As we first let our thoughts wander and then refocus them on the landscape, we learn to see not only how complex and various are the ways of human living but also how difficult it is to achieve anywhere a habitat consonant with the full potential of our being.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1979, 101) “Thought and Landscape”
I was born in Los Angeles and raised by parents who liked to tent camp. My father loved to surf fish so we frequently, sometimes monthly, camped in beachside county and state parks along the Santa Barbara coast. In addition, perhaps once each summer, we traveled farther to camp at either Sequoia National Park (my parents favorite) or Yosemite. I strongly remember the immense size and bracing fragrance of Sequoia’s Big Trees (Sequoia gigantea) and the spectacle of Yosemite’s Firefall. On at least one occasion, however, we did not camp but instead traveled around San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. It was on this trip, sometime around 1962 or 1963, that I first toured Golden Gate Park. We visited the De Young Museum (Figure 1), the Japanese Tea Garden (Figure 2), the Conservatory of Flowers (Figure 3), and more. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and recall being struck by the greenness of the landscape, how large it was (approximately 1013 acres), and how filled with people.
I do not, however, recall wondering why, when Los Angeles’s Griffith Park is mostly dry in summer, Golden Gate Park was everywhere lush or what had prompted the park’s development. Frankly, I did not really think about or realize that it was a built environment. It was simply San Francisco’s grand park. Ten years passed before I again visited Golden Gate Park, this time as an undergraduate at the University of California-Berkeley, but my perception had shifted little. I visited the park on multiple occasions over several years and what I noted were the park’s still lush greenness, the many hippies, including me I suppose, the unmistakable fragrance of pot, and the frequent presence of music. Like my childhood experience of Golden Gate Park, my young adult encounters remained immediate and lacked any historical or cultural reflections on my part. It was a grand place without history or any purpose beyond being itself. I have no photographs from these early visits, but the ones below suggest the place I encountered in the 1960s and 1970s.
When I began the doctoral program at UCLA in the 1980s, I knew I wanted to explore the cultural-historical geography of urban greenspace, but I did not know which kind or where. I considered extending my master’s thesis study of front-yard gardens on middle-class homes, but soon realized that documents about the purpose, planning, design, installation, maintenance, and meaning of a single-family property would be difficult, if not impossible to obtain. After several discussions, my advisor encouraged me to investigate public greenspaces. I did some initial research into the sources used by landscape, garden, and environmental historians, discovering that landscape drawings, receipts for the purchase of horticultural and other materials, government documents, newspaper accounts, and more would likely be available (Cranz 1982; Graff 1985; Schuyler 1986). With such sources, it would be possible to explore the purpose, planning, construction, modification, and, to a degree, the meanings of such places. In my naiveté, I proposed an historical-cultural study comparing the development of two contemporaneous large urban parks systems – San Francisco’s and Brooklyn’s – to my committee, but one member, a particularly practical biogeographer, rejected the plan. A two-park, largely narrative comparison, he explained, would result in nothing statistically significant so why go to all that trouble. Instead, he suggested I analyze just the proximate system, San Francisco. My research expenses would be less than for an investigation of Brooklyn, so I would be more likely to expeditiously finish my dissertation. The other committee members concurred, so I took this excellent advice, finishing my dissertation about the early development of San Francisco’s parks in four years (Young 1991). Following graduation, I continued to explore the historical geography of public greenspaces in numerous locations and at multiple scales (for example, Young 1996), and eventually revised my dissertation into a book (Young 2004).
Three decades later, I no longer encounter Golden Gate Park and its landscapes as I did in my youth. Instead, I experience a continuum of judgments beyond enjoyment. “The appreciation of landscape,” explained Yi-Fu Tuan (1990, 95) in Topophilia, “is more personal and longer lasting when it is mixed with the memory of human incidents.” As noted above, my early visits make Golden Gate Park a palimpsest of memories, but now I am also a veteran scholar, which adds nuance and depth to my experience. The appreciation of landscape, continued Tuan, “also endures beyond the fleeting when aesthetic pleasure is combined with scientific curiosity.” When I visit Golden Gate Park, the pleasure prompted by the park’s visual scenes is combined with recollections of traveling with my parents and enjoying music on Hippie Hill. At the same time, my engagement is also commingled with memories from my many doctoral research trips to the park, deep dives into its archival records, and with the cultural understanding I gained while investigating the history of American urban parks. All these subjective elements are fundamental to my encounters with Golden Gate Park.
