You’d never know there are bats in Golden Gate Park. At least not if you’re a human. Our dullard ears can’t hear them and our night-blind eyes don’t see them. But “they’re here. And there’s a lot of them,” said Tièche, who has made a film about bats aptly titled “The Invisible Mammal.” (FYI: She also for years was one of the caretakers of Kathleen’s Corner, which I wrote about earlier this year.)

Indeed, the park is home to many of the Bay Area’s 16 native bat species. The best places to find them are the park’s lakes where the water attracts the insects that the bats feed on. Tièche had me meet her shortly before sunset at the primo batting site, Blue Heron Lake.

As we sat at a picnic table near the boathouse waiting for the dark, Tièche set up her “bat detector” — a red plastic device about the size of a Zippo lighter that can be plugged into a phone or I-pad. It picks up the ultrasonic noises bats use to echolocate and identifies the type of bat making the sounds. It’s a little like the Merlin app I use to identify birds by their calls.

Nothing much happened for a while and then the sky dimmed by some imperceptible shade and suddenly the screen of her I-pad lit up with little chirps and a series of bright red and green lines. “We’re getting our first bat,” she said. “It’s here somewhere.

It took a moment to find the creature animating her I-pad screen. Then I saw it — a small figure skimming low and fast just above the water. The bat detector labelled it a hoary bat. “But it might not be,” Tièche said. “I’m saying that because the scientists that I’ve worked with have told me that this detector sometimes detects Mexican free-tailed bats as hoary bats, but their echolocation call is probably in the same range.”

The I-pad lit up again with higher-pitched chirps; the sounds of little brown bats, Tièche announced ahead of the detector. And we could see them: a pair flying circles around the edge of the lake, disappearing into the darkness then swooping back.

Now more bats appeared. The detector was a jukebox of different chirps, some squeaky and high, some low and hollow-sounding like the noise of a suction cup. A scrawl of red and green lines zigzagged on the I-pad screen, following the various frequencies emitted by the different species. According to the detector, there were lots of bats around us. Big brown bats, silver-haired bats, little brown bats and depending on the accuracy of the detector, either hoary bats or Mexican free-tailed bats. “Now it’s like a bat party here,” she said.

“We’ve got like three or four species that are out tonight.” She nodded toward a pair of people passing by. “I mean, these folks are walking by right now and they have no idea that there are bats, right? Because you don’t hear them, you can barely see them because it’s dusk, and so you would have no idea that they’re there unless somebody told you. It’s really cool, isn’t it!” As she spoke, the detector picked up two little brown bats circling the edge of the lake right in front of us.

The bats’ nighttime behavior is all about finding food. After sleeping all day in hidden roosts in buildings or the bark of trees, they wake hungry and desperate to fill their bellies. “They eat their body weight in bugs every night. That’s a lot of food. Imagine eating your body weight every single night.”

Tièche is baffled by the revulsion many people feel for bats. “When you see their faces, they’re actually so cute.” And there are so many things about them that are amazing. They’re the only mammal that can fly. “They breastfeed their babies.” Mothers may carry their young while they’re out hunting. They play essential roles as pollinators, pest controllers and, in the case of bats that eat fruit, dispersers of seeds.

Growing up in the cold, foggy Bay Area, Tièche had little experience with bats. That changed one summer night in 1998 when she was studying film at Syracuse University. She was having a beer on the outside patio of the campus pub. “I thought I saw something fly by my head and I look up, and the sky is like filled with bats. It was really cool.”

Fast forward to 2009 when she read a New Yorker article that described how bat populations in North America were being decimated by a disease called White Nose Syndrome (WNS). It’s caused by a cold-loving fungus that grows on bats’ noses, skin and wings while they are hibernating. It damages the tissues and causes infected bats to wake too often, burning through their stored fat, leading to dehydration and starvation. The disease can wipe out an entire colony of hibernating bats. Since 2006, when it was first discovered it’s killed an estimated 6 million bats, mostly on the east coast. The disease was first detected California in 2018 and since has been confirmed in Humboldt, Sutter, Placer, Amador, and Inyo counties.

“Unfortunately, it appears that it’s not a question of if WNS will reach the Bay Area but when,” according to a 2016 article in Bay Nature. Two native species, the big brown and little brown bats, have suffered from WNS elsewhere and three local species are known to be carriers. But then again, we don’t have the cold and humidity in which WNS flourishes. “So we, and our local bats, may luck out,” the Bay Nature article concluded.

