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Bernal Heights is a residential neighborhood on a rocky hill in southeast San Francisco, known for the grassland park on its summit. It grew after the 1906 earthquake, when displaced residents climbed the hill and the city's relief cottages followed. The Alemany Farmers' Market at its foot has operated every Saturday since 1947.
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The Hill the Con Artists Found
Bernal Heights is the rocky hill rising south of the Mission, a neighborhood of small houses wrapped around a grassland summit. The land came from a Mexican land grant in 1839, named for José Cornelio Bernal, who never lived to see it built on. In 1876, according to local legend, con artists salted the hilltop with traces of gold and set off a miniature rush. Nothing was ever mined out of the hill, but the story stuck, and the neighborhood kept its small-town character while the city grew up around it.
The Earthquake That Built the Blocks
Most of the houses here came after 1906. The earthquake and the fire that followed destroyed the center of the city, and displaced people climbed this hill, where houses on the chert bedrock had come through the shaking. The city built thousands of small wooden relief cottages for the homeless, and only a handful survive; two are preserved at the Presidio, and three were moved up to Bernal Heights, where people still live in them. In 1907 the refugee camp in what is now Precita Park was broken up, and the little houses went up the hill on wagons.
The Hill With a View and a Market
The summit is the hilltop park, and the road that circles it is closed to cars — a level mile of asphalt around the top, with the bay, the bridges and the downtown skyline turning below you. In spring the grassland is thick with California poppies. At the foot of the hill, the Alemany Farmers' Market has run every Saturday since 1947, one of the oldest open-air markets in the country. Walk the loop at the top, then come down and wander the stalls — the hill's one real claim to gold, still paying out.