The Cork Oak of 20th Street

San Francisco Landmark Tree No. 15 grows in the middle of a street. Not beside one: 20th Street at Noe is one of this city's stairway streets, a public right-of-way that was never paved as a roadway, and the hillside garden climbing it stands where the road would have gone. The cork oak stands at the top of it, on ground that legally belongs to the street. In October 2025 the neighbourhood association that tends the garden renamed the whole thing after the tree, so it is now the Cork Oak Tree Community Garden. They keep it watered with help from the city's public works and water departments, which is an unusually specific piece of care for a tree nobody owns. Quercus suber is the tree the cork industry is built on, a Mediterranean oak grown in Portugal and Spain for a bark thick enough to be stripped every nine years or so and grow back. Nobody harvests this one. It is evergreen, so there is no season to wait for, and no source we found gives a planting date or a girth, which leaves the age open; if you know when it went in, that is worth a message. The climb up from Noe Street is the price of admission.