Tièche decided to make a film about the danger to bats, which premiered in 2025. It focuses on a team of women scientists who are among those working to help bats defeat or survive the disease. In honor of International Bat Night, there will be a free screening of the film and a Q and A with Tièche this Saturday (August 29) from 2-4 pm at Rhoda Goldman Plaza. You can find details of the event here.

For a bat lover like Tièche, the bat experiences available in San Francisco must be a little frustrating. Many of the native bats are solitary creatures and their numbers fairly small. Not long ago, she made a pilgrimage to Bracken Cave outside San Antonio Texas, the summer home of 15 million Mexican free tail bats— the world’s largest bat colony. Every evening, millions fly out of the cave in a spiraling column that’s been called a “batnado.”

“It’s the most incredible wildlife experience I’ve ever had. You’re standing there and they’re flying right by your face,” she recalled. “I would put that on your bucket list.”

I wrote about this little house when an anonymous artist placed it on top of a 30-foot tree stump a few years ago. Then, as now, it seems a fair reflection of real estate in a city where there’s a market for every square inch.

And for more adorable real estate: a new crop of fairy houses have appeared on the trail that winds through Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve, replacing the older tiny abodes that disappeared some time ago.

Two giant crows have come to roost on the Panhandle. Sculptor Jack Champion calls his piece “An Attempted Murder”, a play on the collective noun for covids. It takes three crows to constitute, so two are…well, an attempt. l know not everyone wants to celebrate crows — one woman told The Chronicle she was “spooked out” by the big birds — but personally, I like their attitude:

Through the years I’ve come across lots of musicians practicing in the park, seeking a quiet place to play their horn or bagpipes, drums, or guitar or once, even, a shofar. Each time feels like I've stumbled upon a private concert. I heard Ian’s voice before I found him and Emma and Wonky set up on a quiet trail. Ian said he’d played a gig the night before and wanted to rehearse some more without bugging his neighbors. He’s the first park player I’ve come across to bring an amp and mic.

Something about this scene just amused me.

And this speaks for itself:

In the wake of my brother’s death on June 3, I need to stray a bit from my usual style of park stories. I hope you’ll bear with me.

On Sunset Dunes Park, there’s a sky-blue phone booth with a sign that says “Ocean Calling.” Inside is an old-style black rotary phone that’s not connected to anything, a box of pebbles and a length of metal pipe. Visitors are invited to use the phone to call a loved one who has died.

The piece was created by artists Jamae Tasker and Sarah McCarthy Grimm, who were both grieving the loss of younger siblings. They were inspired by the Wind Phone in Japan, which was installed by Itaru Sasaki for mourners after the devastating 2011 tsunami. “At the Wind Phone, the line may be disconnected, but the connection of love never is,” says its website.

I’ve passed the little booth many times without stopping, but the other day I did. Following the instructions, I took a pebble from the box and dropped it down the pipe where it made a sound like coins clinking in pay phones of yore. I picked up the heavy black receiver, pressed it to my ear and looked out at the choppy dark waves and distant horizon. “Hello, Andy,” I said and then it came – a clobbering sneaker wave of grief. I began crying harder than I had since the day my brother died. “I miss you. I love you. I should have told you that more,” I sobbed and told the phone, the wind, the ocean about all the feelings I’d been having – the sadness, the guilt, the anger, the remorse. Who knows? Maybe my brother heard me.

For much of the last month, I’ve felt disconnected from the world, at once numb but also as rawly vulnerable as a snail without a shell. In that state I’ve not trusted myself to talk much to strangers. After visiting Ocean Calling, I decided to ride back home through the park. I told myself to look for things that might unmuffle my senses, sparks of joy that might help reel me back into life. Like the fluffy pair of ducklings I spotted paddling near the shore of Metson Lake last week.

At one of the pianos stationed on JFK Promenade, a man was playing “Everybody ‘s Got a Hungry Heart.” My mind filled in the lyrics. And though I didn’t think of it at the time, maybe those words were what snagged my attention – my hungry heart beckoning me to stop and listen to him play and then talk to him.

