The Landmark Palms of Dolores Street

The city's landmark list names this one block of Dolores Street twice. Once for the Canary Island date palms in the median, and once for a pair of cliff date palms, Phoenix rupicola, a rarer and finer-leaved cousin standing in the same strip of grass. Two designations, one address: 730 Dolores, the median between 19th and Liberty. That is why this entry is a block rather than an avenue. Palms run down the middle of Dolores Street for most of its length, and a row of trunks a mile long is a view rather than somewhere to stand; the city itself picked out this stretch, and the two rare palms in it are the likeliest reason. The San Francisco Standard, writing in 2023 about whether the city's palms have a future, called them beloved, which for a street tree is a measurement of something. Nobody we could reach has dated them. Canary Island date palms grow slowly and take decades to reach this height, and Dolores Street was rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake, but no source we read joins those two facts to these particular trunks, so this page leaves the age empty. If you have a planting record, or a photograph of this median without palms in it, tell us.