Stow Lake

Stow Lake is a man-made lake located between John F. Kennedy Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive – west of the Japanese Tea Gardens in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The lake is home to ducks, geese, herons, mallards, seagulls and turtles and the adjacent lake area is equipped with eight picnic tables and barbeque grills.

The artificial Huntington waterfalls system was meticulously designed to be built in the middle of Golden Gate Park- on the Strawberry Hills Island surrounded by Stow Lake, made out of sand dunes. The Stow Lake provides a range of recreational activities such as picnicking, row boating, pedal boating and water biking and is also equipped with restrooms and snack bars. There lies in close proximity a Chinese pagoda- The Golden Gate Pavilion which was presented to California by Taipei as a symbol of friendship.
The lake is also blessed with the charming Stow Lake Boathouse, located on the easternmost side of the Park. Owned by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, the original plan for the boathouse was conceived by the architect Arthur Page Brown and also includes restrooms and a café and snack bar. The lake also serves as a haunted place with its alleged distraught apparitions of a mother roaming around at night that once lost her child in the lake and later drowned in the same lake.