Drew said he rides the bus from North Beach a couple of times a week to play the piano. Always in the morning – “It’s quiet, there’s more mist in the air, so the notes carry well” – and always this Baldwin upright – a “fantastic instrument.”

He’ll play for two hours or so. “If another piano player shows up, I automatically relinquish it, especially if I’ve had enough time on it. But I don’t find a lot of people show up at this time.”

His repertoire is mainly classic rock. “Growing up I never had any musical training but I heard all these songs very clearly on my car radio.”

He’ll play pieces that “have a San Francisco vibe,” tunes by San Francisco bands like Jefferson Airplane, Santana or Grateful Dead. But he also likes to play songs people don’t expect to hear on a piano: a moody Pink Floyd tune or something from the Beastie Boys. “I love to play Iron Maiden on the piano, but at 8:30 in the morning, it might be a bit much.”

It’s great when passers by give him a thumbs up or a smile, but that’s not why he plays. Drew’s playing for his own pleasure.

He decided to take part in Flower Piano this year, his first time. He waited until the final hour of the final day. “I didn’t even give myself the opportunity to get stage fright or anxiety. I just jumped right into the song.” It was, he admits, an unusual choice: Free Bird by Lynard Skynard. “And people loved it. I got a lot of applause.”

Drew worked for 28 years as a software developer until being laid off two years ago. “Quite honestly I’m at a phase of my life when I’m in a new phase of my career. I have discovered that I don’t give a shit about software…That may change one day,” he said, “but for now I’m pleased to have this opportunity to make a pivot cuz my heart’s not in software anymore.”

So he’s filling his time playing music, learning to knit, taking chess lessons from a grandmaster. He’s enjoying life as he should.

As we all should.

I’m 500 miles away of from the park today, up in Eugene Oregon, where my brother is dying. I called this blog “life in the park” but as I’ve written before, there’s no getting around the truth that part of life is death.

On September 6, 1989, I got an early morning call that my father had died, I made arrangements to fly home and then took my dog for a walk in the park before driving her to a kennel. I can’t say I was paying much attention to what was around me as we did our regular loop. But even all these years later, I hold a strong sense memory of walking slowly along this dirt path, my dog nosing at the dry grasses and curls of eucalyptus bark as I tried to wrap my mind around how the family I’d known for 31 years had just been blown apart. The five of us were now just four and we’d struggle for years to find a new balance, a new way of being. Even now, the smell of dust and eucalyptus on certain warm days brings me back to that moment.

After my mother died in 2014, I spent months on my daily walks in the park thinking about her life and death. I wanted to write about it and dictated hours of notes to myself about her and her passing. We were three now — just my sister and brother and me — and we would have to learn how to be a steady tripod.

My mother died in May, which I always think of as absolutely the best time of year in the park. The days are bathed in sun. Nasturtium and irises are out in full force. The cherry and plum trees are spattered with pink blossoms. Robins are plucking grass to line their nests. The wild oats and foxtails have not yet parched. The park is pulsing with so much new life that death seems an impossibility.

But of course the wheel keeps turning. See the iris wilting as another buds. The wild plums that foragers haven’t picked are rotting on the ground. Baby ducks trail their mothers in Alvord Lake. I come across a broken robin’s egg one day with a tiny half-being inside, neck stretched, tiny beak open to the breath it never got. The foxtails and wild oats are browning and dropping their needly seed.

The transience of life is what makes it so precious, so sweet – and so heart-breaking.As Robert Frost wrote in one of the few poems my sieve brain can retain: “so Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down to day, nothing gold can stay,”

My brother is in a hospice home, a place called the Pete Moore Hospice House. It’s a beautiful building with high ceilings, wood beams, and thoughtfully designed so that every room looks out on a serene landscape of trees and flowers and Oregon’s ever-changing sky. Bird feeders outside each room draw a steady traffic of hummingbirds, chickadees, juncos sapsuckers, towhees, finches and more.

The bird feeders, I read on the facility’s website, are the genius contribution of a volunteer named Holly Knight, who works with a local bird store, Birds Unlimited, and other volunteers to keep the feeders sturdy and stocked. For would-be birders, there are laminated cards scattered around the facility identifying the most common avian visitors.

After my brother got settled into the hospice yesterday, my sister and I took a moment to walk around the grounds. Soon the family will just be the two of us — which feels so small and yet we’re a strong pair.

