A Kids' Paradise

By C.J. Hirschfield

Lakeside Park is a very special neighborhood that’s designed with our community’s kids in mind. There’s Children’s Fairyland, of course, a treasure for our youngest kids since 1950. There’s the Rotary Nature Center, which since 1953 has served as a citywide interpretive center for science and environmental education. 

Rotary Nature Center in Lakeside Park.

And there’s the delightful Junior Center of Art and Science, which moved to Lakeside Park in 1992 from Mosswood Park, where it had been located since 1954.

The Junior Center of Art and Science in Lakeside Park.

All Keyed Up

By C.J. Hirschfield

“I’m a sane person,” Lela McKenna assures me. “I just have a singular obsession with Fairyland’s Magic Key.”

No kidding.

Lela – one of Fairyland’s most active volunteers – still has her very first key, which she believes she acquired in 1968. “It’s yellow, and it has the original tag,” she says.

Children’s Fairyland’s iconic Magic Key made its debut a decade earlier, in 1958. It unlocks the many storybook boxes in our park, releasing musical stories tied to our fanciful sets. For generations of Bay Area kids, the Magic Key has represented positive memories of time spent with loved ones in our little urban oasis.

Lela McKenna, volunteer extraordinaire.