Sunset Dunes

Before the rows of houses you see today, this entire district was a shifting, windswept wilderness known to early residents as the Outside Lands. In the late nineteenth century, this landscape was so daunting that it was considered virtually uninhabitable. The dunes were not just empty space, but a moving barrier that frequently encroached on streets and early construction efforts. In a strange quirk of local history, the area once hosted a settlement called Carville. When the city replaced horse-drawn streetcars with electric versions, residents bought the retired, wooden cars for a pittance and dragged them into the dunes to serve as homes. More than one hundred of these makeshift houses once dotted the sand, creating a quirky community that eventually vanished as permanent tract housing took over. The park you are standing in today sits on the former path of the Great Highway, a road that for decades separated the neighborhood from the ocean. Following a period of temporary closure during the pandemic, the city voted to permanently transform this two-mile stretch of asphalt into a public space. It now serves as a rare restoration zone for the native coastal ecosystem, with volunteers working to stabilize the remaining dunes by planting hardy native grasses like Leymus mollis.