Today, when I visit a public park I understand its landscape as the embodied society-nature relations argued thoughtfully by Denis Cosgrove and others (Angelo 2021; Lee 2025). Landscapes, explained Cosgrove (1984, 1) “represent a way of seeing – a way in which some Europeans [and Americans] have represented to themselves and to others the world about them and their relationships with it, and through which they have commented on social relations.” In mid-nineteenth-century America, large urban parks were promoted as environmental devices to reform urban societies. In contrast to the urban landscape, they were places where pedestrians and riders could ramble through “naturalistic” scenery composed of woodlands, shrubs, lawns, lakes, paths, drives, and “rustic” structures (Figures 5 & 6). Perceived through the lens of Romanticism, leading urban greenspace advocates like Frederick Law Olmsted (Figure 4), the co-designer of New York City’s Central Park (Map 1), told authorities that the cities they feared as too diverse, disordered, and brutal could be “civilized” when permeated by parks. Urban social problems, park advocates argued, were not the result of individual viciousness or a fault in human nature as much as they were caused by the lack of “uplifting” nature in cities. The natural world was God’s handiwork, which was good, and when people intuited the goodness in “natural” parks, they would become as virtuous as the authorities promoting urban parks. This understanding of nature-society relations successfully justified creating many scenic parks in America’s cities, including Golden Gate Park. However, this particular greenspace justification would begin to lose momentum as the twentieth century approached.
As the nineteenth century closed, a scientistic, pseudo-Darwinian view of nature and society arose and impacted park design. Along with “natural” scenery, advocates increasingly promoted parks as necessary places for the felicitous development of people. Urban greenspace advocates like Luther Gulick (Figure 7) argued that every individual needed to “recapitulate” the social history of humanity in order to mature correctly from an infant into their version of the exemplary human – an educated and competitive yet cooperative adult (Cavallo 1981; Mrozek 1992). Gulick (1898, 803) pithily summarized this evolutionary view as “the plays of children are the rehearsal of the activities of the race during forgotten ages – not necessarily the selfsame activities, but activities involving the same bodily and mental qualities. Putting it exactly, play is the ontogenetic rehearsal of the phylogenetic series.”1 From birth, advocates explained, people moved through developmental “stages” on their passage to adulthood. At each stage, an individual had to have the proper physical setting to recapitulate the actions that their “primitive” ancestors purportedly experienced earlier in biological evolution. For example, “dramatic age” children (approximately 3 to 6 years-old) needed to play in physical settings analogous to the ones which shaped some of the earliest prehistoric peoples. In particular, this stage’s settings were supposed to foster children’s learning to create shapes with their hands and to cooperate with others. With such justifications, sand boxes (Figure 8), playgrounds (Figure 9), ball fields (Figure 10), and other settings for recreational play and “nature study” became commonplace in America’s urban parks.
The development of Golden Gate Park during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries followed the general pattern outlined above. From its outset in the 1870s, the park’s overall shape and curvilinear paths recalled New York’s Central Park (Map 2). Through the 1870s and 1880s, the park landscape was Romantic in design with lush vegetation (Figure 11), water features, “rustic” structures (Figure 12), and a Conservatory (Figure 13).
As the 1880s turned into the 1890s, such scientistic features as a children’s play area (Figure 14), ball fields (Figure 15), and tennis courts (Figure 16) appeared.
However, the development of Golden Gate Park also varied from the general pattern with some unique elements and central ironies. The park was launched in April 1870 and its initial landscape designer and first superintendent, 24-year-old William Hammond Hall (Figure 17), like his role model Olmsted, saw the park as a device for social reform. He sought to build the same sort of scenery that Olmsted had created within New York’s Central Park in order to passively refresh and restore San Francisco’s urban residents. However, Golden Gate Park’s climate is significantly different than Central Park’s. The latter is located in a moist continental climate where most of the city’s 125 centimeters of annual rains fall during summer, which is when the park’s vegetation most needs it. Golden Gate Park, in contrast, is located in a mediterranean climate where nearly all of the city’s 60 centimeters fall between November and May; summers are consistently dry. Consequently, irrigation was necessary to support the same sort of plants that were used to create Central Park’s scenery. Compounding the challenge, Golden Gate Park mostly sits upon sand (Figure 18), which by its nature is porous and does not hold water well. Unlike other soils, water moves rapidly downward through sand and is quickly lost to most plants. Frequent irrigation thus was required. To create a west coast version of New York’s naturalistic park, Hall had to plant over 700 acres of the naturally occurring sand dunes that covered the western portion of the park and 270 acres of the eastern “sandy downs covered with a rough low shrubbery, native of course” with non-native plants (Hall [1926], 109). Ironically, Hall and his crew’s task was to replace the natural landscape with the exotic trees, shrubs, lawns, lakes and more that signaled “nature” in a Romantic-style park.