It was late in the day, that golden hour when everything glows. She squeezed some lavender and held her hand up for me to smell its tangy scent. Each room has its own small patio and the nurse told us that if we want, we can wheel his hospital bed outside, so he can feel the warm, air, smell the lavender, watch the birds flitting back and forth, hear their chatter.

Being embodied is such a blessing. I feel it every day when I’m in the park, or any place where I can connect with nature, whether it’s our back yard or Yosemite. Even though my brother was never one to seek out nature, I hope we can take him out on the patio today. I know dying means letting go of life one strand at a time. But part of me wants him to have a chance to grab all the strands again, for a moment to feel, feel, the gorgeous fullness of it all. I like to think it would be a comfort.

In honor of prom season, Rec and Park held its own Senior Prom at the County Fair Building yesterday afternoon. There were few tuxedos or slinky dresses; no stretch limos, kegs of beer or blunts. Instead, some 200 seniors, most dressed casually, snacking on cheese and crackers and juice and dancing to golden oldies played by the “Island Groove”, the house band from the Tonga Room at the Fairmont hotel. To paraphrase Prince, all were partying like it was 1979 — and having a ton of fun.

Senior Prom used to be a spring staple, held every year from 1985 until 2020 when the pandemic shut it down. Katherine Villasin, who coordinates senior programming for the department, decided it was time to bring it back. “I literally woke up one morning and said this has got to happen for our community, to let people 55 and over know that they’re young at heart and to enjoy what we have, especially in our parks.”

I wasn’t surprised to learn recently that it was also John McLaren’s favorite. He built it in 1908 as a reservoir for water pumped by Murphy Windmill, which was constructed at the same time. It cost less than $10,000. Following the practice of the day, it was named for the president of the Park Commission, William H. Metson, a mining lawyer.

(Incidentally, not all commissioners were so pleased to have park sites named for them. William Alvord wanted the lake that bears his name to be called “The Lakelet.” Fellow commissioners complied with his wishes and then renamed it after him while he was out of town. He was so angry he resigned — which apparently was exactly what his rivals on the board had hoped he would do. They replaced him with Leland Stanford, clearing the way for the Ocean Park and Railroad to build its railroad through the park. Ah, nasty politics in this town go a long ways back.) A world of such machinations seems distant when I’m at Metson Lake.

Because it sits alongside a stretch of Middle Drive West that’s closed to cars, the lake is wrapped in a quiet that allows me to tune into its rich life:

In the mornings, it’s awash in birdsong. My handy Merlin app tells me the singers: robins, house finches, song sparrows, towhees, chestnut backed chickadees. I don’t need help identifying the screeching crows or the operatic redwing blackbirds that like to perch on the cattails. In the late afternoons when the sun has burnt off the fog, I‘ll hear the plop of a fish jumping up to catch a fly. I’ll see the backside of a cormorant raking the shallow depths for food. A gang of geese graze the grass by the road every afternoon, hissing at my dog when we pass by.

A massive cypress toppled into the water three years ago and has been left there, a woody reef that draws wildlife. Ducks and geese and turtles like to sunbathe on it. This spring, I keep seeing the same trio of ducks gliding around. I wonder if they’re a duck throuple. (Yes, it’s sometimes a thing.)

Hummingbirds puck fluff from cattails and then speed off into the cypresses where I guess they have their nests. Tiny minnows flick through the shallows around the vegetation. The water occasionally moves with a mysterious current. It wasn’t until I saw a muscular fin poking above the surface that I realized the water was being stirred by one of the fat carp that lives there. I once came across two boys with a fishing pole and bag of bread hoping to catch one of them. While fishing isn’t allowed in the park, I couldn’t help but admire their Huckleberry Finn spirit.

My routine has made the lake familiar and that may also be why I love it. I like that I know in the mornings I’m likely to see the guy who sits on a bench with his three small yapping dogs and a thermos of something hot and who never says hi when we pass.

Crazy factoid: in 1988 then-parks superintendent Barney Barron proposed turning the lake into a year-round skating rink. With a depth of just three feet, he figured Metson or near-by Elk Glen Lake, would the easiest to freeze. He said he was inspired by seeing the wintertime “Currier and Ives-like skating scenes” in New York’s Rockefeller Center and Central Park, as The Examiner put it. A rink could draw some 200,000 people into the park, he speculated. Thankfully, the idea never went anywhere.

