The deepest part of Lake Merced drops sixty feet below the surface, held back from the Pacific Ocean by a narrow wall of dunes. This freshwater lake sits in a natural basin formed by the San Andreas Fault. In the eighteen hundreds, it served as the primary water source for San Francisco. A developer named A.J. Raisch once tried to drain the lake to create a residential neighborhood, but the project failed when the bottom turned out to be unstable, shifting silt.
Lake Merced Park
park garden