The land that became Golden Gate Park was once a wasteland of sand dunes so barren that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors considered the property essentially worthless. William Hammond Hall, the park's first superintendent, and his successor John McLaren spent decades wrestling vegetation from sand, planting thousands of trees and shrubs in soil that had to be amended, irrigated, and protected from the Pacific wind. The result is the third-most visited urban park in the United States, a 1,017-acre rectangle stretching from the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to the Pacific Ocean, containing more cultural institutions, gardens, and surprises per acre than any comparable park in the country.
Golden Gate Park is larger than New York's Central Park -- a fact that San Franciscans enjoy mentioning -- and unlike Central Park, it was built entirely on barren sand. Hall and McLaren's transformation of the Outer Lands into a forested park is one of the great landscaping achievements of the 19th century. They planted blue gum eucalyptus, Monterey cypress, and Monterey pine to stabilize the dunes, then introduced the diverse plantings that give the park its current character: rhododendrons, fuchsias, ferns, and the formal gardens that occupy its eastern end. The park's western half retains a wilder quality, where the trees thin and the wind from the Pacific reasserts itself.
The park's cultural inventory is extraordinary. The de Young Museum and the California Academy of Sciences face each other across the Music Concourse. The Japanese Tea Garden, the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States, has been serving tea since 1894. The Conservatory of Flowers, a Victorian greenhouse, is the park's oldest building. The San Francisco Botanical Garden contains 8,000 plant varieties from around the world. And in the park's western meadows, a small herd of American bison has grazed since 1891 -- a living anachronism that delights every visitor who stumbles upon it for the first time.
Golden Gate Park has been the stage for San Francisco's most consequential public gatherings. The Human Be-In of 1967 drew 20,000 people to the Polo Field, launching the Summer of Love. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the free music festival funded by venture capitalist Warren Hellman, fills the western meadows every October. AIDS memorials, anti-war protests, and cultural festivals have all claimed the park's open spaces. The park's gift to these movements is the same quality that makes it remarkable as landscape: it absorbs whatever San Francisco throws at it and remains, somehow, beautiful.
Walking the park's full length -- from the Stanyan Street entrance near the Haight to the windmills at Ocean Beach -- takes about an hour and covers the full spectrum of the park's personalities. The eastern end is cultivated and cultural, dense with museums and formal gardens. The middle section opens into meadows, lakes, and the bison paddock. The western end grows wild and windswept, the trees shorter and more twisted, the sound of the Pacific growing louder. The park ends at two Dutch windmills that McLaren installed to pump groundwater for irrigation -- relics of an era when keeping the park alive required engineering as much as horticulture.
Located at 37.7697°N, 122.477°W on San Francisco's west side. The park's rectangular shape, stretching 3 miles from Stanyan Street to Ocean Beach, is clearly visible from the air. Best viewed at 3,000-5,000 feet AGL. Nearest airports: KSFO (13 nm south), KOAK (12 nm east). The park is the dominant green rectangle on the city's western half, easily distinguished from the surrounding urban grid.