Spreckels Lake

The Spreckels Lake Model Yacht Facility, commonly referred to as "Spreckels Lake", is an artificial reservoir behind an earthen dam and adjoining clubhouse situated on the northern side of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Completed in mid-March 1904, the reservoir was built for the use of model boaters of all ages, interests, and skill levels, designed specifically for racing model sail and power boats and to propagate the skills and crafts necessary to build and sail competitive model boats of all types. The Spreckels Lake Model Yacht Facility is considered one of the finest examples and one of the most beautiful of the naturalistically styled, man-made model boating facilities in the world and is always open to anyone wishing to sail its waters with few restrictions. The facility is also the permanent home to the San Francisco Model Yacht Club (SFMYC), the organization at whose request Spreckels Lake and the adjoining clubhouses were built and whose history is and always will be irrevocably intertwined with the history of the facility.

Spreckels Lake is an artificial, clay-lined, reservoir holding around 7.8 million gallons (23.94 acre feet/29,530,000 liters) of non-potable (not-drinkable) well-water behind an earthen dam that forms its western edge, walkway, and the 36th Avenue roadbed, which crosses the top of the dam after entering Golden Gate Park at Fulton Street. Situated between 36th Avenue and 31st Avenue to the east, on the north side of the Park between Spreckels Lake Drive and Fulton Street to the north and John F. Kennedy Drive to the south, making it part of San Francisco's famed 49-Mile Scenic Drive, the lake is named for sugar-fortune heir and San Francisco Parks Commission President Adolph B. Spreckels, at a meeting of the Park Commissioners on Friday, January 29, 1904, over the objections of Spreckels who had wanted it called the "Model Yacht Lake" but whose donation of the surrounding land extending from about 25th Avenue westward to the edge of park at the Great Highway prompted the other Commissioners to name the lake in his honor.

Designed specifically for model boating and measuring approximately 950 feet (east–west) by 420 feet at its widest, the irregularly shaped "Model Yacht Lake" began being filled with water pumped into it from the underground aquifers near Ocean Beach by the Dutch Windmill on January 14, 1904, when Spreckels and Park Superintendent John McLaren "supervised the adjustment of the valves." The new lake was filled and judged completed by late February or early March of that year, and the lake model yachting facilities officially opened a little under a month later on Sunday, March 20.

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