Tourist attractionSan Francisco · US
Seward Park Concrete Slides
Two long, steep concrete slides plunge down a hillside in Seward Mini Park, a pocket of green wedged between San Francisco's Castro and Noe Valley neighborhoods. Designed in 1973 by a 14-year-old girl named Kim Clark, they offer a raw, visceral thrill that modern safety-certified playgrounds can't match — and they're free. What makes this attraction genuinely extraordinary isn't just the rush of gravity on bare concrete. The slides are a monument to grassroots neighborhood activism: residents fought developers for a decade, staged a bulldozer-defying sit-in in 1966, and ultimately won the land for public use. Their victory helped reshape San Francisco's zoning laws. Riding the slides means riding on a triumph of civic spirit.