Sand dunes, and the two men who fixed them
The park opened on 4 April 1870 on a strip of shifting coastal dune that everyone involved was told could not be planted. William Hammond Hall surveyed it in 1870, became park commissioner in 1871, and worked out how to stabilise the sand — the problem on which the entire project depended, and the reason the park exists in a form Hall would recognise.
John McLaren was Hall's assistant and then superintendent, and he ran the park for more than half a century, living in McLaren Lodge until he died there in 1943 at ninety-six. Between them they turned four square kilometres of dune into the thing it is now. Accounts that credit McLaren with the first gardens have the order of events the wrong way round.
The road that is no longer a road
This is the biggest practical change to the park in decades and it postdates every older guide. The eastern stretch of John F. Kennedy Drive was closed to traffic during the pandemic, the Board of Supervisors voted in 2022 to make the closure permanent, and voters confirmed it later that year with sixty-five per cent in favour. It is now the JFK Promenade: walkers, cyclists, skaters and children on a wide tarmac road through the middle of the park.
The park kept the large majority of its parking, the Music Concourse garage still serves the museums, and accessible spaces and a shuttle were added as part of the same legislation. Arriving by car is still possible; arriving by car and expecting to drive across the eastern park is not.
The two museums on the Music Concourse
They face each other across a sunken plaza of pollarded trees, which is the park's formal centre.
- The de Young. The 1921 building was demolished and rebuilt by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, reopening in 2005 in perforated copper that was meant to oxidise to the green of the surrounding trees, and has. It holds American art, along with the collections of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, plus textiles and costume. The observation level at the top of its twisting tower is free to enter, and gives the best overview of the park and a good part of the city.
- The California Academy of Sciences, opposite — aquarium, planetarium, rainforest and natural history museum under a roof of planted hillocks. It is covered in detail under science museums and the zoo.
A correction worth making because it still appears in print: the Asian Art Museum is not in the park. Its collection began in the de Young, but it moved to the former main library building in the Civic Center in 2003 and has been there ever since.
The Japanese Tea Garden
The oldest public Japanese garden in the United States, and the best half-hour in the park. It began in 1894 as the Japanese Village at the California Midwinter International Exposition, and the city bought it when the fair closed.
What it became was the work of Makoto Hagiwara, its caretaker from 1895 until his death in 1925, who turned a fairground exhibit into a permanent garden, imported plants, birds and koi, and more than tripled its size. His daughter Takano and her children ran it after him.
Then, during the Second World War, the Hagiwara family were evicted from their home in the garden and sent to an internment camp. They were never allowed to return and never compensated. While they were gone the garden was renamed the Oriental Tea Garden; the original name was restored in 1952.
What is there now: a five-tiered pagoda, built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition and moved in afterwards; the steeply arched drum bridge, taiko bashi, which throws a full circle onto the water below it; stone lanterns, a koi pond, and a tea house that has stood on the site in one form or another since 1894.
One footnote that connects two ends of the city. Makoto Hagiwara is the man generally credited with first serving the modern fortune cookie in the United States, here in this garden — which is why the claims made for it in Chinatown do not hold up.
Gardens and glasshouses
- The Conservatory of Flowers, 1879, the oldest surviving municipal wooden-and-glass conservatory in the country. A storm in 1995 with winds around a hundred miles an hour destroyed two fifths of its glazing and closed it; it reopened in September 2003. Inside: lowland tropics, highland tropics, aquatic plants and a seasonal gallery.
- The San Francisco Botanical Garden, long known as the Strybing Arboretum. Fifty-five acres and over seven thousand species, arranged by climate — the Mediterranean, Chilean and New Zealand sections do particularly well here, because San Francisco's climate suits them. Accounts giving seventy acres and six hundred species are badly out.
- The Shakespeare Garden, a small walled enclosure planted with the flowers and herbs named in the plays and poems, of which there are around two hundred.
- The National AIDS Memorial Grove, seven acres of dell off Stanyan Street, which Congress recognised as a national memorial in 1996. It is the quietest place in the park and deliberately so.
Water, windmills and bison
- Blue Heron Lake, in the middle of the park, which was Stow Lake until the parks commission renamed it in January 2024 after the herons that nest there. It is the park's first artificial lake, there are rowing boats and pedalos, and the island in it, Strawberry Hill, has a waterfall and the highest viewpoint in the park.
- Spreckels Lake, built between 1902 and 1904 at the request of the San Francisco Model Yacht Club and opened in March 1904. Members still sail and motor model boats on it at weekends, and have done for over a century.
- The bison. They are American bison rather than buffalo, they have been in the park since 1891, and they are in a fenced paddock towards the western end rather than roaming loose. The herd is small and has been restocked several times.
- The Dutch Windmill, built around 1902 to pump water for irrigation, seventy-five feet tall, restored in 1981, with the Queen Wilhelmina tulip garden at its foot — a gift from the Netherlands, and spectacular for a few weeks in spring. A second windmill, the Murphy, stands nearby.
- Hippie Hill, the slope at the eastern end nearest Haight Street, where the free concerts of 1967 happened and where a drum circle still meets at weekends. The Haight-Ashbury page has the rest of that story.
Practical notes
The park is three miles long and runs from the middle of the city to the Pacific, which has one consequence that matters more than any other: the two ends have different weather. The eastern end near the Haight is frequently in sunshine while the western end at Ocean Beach is in cold fog, and the gradient can be startling over a twenty-minute walk. Anyone planning to finish at the beach should take a layer they do not need at the Conservatory.
Distances are real. Walking from the Music Concourse to the windmills and back is a serious afternoon. Bicycles are the sensible answer, and the car-free promenade has made the eastern half much better for them. Buses run along the northern and southern edges rather than through the middle.
And the perennial confusion: the park has nothing to do with the Golden Gate Bridge, which is at the other end of the city. Both take their name from the strait. General practicalities are on the San Francisco page.