Not long after we moved here, my husband took me to his favorite spot in Golden Gate Park, the rhododendron Dell (then still in full glory). We’d moved here from dreary Kansas in winter and I was gobsmacked to see these trees fluffy with crimson, fuchsia and pale pink blossoms, the color of dawn. It felt like we’d landed in Oz.
That was 35 years ago and in all that time since I’ve lived a block from the park and visited it almost every day. I’ve walked my dog, run, biked, pushed a stroller across most of its 1,070 acres and love them all. The park has been my front yard, my back yard — the backdrop, really, to much of my life.
My memories of the park are mostly a a montage of picnics and playgrounds, birthday parties and soccer games, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass concerts, bison watching and spotting coyotes and hawks. Of walks west through its woodsier, more tangly and wilder parts where you could almost pretend you’d left the city. Of walks east toward the more manicured gardens and the indisputably urban attractions like the museums or Japanese Tea Garden. And so, so, so many outings that began under blessedly sunny skies and ended in cold clammy fog.
I remember watching my kids climb the twisting tea trees near the polo fields, and taking them foraging for berries in the then thick brambles surrounding the Chain of Lakes. I felt grateful to be able to give these country experiences to my thoroughly citified children.
I recall the morning I looped the park’s dusty trails in a stunned state, trying to absorb the terrible 6 AM phone call that brought news my dad had died.
But the memory that always bubbles up when I think about the park is of a winter day decades ago when my two squirrely young sons were quarantined with chicken pox. Mammoth storms had shut down the city. The park was our only escape. It was quiet – no cars or people -- and the wind and rain had left a thick carpet of needles on the ground. It felt like we had stepped through a magic door into a paradise of our very own. We giggled with pleasure.
I’m struck that this moment – out of my bajillion in Golden Gate Park—has stayed so sharp in my mind. I think it’s because it captures my own intimate connection to the park – and maybe how people come to claim a sense of ownership in any park or public space. That was probably how many San Franciscans felt at the height of the pandemic, when the park was one of the few public places offering relief from lockdown.
Thanks to the pandemic, when I was more grateful than ever for Golden Gate Park, I began thinking about it in a way I hadn’t been before. I grew more curious. I vaguely knew the land where the park sits had once all been sand dunes. Wait! How were acres of sand transformed into acres of woods and grassy meadows and formal gardens? Who was behind that feat? Has it changed much since its earliest days?
The questions multiplied: where did the bison come from? Why do the lakes occasionally go dry? What’s it like for unhoused people who live there? How do the gardeners spend their days? When did the coyotes arrive and the ravens appear? What’s the origin of the Japanese Tea Garden? Does anyone actually use the Horseshoe Pits? Can this vast green place survive drought and climate change? What does it mean to have a “natural” space that is almost entirely artificial? What role does the park play in the life of the city?
So I’ve been doing what any journalist would do: reading, talking to people involved with the park as employees, volunteers, visitors, afficionados; digging out pieces of its past and exploring its present. This won’t be an exhaustive history or A to Z tour. Like any good day in the park, it will be more of a ramble. I’m out to learn about the people -- and plants and animals – that make it the place that I love. I hope you’ll join me.