How Cool is Glen Park? On a Global Scale, REALLY Cool!
- Evelyn Rose
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read

For the residents of Glen Park, being cool is no longer just a state of mind.
Thanks to TimeOut, a global media and hospitality publication out of the United Kingdom, being cool is now part of Glen Park's storied legacy. In the magazine's 8th year of ranking the world's coolest neighborhoods, Glen Park is ranked 35th out of a total of 39, wedged between Margit-negyed, Budapest, Hungary and MiZa, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (the Number 1 ranked neighborhood for 2025 is Jimbōchō, Tokyo, Japan). The news has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, and SFGate.
Just how special is this honor? There is no official tabulation of the total number of neighborhoods in the world, but a "bazillion" might be a safe estimate. More than half of the world's 4.7 billion people on Planet Earth (as of 2024) live in urban areas, a number that is projected to grow to 68% by 2050.
Each of those urban areas have multiple numbers of neighborhoods. For example, New York City alone has about 350 neighborhoods filled with its nearly 8.5 million residents. The United Nations projects that by 2030, there will be 662 cities around the world with at least 1 million residents, so we get an idea that the number of neighborhoods worldwide is just too enormous to estimate (San Francisco has 37 neighborhoods for its 842,000 residents). And for all of the neighborhoods across the world, each most likely has its own distinctive character and ambience, just like Glen Park.
So what makes Glen Park special? As Glen Park Gum Tree Girl Zoanne Nordstrom described it in 2000, Glen Park is "a perfect small town in the middle of a big city." Glen Park residents understand that feeling by continuing to refer to their Glen Park shopping district as "The Village." And how many neighborhoods in any big city can say that have 70 acres of open space, right in the middle of that city, for recreation, hiking, wildlife viewing, and respite from a troubled world?
The Glen Park district has always provided a path to and from San Francisco, likely beginning with the Ramaytush Ohlone but codified by the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza in 1776 when he followed a route aligning with today's Chenery and Arlington Streets that would become the El Camino Real. In the early 1860s, the district also helped provide a water supply to a growing, thirsty city from the flow of Islais Creek, the largest creek in San Francisco and today, still partially daylighted in Glen Canyon Park.
But Glen Park is also a place with a long history of innovation and activism. In the late 1860s, the first dynamite factory in the United States, personally licensed by inventor Alfred Nobel, was located in the area of today's Glen Canyon Park Recreation Center. Upon his death, the funds Nobel had accumulated during his lifetime were used to establish the Nobel Prizes, to "reward outstanding efforts in the fields that he was most involved in during his lifetime: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace."
Three decades later, Glen Park got its name when realtor A. S. Baldwin organized the Glen Park Company. The sole purpose of the company in the late 1890s was to manage a zoo and pleasure grounds in today's Glen Canyon as a means to attract prospective homeowners to Baldwin's new lots west of Castro Street, in a region of San Francisco that was still quite rural. An aviation pioneer, Daniel J. Maloney, himself a resident of Fairmount, emerged from Glen Park and the Mission Zoo as a well-known aeronaut. Through his collaboration with inventor and aviation pioneer John J. Montgomery at Santa Clara College in the early 1900s, Maloney would become the first human to fly at high altitude in a fixed-wing craft with equilibrium and control.
We can thank the Glen Park Company for our sylvan district (and not Adolph Sutro). The company's practice of tree planting throughout the formerly treeless area would be carried forward by the activist suffragists of the Glen Park Outdoor Art League, some of whom would co-lead the first official march for women's suffrage in the United States in August 1908. As the daughter of one of those suffragists, a 12-year-old girl who grew up to become lifelong Glen Park resident, Minnie Straub Baxter, carried that moxie forward to the mid-20th century when she galvanized the neighborhood to stop the city and state from constructing the Circumferential Expressway through the heart of Glen Park and Glen Canyon Park. And when the city and state tried again in the mid-1960s, Mrs. Baxter passed the torch to the Glen Park Gum Tree Girls - Zoanne Nordstrom, Joan Seiwald, and Geri Arkush - who once again galvanized the neighborhood to stop the construction of a viaduct freeway with suffragist moxie and small-scale civil disobedience. And not just these women, but at least 20 women who strove to make a difference in their community have been associated with Glen Park.
When standing on the corner of Diamond and Chenery Streets and looking any direction, Glen Park today looks very similar to what it did a century ago. Our bucolic byways only add to that ambience. A snapshot of this history has been beautifully captured by the Burnside Mural and Tiled Stairway, now one of the more popular sites in San Francisco. And loved not only by residents, Glen Park has become a destination with several options for excellent international cuisine (eg, Gialina, La Corneta Taqueria, Glen Park Station, Glen Park Cafe, Higher Grounds, Destination Bakery, the Brazilian Pebbles Cafe, Win Garden, Manzoni, Tekka House, One Waan Thai, and the recently opened La Cigale), shopping with long-term/legacy retailers (eg, Perch, Canyon Market, Critter Fritters, Cheese Boutique, Dalere's Beauty Salon), and for entertainment at the cherished Bird & Beckett Books & Records. And nearly all of these businesses can be found within a 2-block area.
So, yes. Glen Park is a very cool place. How cool is it to be cool?