But maybe Mother Nature was listening. In December, 1990, a rare Arctic blast froze the top few inches of the lake. On Christmas Day, the Godfather of Skate, David Miles Jr. strapped on ice skates and played hockey there. ”It was absolutely fabulous,” he later told The Examiner. “Not many people can say they’ve ever ice skated in the park.”

++

And in other lake news: it’s Great Blue Heron nesting season again at Blue Heron Lake. There are currently at least 15 chicks in nests at two sites on the lake — one by the boathouse, the other by the waterfall, according to San Francisco Nature Education. Volunteers from the group will be out on May 16th with spotting scopes to help you see them. It’s free and so much fun to see the heron babies. Learn more here.

That work carries on a long tradition. The nursery has been at the heart of the park system for more than 150 years—going all the way back to the very beginnings of Golden Gate Park. In fact, creating a nursery was one of the very first steps taken by William Hammond Hall after he was hired to design the park. (The actual hands-on work fell to Patrick Owen, the park’s first employee, who built a small greenhouse and adjoining hotbeds.) You can understand why a nursery was a priority for Hall. He had 1,000-plus acres to fill with trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses – and he planned to grow most of it in-house.

That decision did not go over quietly. Local commercial nursery owners, who had anticipated a steady stream of business from the new park, were incensed. According to park historian Raymond Clary, they became “violent opponents of the park.” Hall was not inclined toward conciliation. Whether out of principle or pique, when he did need to purchase plants, he called on nurseries outside of town, writes Terence Young in his history “Building San Francisco’s Parks 1850-1930”.

Meanwhile, the park’s own nursery was rapidly outgrowing its origins. Within three years, it was been moved to a larger plot in the park’s southeastern corner. By the early 1880s, it was producing tens of thousands of plants representing more than a hundred species.

Even so it wasn’t enough. Park management determined “it would take 25 years to raise plants enough to complete the park.” They expanded the size of the nursery to 1.35 acres, abandoned Hall’s grow-your-own policy and began buying more plants from outside sources. Under the leadership of the ambitious, horticulturally curious superintendent John McLaren, those outside sources might be anywhere from southern California to the south of France to New Zealand.

In 1923, the nursery was uprooted again to make way for Kezar Stadium and Pavilion. It took over a six-acre site between Big Rec and the Lawn Bowling Courts, where it’s been ever since, an essential but mostly invisible cog of the park.

I’d always wondered how it operated. One bright February morning Ortega kindly agreed to give me a tour. He was the best kind of guide — deeply informed and infectiously enthusiastic.

The nursery, he explained, raises most its plants from seeds or cuttings either collected from its own stock or gathered by park gardeners across the city. When the iconic Monterey cypress in Hellman Hollow was cut down last year, the gardeners collected seeds from it and delivered them to the nursery. On the morning I arrived, Ortega was at a long table carefully sorting through stalks of snowberry that a gardener had dropped off. The healthiest ones he’d propagate.

The nursery’s production line begins in the greenhouses, where seeds and seedlings are carefully nurtured on heated tables and under automatic misters. Once they are sturdy enough, they are moved outdoors to growing fields to acclimate to the realities of city life. There, the young plants contend with fog and wind, cold nights and baking sun, and even the persistent mischief of ravens. Despite protective netting overhead, the birds still find ways to damage or destroy scores of plants. “It's torturous out there for baby plants,” he said.

This mostly low-tech system yields about 20,000 plants a year, from ground cover grasses to saplings that the nursery sends out to the city’s parks. (Plants for the Botanical Garden are grown separately in its own new nursery.)

But, I was surprised to learn, that’s not all the park nursery does. It also supplies greenery for indoor spaces throughout the city, from offices to recreation centers to the War Memorial Opera House. One whole greenhouse is devoted to house plants, the kind you might find on a receptionist’s desk or softening the edges of a public lobby.

“We also take care of interior plants for the mayor’s office,” Ortega said.

“What kind of plants does Mayor Lurie like?”I asked.

H shrugged. In his seven years working at the nursery, he’s supplied three administrations and ”every mayor is different.” Later, when we go through a greenhouse where there are tables of luminous green orchids, he mentions that nursery lore has it former mayor Dianne Feinstein loved orchids. “So we put orchids in city hall when she was there.”

