Steps or Slide?

I forget when this was, but on one of our many walks through Bernal Heights we stumbled upon something so intrinsically awesome and wonderful that I think I actually squealed with delight.  We had taken a walk up to the top of Bernal Hill (which is all parkland and open space) and decided to explore the west side of the neighborhood by taking a flight of stairs down the hillside, back into the area of streets and houses.  Bernal Hill actually has several cool stairways cut into the hillside, and the one we took this day was almost jungle-like, with leafy trees and vines and ferns everywhere.

It deposited us onto a cute street with a lot of cute houses, and across that street we found another stairway to take us further down the hillside.  Repeat one or two more times, with more cute streets and cute houses and stairways. 

Then, across the next street, we came to a small clearing with a sign painted in the familiar green "SF Rec & Parks" color.  It was a mini-park, set into the hillside, with the usual set of steps leading down to the street below. 

But it also had the most awesome set of TWO SLIDES!  This mini-park offers you a choice:  step or slide to your destination.  The slides are side by side, so you can slide with a companion next to you.  They're fast slides, and long, and shaded, so you could never get burned on them.  That day, we took the slides, of course, as a couple of older tourists photographed it all from the top.  The slides spit us out into more leafy trees and a beautiful succulent garden.  It was SO FUN.

Weeks later, I am still marvelling at those slides.  ONLY IN SF.  For some reason, that mini-park with its slides gets me more than anything else I've seen or experienced here.  When a flight of stone steps would have done the trick, this city chose to transform the simple action of ascending or descending into something utterly fun and whimsical.

I actually found some history about the slides here:

"A more boisterous park amenity--the city’s longest pair of outdoor slides--greets visitors to Bernal Heights Mini Park just a few blocks away at Winfield and Esmeralda. In the late 1970s, neighborhood activists, with help from then-Mayor George Moscone, turned the empty corner lot into a garden spot with spectacular views and a twin, 42-foot sloping steel slide. The highlight of its dedication in 1979 was the photograph of Mayor Dianne Feinstein flying exuberantly down the chute."

Next task is to find that photo of DiFi choosing the slide over the stairs.