Although I’d been to Kezar Stadium many times and knew it had a rich history, I’d never really taken the time to really appreciate it until now. Luckily there was a semi-professional soccer game going on over there recently, so I took the time to go visit the old park and see where San Francisco sports used to live.
The history of the stadium dates back 100 years to 1917 when socialite Mary Kezar left a $100,000 gift to the City to help build a “playground” in the name of her mother Nancy, who was an early San Francisco pioneer. Although the “playground” was supposed to be for San Francisco Polytechnic High School, the City had other plans.
San Francisco’s leaders had been trying to build a large sports ground for sometime when Mary Kezar died and the park commission decided that they could kill two birds with one stone if they used the money to build the stadium in Golden Gate Park, right across the street from S.F. Polytechnic High School. The City tossed in another $200,000 and construction commenced in 1924.
The stadium only took a year to build and found many uses right away, including high school and college football, track and field, boxing, rugby, cricket and pretty much anything else you could think of.
Both the 49ers and Raiders NFL teams began at Kezar, as well, with the Niners staying until moving to Candlestick in 1971 and the Raiders playing only in their inaugural season of 1960.
After football left in the early 1970s, the stadium found a number of other uses, including starring in the Clint Eastwood blockbuster Dirty Harry (1971) in which the antagonist, Scorpio, lives at the stadium and is ultimately shot there by Dirty Hairy, as well.
The stadium’s location, just a few streets away from Haight-Ashbury, meant the stadium was also an ideal place to host rock concerts in the late 60s and after, seeing such acts as The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Starship, Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin.
In 1989, the old stadium was almost completely torn down and replaced by a smaller, abbreviated 10,000 version more befitting for somewhere that mostly now just hosts high school football games, track and field events and local professional soccer.
So get out to Golden Gate Park and check out this relic of San Francisco for yourself!
Historic Bay Area 