Aptos Playground

The Aptos Playground occupies a steep, terraced hillside in the Mount Davidson Manor neighborhood. Before it became a public space, the land was part of the expansive Rancho San Miguel, a Mexican land grant owned by Jose de Jesus Noe. In the nineteen twenties, developers leveled parts of these hills to build residential blocks, but they left this patch of earth for the public. It remains a rare, sunken bowl of green tucked into the dense grid of suburban houses built afterward.