brand-new idea. The current carousel arrived after the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition and has been delighting riders in the park since the early 1940s.
Its colors have a story, too. After the carousel closed in 1977 for safety repairs, local artist Ruby Newman led a crew that hand-painted every animal, chariot and Bay Area landscape panel; it reopened in 1984 looking more joyful than ever. In 2007 the Koret Foundation funded a $3.8 million renewal of the whole quarter, refreshing the playground, keeping the beloved concrete slides and giving the carousel a bright new chapter.
Today the quarter pairs the ride with climbing structures, a rope web and plenty of lawn for picnics, with the Sharon Art Studio next door. Carousel hours change with the season and the school calendar, so check sfrecpark.org before you go – then pick your favorite animal and take a spin through a century of San Francisco childhoods.
Photo: The Golden Gate Park carousel building, via Wikimedia Commons.
