Golden Gate Park, San Francisco: the Music Concourse, the gardens, Stow Lake and the windmills

The Music Concourse is the sunken oval at the Stanyan Street end of the park, with the de Young Museum on its north side at 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive and the California Academy of Sciences on its south at 55 Music Concourse Drive. The bowl sits approximately ten feet below the surrounding roadway; its surface is asphalt paths with fields of decomposed granite at the southwest end and turf at the northeast end, planted with a bosque of pollarded deciduous trees, primarily London Plane and Scotch Elm. It is San Francisco Landmark No. 249, designated in 2005 under Ordinance File No. 051590, and the ordinance draws the landmark boundary to include the three pedestrian tunnels that run under the concourse. The Spreckels Temple of Music closes its west end: a masonry and concrete bandshell clad on the exterior with Colusa sandstone, built in 1900 with funds donated by the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels to a design by the Reid Brothers, with a central half-dome and two flanking colonnades of eight pairs of Ionic columns.

Monuments stand around the oval. The Miguel de Cervantes Memorial by Joseph Jacinto Mora, bronze and natural stone of 1916, shows Cervantes looking down at Don Quixote and Sancho Panza kneeling before him. Two cast concrete sphinxes by Arthur Putnam of 1903 flank the footpath entrance to the de Young parking area. The Robert Emmet Memorial by Jerome Connor, bronze on granite of 1919, was the gift of James D. Phelan, and Eamon De Valera, President of the Irish Republic in 1919, spoke at its dedication. The Goethe and Schiller Monument by Ernst Rietschel dates from 1901, the Ludwig van Beethoven Monument from 1915, the gift of the Beethoven Maennerchor of New York and dedicated on 15 August 1915. The Giuseppe Verdi Monument by Orazio Grossoni, a 52-ton statue, was the gift of the Italian Colony of San Francisco.

The Japanese Tea Garden is at 75 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, open every day from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. in winter and 9 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. in summer, with the gate closing at 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. George Turner Marsh created it as a Japanese Village feature of the 1894 Mid Winter Exposition and Makoto Hagiwara designed and constructed it; it was expanded from one acre to five in 1902. The Conservatory of Flowers stands above Conservatory Valley on John F. Kennedy Drive: San Francisco Landmark No. 50, designated in 1972, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, reference number 71000184. It was acquired for the park from an estate while it was still in crates and constructed in 1878.

East of the concourse are the Children's Quarter, the Sharon Building of 1888, which is San Francisco Landmark No. 124, designated in 1981, and the carousel in its 1889 building of sixteen fluted, tapered wood Doric columns. The Shakespeare Garden of 1928 carries six bronze panels with 88 floral quotations. McLaren Lodge, San Francisco Landmark No. 175, designated in 1984, stands at 501 Stanyan Street. Kezar Stadium is at 670 Kezar Drive, and Kezar Pavilion, a gymnasium building of 1926 with seats for four thousand, fronts on Stanyan Street.

Stow Lake wraps around Strawberry Hill in the middle of the park: 12.7 acres, completed along with Huntington Falls in 1893, crossed by the Roman Bridge on the north side and the Rustic Stone Bridge over the south arm, both of 1893 by the architect Arthur Page Brown. Huntington Falls drops approximately 90 feet down the flank of the hill in concrete sculpted to look like natural rock, and the Chinese Pavilion of 1981, a gift from the sister city Taipei, stands at the water. The boathouse at the north part of the lake rents American-made row and pedal boats by the hour and runs a cafe. The San Francisco Botanical Garden is at 1199 9th Avenue: 55 developed acres of a 70-acre site, showing more than 8,000 different kinds of plants.

West of Crossover Drive the park opens out. The Polo Field, formally the Golden Gate Park Stadium, is a 17-acre field inside a 10-foot graded berm with a trotting track on top, with eighteen sections of concrete stands lining the embankment on the north side and another six on the south. Anglers' Lodge of 1936 overlooks fly casting pools 450 feet wide by 185 feet long. Spreckels Lake, approximately six acres, is used for model boating, and the model yacht clubhouse of 1938 stands beside it. The bison paddock is a large fenced open space with a feeding shelter and isolation pens at its west end; bison were introduced into the park in 1890 and the herd was moved to this ground around 1900. The Chain of Lakes, North, Middle and South, were made in 1898.

At the Great Highway end stand two windmills. The Dutch Windmill of 1902 is 75 feet tall on a 5-foot-thick concrete foundation 33 feet across, and is San Francisco Landmark No. 147, designated in 1981. The Murphy Windmill of 1905 is 95 feet tall with a span of 114 feet, and together with the Millwright's House it is San Francisco Landmark No. 210, designated in 2000. The Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden lies beside the Dutch Windmill. The Beach Chalet at 1000 Great Highway is San Francisco Landmark No. 179, designated in 1985, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 22 July 1981, reference number 81000172; Lucien Labaudt's fresco People and Places of San Francisco of 1936 is inside it, with a visitor center on the ground floor and a brewery and restaurant above. The Roald Amundsen Monument of red Norwegian granite and bronze stands north of the building.

Steer by the gates and by the addresses.

The gates: Arguello Gate at Fulton Street and Arguello Boulevard, two large pylons and flanking walls of stone ornamented with polychrome terra cotta and copper metal urns and globes; Brown Gate at 8th Avenue and Fulton Street, with a bronze Bear on the northeast corner and a bronze Lion on the northwest corner; Breon Gate at 19th Avenue and Lincoln Way, two large ornamented stone pylons; and two boulder groupings inscribed with the name Golden Gate Park, one at the Great Highway and John F. Kennedy Drive entry and one at the Fulton Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive entry.

The addresses: the de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive; the California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Drive; the Japanese Tea Garden, 75 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive; the San Francisco Botanical Garden, 1199 9th Avenue; McLaren Lodge, 501 Stanyan Street; Kezar Stadium, 670 Kezar Drive; and the Beach Chalet, 1000 Great Highway. The San Francisco Model Yacht Club gives its own location as the 36th Avenue and Fulton Street entrance.

The park runs between Fulton Street on the north and Lincoln Way on the south, from Stanyan Street west to the Great Highway, and the Panhandle carries on east between Oak Street and Fell Street as far as Baker Street. A stone masonry wall of rustic stone-like rectangular blocks runs along Stanyan Street from Fell Street and along Fulton Street to 2nd Avenue.