San Francisco’s landscape has changed drastically since its founding. While the city is now tightly packed with rows of Victorians and numerous parks, many parts of San Francisco were once covered in sprawling sand dunes.
Before the western part of the city was developed, much of the San Francisco peninsula was covered in miles of dunes. Some even reached 80 feet tall (or higher), and the dunes were extensive even for the California coast. Western neighborhoods of the city, such as the Richmond and Sunset, were called the “Outside Lands” due to the few buildings, roads, and dunes that made the areas hard to inhabit.
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Due to the strong coastal winds, the sand dunes were known to migrate, making it difficult for early construction efforts. While some dunes would slowly move with the wind, others were held in place by vegetation.
Eventually, though, the city began to win over the shifting sand, and the neighborhoods and buildings that stand today started to form. Large steam shovels were used to clear the dunes beginning in 1849, and the excess sand was dumped into the bay to create more shoreline real estate. The Sunset District was one of the neighborhoods that were previously covered in sand until its rapid transformation during the first half of the 20th century. Yerba Buena Cove was filled in with sand, along with the Marina District, now one of the city’s most thriving neighborhoods.
Even when buildings were able to conquer the stubborn dunes, early San Francisco residents often complained of the wind carrying the coarse sand everywhere. While decades later, the sand dunes are just a faint memory reserved for the edges of Ocean Beach, it was once a significant landscape in the city.
You can see some drifting dunes forming along the great highway, and dunes filled with shrubs sit at the border of Ocean Beach. The name Outside Lands isn’t entirely gone either; the popular music festival that is held in Golden Gate Park every summer is aptly titled Outside Lands, referencing the neighborhood’s original name.