• Juan Bautista Circle
• Lake Merced
• Parkmerced Meadow
• Muni M Ocean View Line

Parkmerced takes its name from a combination of 'park' and 'Merced,' a nod to the adjacent Lake Merced that anchors the neighborhood's western edge. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company broke ground on the 191-acre development in 1939, with construction slowed by World War II and completed by the early 1950s. Designed as a 'city within a city' by architect Leonard Schultze and landscape architect Thomas Dolliver Church, Parkmerced was built to house returning veterans and middle-income families, breaking with San Francisco's traditional street grid through a Beaux Arts radial plan.

Juan Bautista Circle — Church's three-acre wooded oval park at the development's geometric center — anchors the neighborhood's distinctive layout, with major streets radiating outward like spokes. Eleven streamline moderne high-rise towers rise at the western edge near the Meadow, alongside low-rise garden apartments that define the neighborhood's park-like residential character. Lake Merced itself, a freshwater lake long used by the Ramaytush Ohlone, remains the neighborhood's defining natural boundary and recreational resource.

Parkmerced's layered history — from postwar idealism through civil rights litigation to ongoing redevelopment debates — is woven into the fabric of San Francisco's west side. MY-NHD's Parkmerced collection captures that enduring character for those who call this singular planned community home.