Indeed, there are many tiny parklets and twee patches of grass scattered around San Francisco. All of them wonderful and adorable to behold. But the city’s smallest public park, Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park, consists only of a plaque and six enormous eucalyptus trees that tower above Octavia in the Fillmore.
Mary Ellen Pleasant was born a slave sometime between 1814 and 1817. Pleasant came to San Francisco in 1852 to escape the Fugitive Slave Law as she was part of the Underground Railway. She later became one of the first black female American millionaires.
After opening her own restaurant and meeting Thomas Bell, the "great love of her life" and business partner, her worth was estimated upward of 30 million. She later moved into the Bell Mansion.
In 1974, the city of San Francisco designated the six eucalyptus outside the mansion, which she had planted shortly before her death in 1904, as a Structure of Merit. At just a half block long on half the sidewalk, It is now considered to be the city’s smallest park.
Jack Early Park, over in North Beach, is widely considered to be the city’s tiniest, albeit unauthorized, park.