The nursery also serves as backstage sprucer-up for the city’s public life, renting out hundreds of plants for events—concerts, graduations, civic ceremonies, holiday displays. At Christmas, demand centers on poinsettias. Last year, Ortega and his team grew 1,200 last year from seed; by December, an entire greenhouse had become a field of red.

He took me into another greenhouse devoted to annuals, which the staff harvest for floral arrangements. “We deliver flower arrangements like this to the board of supervisors’ chambers every single week,” he said, showing me photos of massive bouquets. “I never knew I was going to do flower arrangements, but I do them — and I love it.” He taught himself the art years ago when he was working as the horticulturalist in Hawaii.

For all the continuity of its mission, the nursery has evolved. In McLaren’s day, every gardener began there, learning not just plant names but plant lives—how they grow, what they need. “If you know how to grow them,” Ortega said, “it’s more intuitive how to take care of them.” That apprenticeship model has since faded.

So too has the appetite for exotics. While McLaren loved filling the park with plants from around the world, the emphasis today is on native species. Nearly 70 percent of the plants the nursery now grows are native plants, such as California fescue (Festuca californica), purple blossomed seaside daisy (Erigeron glaucus), and the grassy common rush (Juncus patens). Everyone wants Juncus, he said. “I can’t grow enough.”

“But, I can’t stop growing non-natives,” he said a little later as we stopped to admire a group of shoulder-high rhododendrons. “A ton of rhododendrons still go out into the park systems, but we don't grow as many as we used to.” Like fuchsias, they need a lot of water, which is problematic in this drought-prone era.

Ortega also has to contend with pests that weren’t a problem in the past such as the pathogen that causes sudden oak death. To kill off dangerous microbes, the nursery mixes its own soil and then steams it at high temperatures. “ If I don’t have good soil, then what’s the point of anything else?” he said.

At the back of the complex, there’s a long embankment demonstrating erosion control with native plants—lupine, mugwort, salvia. Nearby a waist-high tub overflows with fragrant yerba buena. The yerba buena reminded him that at one time the nursery hosted a program for people who were blind or visually impaired. They’d spend a day one day a week working at raised beds or in a vegetable garden at the back.

The nursery also once had a beehive that produced “nursery honey,” he recalled. “We’re going to start it up again. We’re getting help from the bee society.”

In a back corner, beside a deep purple ceanothus, he showed me a picnic bench he’d had workmen drop in over the fence. It’s his refuge, he said, when the demands of the day stack too high. In summer, when the sunflowers rise above head height and everything is in bloom, “it’s so peaceful. It's just a little hidden gem.”

Like the nursery itself.

Last night, about a dozen guys were hanging out by the side of the pools, eyes focused on the concrete basins like surfers on the beach watching the waves. I watched one skater be towed by a bike toward a concrete bank which he tried to jump with his board. He must have tried a dozen times. A guy pulled arrived on his motorcycle and apologized to the group for being late. Then he took over the towing.

The scene reminded me how skateboarding took off in the early 1970s in southern California when skaters began using backyard swimming pools left empty because of a drought. The great documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys tells the story. That’s where the flips and stunts the guys were doing last night originally came from.

Rich was the first woman gardener in Golden Gate Park, hired by John McLaren in 1929. And like many people who become “firsts,” she was a creature of her own creation.

She was born Sadie Friedman in Brooklyn in 1906 to Jewish Russian immigrants. The family moved to California between 1907 and 1915. Her parents divorced some time after. She left home at 16 and lived on and off for the next seven years at the Emanu-El Residence Club, which offered room and board to young Jewish women. (That same building at 300 Page Street is now home to the San Francisco Zen center.) At some point, she shed her given identity, adopting a new first name, Sydney, and a shortened version of her stepfather’s surname of Wasserstein.

“Get-your-hands-dirty gardening”

One of the club’s patrons, Matilda Esberg, became interested in Stein. Stein told her she wanted to work outdoors. She had spent several months working on a large estate, filling in for a friend who was a gardener there. She found she loved what she later called “plain get-your-hands-dirty gardening.” She much preferred it to sales or stocking shelves as she’d done in her previous jobs.

Esberg sponsored Stein for a spot at the newly established California School of Gardening for Women in Hayward, the state’s first horticultural training program for women. The school was created to help usher women into what then was considered a man’s profession. Stein graduated in 1927— the school’s first graduate — “without ceremony other than eight hours’ hard work in the garden,” the Chronicle reported.

