Golden Gate Park
Golden Gate Park is a 1,017-acre urban park situated on the western side of San Francisco, California, stretching from the edge of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. It is the largest urban park in the city and the third-most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated 24 million visitors annually. Born from an audacious effort to transform an inhospitable landscape of windswept sand dunes, the park today ranks among the most ambitious and consequential works of civic landscape design in American history. Golden Gate Park earned the designation of National Historic Landmark and California Historic Resource in 2004. Managed by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, the park encompasses museums, botanical gardens, athletic fields, lakes, and wildlife, and remains a living centerpiece of San Francisco's cultural and civic identity.
Origins and Founding
In the 1860s, San Franciscans felt the need for a spacious public park similar to Central Park, which was then taking shape in New York City. The Gold Rush and the discovery of the Comstock Lode in the mid-1800s had catapulted San Francisco from a minor port town into a metropolis, buoyed by the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. As the city's population swelled, the demand for open green space grew urgent.
Golden Gate Park was carved out of unpromising sand and shore dunes known as the Outside Lands, in an unincorporated area west of San Francisco's then-current borders. Labeled the "Great Sand Bank" on an 1853 map, the sparsely populated and virtually treeless landscape of windswept, rolling dunes gave no hint of the potential for greenery. Naysayers called the park's future location a "dreary desert."
In 1865, Frederick Law Olmsted proposed a plan for a park using native species suited for San Francisco's dry climate, but the proposal was rejected in favor of a Central Park-style park needing extensive irrigation. The park's eventual designer, William Hammond Hall, illustrated the independent spirit of the Bay Area when he ignored the advice of Central Park's landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and created an oasis where Olmsted thought none should be built.
Legislation officially created Golden Gate Park on April 4, 1870. The young William Hammond Hall was contracted to design the park in 1870 and was appointed the first Park Superintendent on August 14, 1871. Hall crafted a parkland that maximized topography, incorporating native species and sculpting the sandy soil with hills, ridges, and verdant meadows.[1]
Landscape Engineering and Horticultural Transformation
The construction of Golden Gate Park stands as one of the most remarkable feats of landscape engineering in United States history. Golden Gate Park is the first major park created on reclaimed land, as most of the 1,017-acre site was windblown sand dunes, resulting in a landscape transformation that was unprecedented.[2]
The undeveloped land, mostly sand dunes and scrub, was stabilized by more than 155,000 trees planted according to European land reclamation practices.[3] Landscape architects in Europe were already pioneering a technique of using quick-growing grasses to "reclaim" sandy areas of the coast, and Hall would have been aware of those successes. In the 1800s, transportation was mostly by horse and buggy, and the roads were full of horse manure; street sweepers would bring those droppings to the city's parks to use as fertilizer, so Golden Gate Park likely had a healthy amount of horse manure to help the reclamation process along.[4]
The eastern, more formally designed side of the park has pastoral vistas, curvilinear paths, flower gardens, and cultural institutions, while the western side was conceived as naturalistic woodland and meadow. Hall's deliberately serpentine roadways shelter visitors from ocean winds and reduce traffic speed. Starting with 22,000 plants in 1872, the tree count quickly grew to 60,000 by 1875 and now sits around 130,000.
In 1889, John McLaren was named superintendent of parks. Groomed by Hall for the role and a horticulturist by training, McLaren maintained the park's intended character while improving the forest's health and diversifying plantings with material from the park's experimental nurseries. McLaren would become the park's most legendary steward. When he refused to retire at the customary age of 60, the San Francisco city government was bombarded with letters of protest; when he reached 70, a charter amendment was passed to exempt him from forced retirement. On his 92nd birthday, two thousand San Franciscans attended a testimonial dinner honoring him as San Francisco's number one citizen. He lived in McLaren Lodge in Golden Gate Park until he died in 1943, aged 96.
Notable Attractions and Cultural Institutions
Over its 150-year history, Golden Gate Park has accumulated an extraordinary array of museums, gardens, and landmarks. Millions of visitors each year experience Golden Gate Park's miles of green lawns, bridle paths, lakes, and 7,000 kinds of plants right in the heart of San Francisco.[5]
The Conservatory of Flowers, opened in 1879, was the park's first formal structure. Its 12,000 square feet, all covered in glass, contains mostly tropical plants.[6] The Conservatory of Flowers is the oldest conservatory in North America.
The Japanese Tea Garden, Music Concourse, and de Young Museum were all established as part of the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894. That exposition — the first world's fair held in the U.S. west of the Mississippi — offered 2 million visitors a glimpse of things to come in its 180 structures set on 160 acres.
Founded in 1895, the de Young museum has been an integral part of the cultural fabric of the city. The de Young showcases an extraordinary permanent collection of American art from the 17th through 21st centuries, modern and contemporary art, photography, international textiles and costumes, and art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The ninth-floor Observation Level of the de Young's Hamon Tower, free to everyone, offers 360-degree views of San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean.
The San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum consists of 55 acres with 9,000 different kinds of plants from around the world. The park is also home to several unique gardens including the Shakespeare Garden, Rose Garden, Japanese Tea Garden, Queen Wilhelmina Garden, and Conservatory Valley with its graphic floral plaques.
With the threat of extinction, bison have resided in the park since 1891. Two windmills also reside in Golden Gate Park, which originally aided in growing the green spaces in the once sandy park by pumping water. The first windmill was built in 1903 with great success, and the second followed shortly in 1907.
Originally called the Sharon Quarters for Children, today's Koret Playground was the first public playground in the United States.
The Park in San Francisco History
Golden Gate Park has served not only as a recreational destination but as a stage for many of the most significant chapters in San Francisco's civic life.
The park played the role of sanctuary after the cataclysmic 1906 Earthquake and Fire, when 200,000 homeless residents were forced to camp in the park, first in crude shelters, and later in temporary wood barracks.[7]
Hippie Hill, a gentle sloping lawn in the eastern portion of the park, has been a part of San Francisco's history, namely the Summer of Love in 1967, a large counterculture movement that partially took place on the hill. With its close proximity to Haight Street, the main site of the Summer of Love, the movement often overflowed onto the hill.
By 1886, streetcars delivered over 47,000 people to Golden Gate Park on one weekend afternoon, out of a population of 250,000 in the city — a testament to how deeply the park had embedded itself into the daily life of San Franciscans within just a decade and a half of its founding.
Golden Gate Park was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.[8]
Recreation and Events
Soccer and baseball fields, tennis courts, an equestrian area, hiking paths, lawn bowling, angling pools, a golf course, and an athletic stadium attract the sports and recreation-minded. Nature lovers enjoy the nine lakes and ponds spread throughout the park, along with a herd of bison, a network of dazzling gardens, and an impressive arboretum.
Recreational activities include bicycling, pedal boating, and concerts and events such as the Outside Lands music festival and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. A main east-west artery in the park is closed to cars on Sundays and holidays, when the road is flooded with bikers, walkers, runners, and rollerbladers.
The annual Bay to Breakers race runs west through the city and finishes along Ocean Beach, with participants running along iconic streets and hills and through Golden Gate Park before reaching the finish line.
Since 2003, the Music Concourse has undergone a series of improvements to include an underground 800-car parking garage and pedestrianization of the plaza itself. The focal point of the concourse is the Spreckels Temple of Music, also called the "Bandshell," where numerous music performances have been staged.
The park is administered by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department.[9] Golden Gate Park is a 1,017-acre urban park in the western section of San Francisco, stretching 3.5 miles (by 0.5 miles wide) from the center of the city to the Pacific Ocean.[10]