San Francisco Parks
Free San Francisco
When I was a kid growing up in New Hampshire, I used to pick up wooly bears, and pet their tiny fuzzy caterpillar bodies. I would hold them gently, watching them crawl across my fingers on the front and back side of my hand. My parent’s house was down a long dirt driveway, surrounded by woods. Leaf litter would sometimes blow up into mini tornadoes on a windy day. Sometimes I would walk through a vortex of leaves to feel like Storm from X-Men, or like Pocahontas, singing with the colors of the wind.
Nature is filled with fleeting beauty and unique imperfections. Beauty in nature triggers automatic positive emotional responses in the brain. Scenes of nature reduce stress, and enhance overall wellbeing.
Nature is also a spendthrift with lives. Annie Dillard’s tenth chapter on ‘fecundity’ in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, reminds us of this, through a vivid and visceral description of how nature favors species, not individuals. But it’s not the species that we think of as we look into the eyes of the people we love. We fall in love with individuals.
In 2017, San Francisco became the first city in the nation where there is a public park located within a 10 minute walk of every residence in the city. There are over 230 parks in the city. Some are small community gardens or playgrounds, others are large enough to be either federally owned or named by the San Francisco department of Parks and Recreation.
Public parks house many diverse ecosystems, and an enormous anthology of both plant and animal life. Park programming includes free performances, events, countless opportunities for hiking, picnicking, and relaxing outdoors. They are treasured community assets, and I personally love them.
When I first started practicing architecture, it quickly became clear to me that when you are studying a site, nothing compares to going in person to see it for yourself. You learn so much through your body, and your senses. You learn about the scent of the flowers, the grade of the hills, which areas are windy and which are sun soaked. I love to study the site plans, and while I feel it provides helpful context for wayfinding, and allows you a helpful starting point for developing your own drawings and maps, I am under no illusions that seeing a place from the top down is enough to understand much about it. I hope you’re not either.
In order to learn what I can, and perhaps to entice you to go to these places yourself, I am making an adventure of exploring as many as I can. In the following pages, I will share my impressions of them with you. I imagine that if you decide to go to these parks for yourself, you may have very different experiences from the ones I had, as my own experiences are colored by what happened to be going on in my life at the time.
I hope you consider that this plurality is one of the many things that makes parks so great. They are always changing. They are shared, belonging to nobody, and everybody at the same time. Every person has an equal right to visit and form their own opinions about them.
They are free, and you are free to visit them whenever you please. If you make a practice of going to them, just to be there and not to do anything specific, you may find yourself understanding both the place and yourself a little better. And the next time you go? It won’t be the same.
