, image =Lake Merced at SFSU.jpg , caption = , location =

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

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Reservoir A reservoir (; from French ''réservoir'' ) is an enlarged lake behind a dam. Such a dam may be either artificial, built to store fresh water or it may be a natural formation. Reservoirs can be created in a number of ways, including contr ...

, inflow =

Spring Spring(s) may refer to: Common uses * Spring (season), a season of the year * Spring (device), a mechanical device that stores energy * Spring (hydrology), a natural source of water * Spring (mathematics), a geometric surface in the shape of a h ...

, outflow = , catchment = , basin_countries =

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

, length = , width = , area = , depth = , max-depth = , volume = , residence_time = , shore = , elevation = , reference = , pushpin_map = California#USA , pushpin_label_position = , pushpin_map_alt = Location of Lake Merced in California, USA. , pushpin_map_caption = , website = , embedded= Lake Merced ( es, Laguna de Merced) is a freshwater

lake A lake is an area filled with water, localized in a basin, surrounded by land, and distinct from any river or other outlet that serves to feed or drain the lake. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean, although, like the much large ...

in the southwest corner of

, in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sove ...

. It is surrounded by three

golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping wi ...

courses (the private

Olympic Club The Olympic Club is an athletic club and private social club in San Francisco, California. First named the "San Francisco Olympic Club", it is the oldest athletic club in the United States. Established on May 6, 1860, its first officers were ...

and San Francisco Golf Club, and the public

TPC Harding Park TPC Harding Park, formerly Harding Park Golf Club and commonly known as Harding Park, is a municipal golf course on the West Coast of the United States, located in western San Francisco, California. It is owned by the city and county of It i ...

), as well as residential areas, Lowell High School,

San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different ...

, Lakeshore Alternative Elementary School, Stonestown Galleria,

Fort Funston Fort Funston is a former harbor defense installation located in the southwestern corner of San Francisco. Formerly known as the Lake Merced Military Reservation, the fort is now a protected area within the Golden Gate National Recreation Are ...

and the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the conti ...

. The San Francisco Police Department shooting range, as well as a now closed

skeet shooting Skeet shooting is a recreational and competitive activity where participants use shotguns to attempt to break clay targets which two fixed stations mechanically fling into the air at high speed and at a variety of angles. Skeet is one of the t ...

club and the city's

National Guard National Guard is the name used by a wide variety of current and historical uniformed organizations in different countries. The original National Guard was formed during the French Revolution around a cadre of defectors from the French Guards. Nat ...

armory are also in the area. The lake was also the home of the Lake Merced Sailing Club, now closed, which provided training and racing for local sailors. Currently there is a sailing and paddling program operated b
San Francisco State University
The lake is home of the Pacific Rowing Club and St. Ignatius College Prep Rowing Team, both competitive rowing programs for San Francisco high school students. The

California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, commonly referred to as OEHHA (pronounced oh-EEE-ha), is a specialized department within the cabinet-level California Environmental Protection Agency ( CalEPA) with responsibility for evaluatin ...

(OEHHA) has developed a safe eatin
advisory
for Lake Merced based on levels of mercury found in fish caught from this water body.

History

Francisco_de_Haro,_Alcalde_de_San_Francisco

Lake Merced was originally christened Laguna de Nuestra Señora de la Merced by Captain Don Bruno de Heceta in 1775. Father Pedro Font, while on the

de Anza Expedition Juan Bautista de Anza Bezerra Nieto (July 6 or 7, 1736 – December 19, 1788) was an expeditionary leader, military officer, and politician primarily in California and New Mexico under the Spanish Empire. He is credited as one of the founding fa ...

to found the

Presidio of San Francisco The Presidio of San Francisco (originally, El Presidio Real de San Francisco or The Royal Fortress of Saint Francis) is a park and former U.S. Army post on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, and is part ...

in March, 1776 wrote in his diary, "we saw a grove of live oaks near which is the Laguna de la Merced, where Captain Ribera stopped; and here we saw many bears (

California Grizzly Bear The California grizzly bear (''Ursus arctos californicus'') is an extinct population or subspecies of the brown bear, generally known (together with other North American brown bear populations) as the grizzly bear. "Grizzly" could have meant " ...

)..." At approximately 11pm of November 22, 1852, a shock was reported to have occurred by those in the areas around the Lake and the following day reports were made that "...a fissure half a mile wide and three hundred yards long was discovered, through which the waters of Lake Merced were flowing to the sea." The most probable cause of the shock was attributed to heavy rains forcing a passage through the sandbank at the north-west. The Lake is reported to have lost 30 feet (9 meters) of water. A map from 1881 shows that the Lake still had a passage to sea, 29 years later. Once owned by

Francisco De Haro Francisco de Haro (1792 – November 28, 1849) was a Californio politician, soldier, and ranchero, who served as the 1st and 5th Alcalde of San Francisco (initially known as Yerba Buena). He notably commissioned the first land survey of Sa ...

