In July, they had a screening in the Niles, CA Museum of ‘Remembering Playland at the Beach’; a tribute to San Francisco’s Coney Island, available on DVD. The film includes a brief clip from Balboa Street to Cabrillo shortly before the amusement park closed. (Thumbnail images)
La Playa Street from Sutro Heights: La Playa is to the left of the Shoot the Chutes ride in the vintage picture; Hawai-land (spelled wrong) was behind where Topsy’s Roost was, and was farther to the right in my picture.
The Cabrillo Street turnaround during the 1950s:
Playland had a live boa constrictor at a sideshow once. Eh, I wrestled with a live alligator at the Alameda County Fair in July.
The approximate spot where the Funhouse and Merry-Go-Round were located: (Flickr)
The Playland Merry-Go-round thrilled kids and parents alike until the park closed in 1972. Moms still wave to their kids today on the Playland Merry-go-round relocated to Fourth & Howard Streets in Downtown San Francisco. (SF Chronicle)
Rather a tawdry marker is all that’s left.
Another view of Playland-the-Beach from Sutro Heights; dating to 1972: This stretch of Playland, from the yellowish building at the lower left to the Carousel on the upper right, is what you see in following film clip from the DVD. The following clips are on the Great Highway, scanning from Balboa to Cabrillo Streets shortly before Playland closed in 1972 and August of 2024
San Francisco Film Locations Then & Now 
In a now old documentary, someone from San Francisco mentioned that it was time for Playland at the Beach to go when it did, and that it would be tacky if it were still there. I am unfamiliar with it, but I sort of understand. Perhaps it is better to remember it as it was than see it trying to serve modern society.
Probably, Herb Caen’s column on the day before Playland closed forever was what you read, Tony; and who better to write Playland’s epitaph? Here’s the article, compliments of the SF Chronicle.
{Since it closes forever after today, I decided to give Playland-at-the-Beach one more chance to kill me. Parking my Mazda Rotary where the city meets the sea, I stepped up to that familiar open window at the corner of the Balboa and ordered a Bull Pupp Enchilada. “Famous for 49 Years.” This one tasted a little younger and had plenty of zing. Bull Pupps are not for the kidds. Then I walked up the block to the It’s It place and had a 40-cent corn dog, with plenty of mustard and catsup, and topped that with an It’s It itself: the fabled sweetmeat made of two oatmeal cookies with vanilla ice cream between, the whole covered with chocolate sauce and frozen. The It’s It didn’t taste as good as I remembered it from years past, but hardly anything does. For one thing, the ice cream between the cookies should be flat. This was round, scooped out like a golf ball and it never did soften to a manageable mess. Still, as junk food, it’s right up there with Taco Bell and Shakey’s Pizza, and dyspepsia was fast setting in. I had planned of getting a little heartsick over the closing of Playland, but heartburn would have to do. I wouldn’t want to keep you away from today’s last rites, but Playland looks awful. Along with the familiar aroma of salt air, popcorn, tobacco and greasy food there is the smell of death. Somebody along the way must have bled the place dry, letting it fall apart like railroad owners trying to discourage the passenger trade. As I stood on the sidewalk, gnawing at my It’s It, a station wagon with Oregon plates pulled up to the curb and out stepped a Norman Rockwell family — with youngish parents and three neat pigtailed little girls. They stared in dismay at the fading and fallen signs, the grimy windows, the debris on streets and sidewalks. After a long silence, one of the girls took her father’s hand and said “Let’s go, Daddy.” They got back in the wagon and drove off. As a San Franciscan I felt embarrassed. “When Playland closes,” an old-timer points out, “San Francisco will be the last major city in the country without an amusement park.” It has been for some time now. The fading Midway, barely alive with yesterday’s laughter. The Diving Bell, a ride I never did like, stood suspended in rust over a pool of fetid water and beer cans. At the old rifle range, George Whitney’s first concession 50 years ago, I emptied a load of .22 shells at moving targets so grimy you could barely see them. In the corner of the Fun House, hideous Laughin’ Sal bobbed up and down, cackling. As kids, we used to cover our ears as we passed Sal, and we did so again. Inside, I began the long three-story climb to the top of the finest, longest, humpiest wooden slide in the world. On the lane next to me sat a little blonde girl, staring down the long slide and screaming in terror as her mother tried to get her going. “Tell her it’s safe!” the mother implored me. “It isn’t kid,” I said as I whooshed off. “You gotta be crazy to ride this thing,” slide, bump, slide, bump, crash into the wall at the bottom. Old Playland. I suppose only those who knew it in the glory days will really miss it, and part of the glory disappeared when the scary, rickety roller coaster, the Big Dipper, was torn down in the late 1950s, for what is an amusement park without a roller coaster? After a show or on a weekend, we’d ride the Dipper in clouds of shrieks, losing our breath on the first dizzying descent and never finding it again until the end, when it was “Let’s go again!” There was the slide that took you into Topsy’s Roost to dance to Ellis Kimball, the milk bottles that wouldn’t fall over even when you hit them, Skee Ball (delightful game) and the prizes you gave your girl in return for her admiring gaze … Goodbye to all that, to part of our youth, and that youth, we expected Playland to last forever. It is an odd, sad feeling to have outlived it.}
No, although similar, it was someone speaking in a documentary. I did not watch the whole thing because it was rather saddening. Great America was a bigger and modern amusement park in Santa Clara that I grew up with. It was established much later, at a different time. It evolved in such a manner that I thought that I would have preferred to not see it in such a state. It was fun a long time ago. Then, it became a place that I needed to be searched for weapons before entering.