Burnside Mural and Steps

The mural: "Reclaiming Islais Creek"

Completed in September 2022, the large mural was painted on the retaining wall at the end of Burnside Avenue by Elaine Chu and Marina Perez-Wong of the Twin Walls Mural Company. Titled "Reclaiming Islais Creek," it takes its subject straight from the neighborhood's history and natural surroundings. The artists pored over archives, conducted interviews, and took guided walks with a local historian before putting brush to wall.↗

The main wall opens into a lush vision of Glen Canyon, tracing the landscape from a black-and-white past into vivid color, and filling it with the animals that live there now—red-tailed hawks, coyotes, great horned owls, hummingbirds—as well as the grizzly bears, mountain lions, deer and elk that roamed before development. Wildflowers, monarch and swallowtail butterflies, garter snakes, and the wild holly-leaf cherry that once fed the region's Ohlone people all weave through the scene. The name itself honors the Ohlone: "Islais" derives from a word for tree.↗↗

The side wall, which rises up five flights of stairs, is where the neighborhood's story unfolds. Water representing Islais Creek flows downward, carrying vignettes of Glen Park history: the Gum Tree Girls who saved the canyon from a freeway, the first suffrage march, old trolley cars, a circus-era aeronaut, a long-vanished zoo and bear pit, and today's beloved local spots like Bird & Beckett booksellers and Canyon Market.↗↗↗

The tiled stairway

In October 2024 the project's second phase was finished: the once-neglected 69-step stairway above the mural was transformed into a cascading ceramic stream. Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher, the celebrated duo behind San Francisco's famous 16th/Moraga and Hidden Gardens tiled steps, designed it to harmonize with the artwork below.↗

Follow the blue waters of Islais Creek as they tumble down the steps, darkening toward the bottom to suggest deeper water and lightening as you climb. Each step's "embankment" is dotted with wildflowers and butterflies, while fish and bird reflections glide through the tiled stream. A warm orange-and-yellow sun, echoing the California poppies in the mural, glows on the flight just above the painted sky.↗

There's a personal touch woven throughout: handcrafted "legacy" tiles carry neighbors' messages of homage to loved ones, and more than 300 tiles were made by residents and visitors at community tile-making workshops held right at the stairway. The finished steps earned a spot on the San Francisco Chronicle's 2025 list of the city's top 25 destinations.↗↗

A story worth walking up

The Burnside Mural+ began as a resident-led idea presented to the Glen Park Association in December 2020, born of pandemic-era neighborhood walks that spotted this wall as a canvas. Fiscally sponsored by the San Francisco Parks Alliance and backed by individual donors, a Community Challenge Grant, and city arts funding, the project turned an overlooked cul-de-sac stairway into a tribute to the community's past.↗↗↗

Central to the story is the group of local women who, in the 1960s, mobilized to stop a freeway from plowing through Glen Park and its eucalyptus-filled canyon—an act of activism the artists honor on both the wall and the steps, and whose legacy the neighborhood's hikers and picnickers now enjoy.↗↗

Visiting the Burnside Mural and Steps

The site sits at the Burnside Avenue cul-de-sac near Paradise Avenue, where the art meets both the Glen Park Greenway and San Francisco's Crosstown Trail, making it an easy stop on a longer walk—or a destination of its own. The stairway has a wheelchair-accessible entrance, is free, and is open around the clock. Weekday afternoons, especially around midday and 3pm, tend to be the busiest, so go early or late if you'd like a quieter moment with the artwork.↗↗↗

Visitors consistently praise the depth and color of the painting, the clever flow from mural into mosaic, and how easily it's reached from the nearby metro. Allow time not just to photograph the front wall but to follow the side wall upward, read the historical vignettes step by step, and then trace the tiled creek all the way to the top.↗