The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area

3. Moving Outdoors - Parks for the People

3 moving outdoors Parks for the People 58 T he reaction against the slaughter of the ancient trees and mountains had changed the public view of them and established the principle of protecting nature within the boundaries of parks. These protected places were still few and far between during the first two decades of the twentieth century: Big Basin, Muir Woods, Yosemite, and Sequoia. If more territory was to be held aside from exploitation and development, something more was needed than the yearnings of Muir and his generation for sublime nature. What was necessary was a shift in rationale toward the use of nearby countryside for civic recreation. A more capacious sense of parks for the people was needed. This shift took place between the world wars. The result, by midcentury, was an explosion of state, county, and regional parks in California and across the country. Such parks were meant to serve city dwellers for outdoor recreation and restoration; that is, they were as much part of the urbanized countryside as reservoirs, brickworks, and berry fields. Parks did not yet represent the kind of rejection of urban expansion and intensive human land use that would come later. A vital precedent for the spread of recreational parks in the countryside was the building of city parks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . The most famous is, of course, Central Park in New York, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the 1860s, but other big cities such as Chicago and Boston had impressive chains of urban parks and greenways by the end of the nineteenth century. These were complemented by neighborhood parks and playgrounds after 1900, as the virtues of recreation for the mass of city dwellers, especially children, came to be accepted wisdom. San Francisco and Oakland joined the grand procession of city parks across the United States, creating green spaces that exist to this day and are among the best used of any in the region. In the twentieth century, the Bay Area played a more central role in the recreational parks movement, providing key leadership in the creation of the National Park Service, launching one of the largest state park systems, and coming up with a new government vehicle: the regional parks district. sculpting nature The jumping-off place for any history of city parks in the Bay Area is Golden Gate Park. It sprang from the nineteenth-century ideal of pastoral parks, which began with scenic cemeteries and then swept through all the big cities of the country in the post–Civil War era. The urban park movement ’s leading figure was landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had a hand in nearly every major park project, including those around the San Francisco Bay. Pastoral parks were widely supported by civic leaders in response to the rapid growth of commercial cities in the midst of a civilization that still imagined itself in agrarian terms. And they were monuments to civic pride in the same way as elaborate city halls.1 Design on the Dunes San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park was carved out of rough hills and sand dunes hard against the Pacific in the teeth of ceaseless winds and fogs. Imagined just after New York’s Central Park, the project brought San Francisco into the mainstream of nineteenth-century urban planning and civic improvement. The inspiration was provided by Olmsted, who came to California to escape the trauma of the Civil War and drew up plans for a park east of Twin Peaks. Golden Gate Park itself was designed by William Hammond Hall and approved by the county supervisors in 1870. It was notable for being the largest of the pastoral parks—1,000 acres, compared to Cenmoving outdoors: parks for the people 59 tral Park’s 850—at a time when San Francisco ranked tenth in size among U.S. cities. The city was otherwise conventional in its adoption of the endless street grid from the bay to the Pacific, and it used the park as a means of settling competing claims over land titles so that the western half of the city could be opened up to development. Landowners happily anticipated the rise in property values that the park would bring to the distant margins of the city.2 Golden Gate Park encompassed the same vision as Central Park: pastoral release from the hard grid of the American city...