Uncertain how to proceed, Hall contacted Olmsted in New York City for advice about which English landscape publications to read before he began work. Olmsted replied in October 1871 with suggestions, but having been himself commissioned to produce an 1866 plan for San Francisco greenspaces, one that was quietly abandoned, he also offered Hall a caveat (Young 2018). “I do not believe it practicable,” he wrote,
to meet the natural but senseless demand of unreflecting people bred in the Atlantic states and the North of Europe for what is technically termed a park under the climatic conditions of San Francisco. Experience in Persia, Turkey, Smyrna, Spain & Portugal would afford more suggestions for what is practicable and desirable than any that could be derived from English authorities. But the conditions are so peculiar and the difficulties so great that I regard the problem as unique and that it must be solved if at all by wholly new means and methods. It requires instruction, not adaptation (1871).
Hall, however, was under public and private pressure to demonstrate progress toward a New York-style landscape, so in late spring 1871 he and his staff had begun to plant the eastern portion of Golden Gate Park with hundreds of trees and shrubs. At nearly the same time, they transferred, adapted, and began to systematically apply an eighteenth-century French technique for fixing and planting the coastal sand dunes on the park’s western end (Young 2004). Of course, these plants needed irrigation to thrive and present the lush look I have known since childhood.
To obtain the water, the park’s administration signed a contract with San Francisco’s water monopoly, the Spring Valley Water Company (SVWC) (Brechin 1999; Black 1995). As planting advanced at both ends of the park, demand for water increased. By 1874, the park was consuming 65,000 to 80,000 gallons per day during the dry season (and would have consumed more if SVWC could have supplied it) for an annual total of 14,124,000 gallons (San Francisco 1875, 16). In 1877, annual consumption climbed to a total of 17,862,600 gallons as demand continued to increase (Clary 1984, 34). In subsequent years, water demand kept increasing until Golden Gate Park became the single largest consumer of water purchased by San Francisco’s municipal government. Despite increasing its supplies, the amount of water delivered by SVWC consistently remained inadequate for park irrigation. Moreover, the company kept increasing its rates, which left San Francisco facing ruinously expensive water bills. The full story is too complicated to relate here, but management took multiple steps to reduce the park’s dependence on SVWC, which indirectly led to the city’s support for the dam and reservoir that was completed in 1923 in Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley (Black 1995; Brechin 1999; Young 2004). Ironically, a natural Sierra Nevada landscape that was described by the great naturalist and conservationist John Muir (1908, 211) as “next to Yosemite [Valley], …the most wonderful and most important feature of the great park,” was flooded, at least in part, to provide the irrigation water that has kept artificial Golden Gate Park so lush for so long.
When I enter a previously unvisited large park in an American city, my initial response is typically an aesthetic one. I scan the landscape and feel pleasure at seeing “nature” in the city. But my response does not stop there. Decades of scholarly research and learning prompt me to wonder about the Romantic origins of the place. Did it begin as one composed of beautiful and picturesque landscape scenes? Was the park supported by local elites who saw it as a mechanism for “improving” urban life? And, if there are playgrounds, ball fields, and the like, did they appear because their pseudo-Darwinian advocates insisted that child development would be compromised and society undermined without them? When I visit San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, my response is even more layered. In addition to recognizing the historical geography of its Romantic and pseudo-Darwinian development, I am aware that its lush naturalistic landscape masks a natural but unappreciated landscape and that the production of its lushness contributed to the flooding of a distant place beloved by John Muir. For me, the irony is sublime. At the same time, the park is suffused with warm personal memories of Hippie Hill and a vacation with my parents. As Tuan (1990, 95) correctly observed in Topophilia, my complex and nuanced appreciation of Golden Gate Park “endures” because my “aesthetic pleasure is combined with scientific curiosity” and with memories of personal incidents.
1With the last phrase, Gulick linked play and social development to naturalist Ernst Haeckel’s widely repeated summation concerning the relationship between embryological development and evolutionary history – “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (See Stocking 1962; Gould 1977; Boyer 1978).