, first

Alcalde Alcalde (; ) is the traditional Spanish municipal magistrate, who had both judicial and administrative functions. An ''alcalde'' was, in the absence of a corregidor, the presiding officer of the Castilian '' cabildo'' (the municipal council) ...

of Yerba Buena, as part of the Galindo ranch, the

Spring Valley Water Company The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) is a public agency of the City and County of San Francisco that provides water, wastewater, and electric power services to the city and an additional 1.9 million customers within three San Franc ...

bought the water rights for the Lake in 1868, and the surrounding watershed in successive years. By purchasing all local supply, the company created a monopoly on San Francisco's water. It was not until 1908, when the city approved construction of O'Shaughnessy Dam creating the

Hetch Hetchy Reservoir Hetch Hetchy is a valley, a reservoir, and a water system in California in the United States. The glacial Hetch Hetchy Valley lies in the northwestern part of Yosemite National Park and is drained by the Tuolumne River. For thousands of years bef ...

in the

Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada () is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primar ...

mountain range, that the city gained municipal control. Prior to the construction of the dam, Lake Merced was to serve as the city's main reservoir, with plans to expand the lake into land that is now the

campus. Around this time, Spring Valley sold off some of its land on Lake Merced, making way for the golf courses that exist today. In 1940,

Metropolitan Life MetLife, Inc. is the holding corporation for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MLIC), better known as MetLife, and its affiliates. MetLife is among the largest global providers of insurance, annuities, and employee benefit programs, wi ...

bought the last of Spring Valley's land to build the

Parkmerced Parkmerced is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, designed by architects Leonard Schultze and Thomas Dolliver Church in the early 1940s. Parkmerced is the second-largest single-owner neighborhood of apartment blocks west of the Mississi ...

apartment complex.

Ecology

The lake is fed by an underground spring, and at one time it did have an outlet to the ocean as shown on an 1869 United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Map. The

salt Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts; salt in the form of a natural crystalline mineral is known as rock salt or halite. Salt is present in vast quant ...

level was always fluctuating, and therefore some species of

fish Fish are Aquatic animal, aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack Limb (anatomy), limbs with Digit (anatomy), digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and Chondrichthyes, cartilaginous and bony fish as we ...

which inhabit the lake are salt and freshwater adapted. There is active recreational fishing at the lake. The lake's water level had been shrinking for decades, endangering the historic role of Lake Merced to support a healthy

ecosystem An ecosystem (or ecological system) consists of all the organisms and the physical environment with which they interact. These biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Energy enters the syst ...

. Due to better management of the aquifer and occasional additions of water, lake level has been rising since 1990.http://www.museumca.org/creeks/1700-OBDCPix4.html Lake Level Fluctuations The only natural freshwater lakes in San Francisco are Pine Lake, Lake Merced, and Mountain Lake. Lake Merced Park, Fort Funston, and SF Zoo

Lake Merced Park, Fort Funston, and SF Zoo

Famous duel

On September 13, 1859, Chief Justice of the

California Supreme Court The Supreme Court of California is the highest and final court of appeals in the courts of the U.S. state of California. It is headquartered in San Francisco at the Earl Warren Building, but it regularly holds sessions in Los Angeles and Sac ...

David S. Terry David Smith Terry (March 8, 1823 – August 14, 1889) was an American politician and jurist who served as the fourth chief justice of the Supreme Court of California; he was an author of the state's 1879 Constitution. Terry won a duel aga ...

killed

United States Senator The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States. The composition and po ...

David C. Broderick David Colbreth Broderick (February 4, 1820 – September 16, 1859) was an attorney and politician, elected by the legislature as United States Democratic Party, Democratic United States Senate, U.S. Senator from California. Born in Washington, DC ...

in a

duel A duel is an arranged engagement in combat between two people, with matched weapons, in accordance with agreed-upon rules. During the 17th and 18th centuries (and earlier), duels were mostly single combats fought with swords (the rapier and ...

at the lake.

References

External links

''Guide to San Francisco Bay Area Creeks'' – Lake Merced''Lake Merced Flickr group'' – Pictures of Lake Merced on Flickr
{{authority control

Merced Merced (; Spanish for "Mercy") is a city in, and the county seat of, Merced County, California, United States, in the San Joaquin Valley. As of the 2020 Census, the city had a population of 86,333, up from 78,958 in 2010. Incorporated on Apri ...

Parks in San Francisco

Bay Area Ridge Trail

History

Ecology

Famous duel

See also

References

External links