With her degree in hand, Stein returned to San Francisco and asked Golden Gate Park superintendent John McLaren for job. “Didn’t get it right away, but I kept going back,” she recalled in a 1934 profile by The Chronicle. “Finally, he asked me if I could spade. I said yes. So they put me to work spading and I spaded for a year. I’ve been here five years now and I’m still crazy about it.”

She was the only woman among the park’s 100 gardeners. She was also the first to join the Laborers Union, which represented them. (And, I’m willing to bet, she was also one of few Jews working in the park.)

The writer of the profile—herself a woman—marveled at the contradiction posed by “Miss Stein”: “A small, attractive and feminine-looking girl who can and does, talk about manicures and dancing in the same breath as weeds and snails.” For Stein there was no contradiction, (though she admitted she wished she’d taken better care of her hands.) “It’s hard work but women have the artistic talent, the creative ability, the choice of color necessary to make a good landscape artist.”

Or as she told The Examiner years later, “I’ve always thought that gardening … was a most natural career for a woman. Growing things, Watching over their ‘feedings’. Seeing to it that that their environment is right.”

If she faced resentment from her male colleagues, she never complained publicly. But she was also careful not to make waves. “I work hard and never do anything they dislike. I’d just love to wear shorts when I’m working, but they’d never like that. They treat me like a sister,” she told The Chronicle writer. “They’re just grand to work with.”

She was clearly good at her job, winning respect and promotions. By 1934, she’d gained the plum assignment of designing one of the park’s most prominent spots: the flower beds in front of the Conservatory that welcomed visitors and announced events. She was also coaching the male park laborers for the civil service exam to become gardeners.

In 1940 she was promoted to Head Nurseryman. (Gender-neutral titles were decades away.) It was up to her to keep the gardens going through the scarcities of wartime. “She shrewdly purchased a three-year supply of cyclamen seeds from Switzerland realizing the escalation of World War II would soon shut off supply,” according to an essay in Outside Lands. That foresight allowed her to put on a lush display of 900 cyclamen two years later when few of the plants were to be found anywhere else.

In 1942, she was promoted again, this time to be Superintendent of the Conservatory of Flowers. It was a demanding, highly visible job in which she oversaw care of the collection, acquired new specimens and put on seven flower shows a year. Each show was a feat of precise calculations of growing times and temperatures to ensure that the thousands of cyclamen or begonias or Easter lilies bloomed on cue. If the glowing news reports were any indication, she was a master of the art.

A growing sisterhood

World War Two opened more opportunities for women to work in the park. Some number— I don’t know how many — won temporary jobs to replace the men fighting overseas. These women gardeners “held together” the park, one of their male co-workers told The Chronicle in 1951.

Yet when the war ended, their efforts were no longer welcome, as was true across the country in the post-war push to get women back into the home. A civil service ruling had decreed that the city’s gardening jobs were strictly for men.

Still, five who had been working as temporary gardeners were allowed to take the civil service exam – the only time women were given that chance. They got the highest scores in their class. The city had to give them permanent positions. The Chronicle dubbed them the “Green Thumb Sisterhood.”

That sisterhood remained small for decades. Rec and Park leaders wouldn't consider taking on female gardeners in anything but temporary positions. Women weren’t even allowed to take the civil service exam. One former gardener, Joan Vellutini, recalled being a horticultural student at City College when a high-ranking park official came to speak in 1973. He declared “there was no room for women gardeners in the 1,017-acre park,” she told SFGate. She was devastated.

A class action lawsuit in the late 1970s finally busted down the doors, opening the way for women like Vellutini who wanted to work as gardeners. Five won permanent jobs in 1980. Today, nine of the 42 gardeners in Golden Gate Park are women. (Note: Those bare numbers mask the progress women have made because the park’s workforce has shrunk dramatically in the last 40 years.)

Stein herself resigned from the Conservatory in 1949. She became a flower arrangement consultant for Podesta Boldocchi florists. By then, she had married a widower named Neville Rich. They lived in a small house in Cow Hollow with a small old-fashioned English garden, according to one last profile in The Examiner. Sadly, she died in 1956 of “malignant hypertension,” a sudden and lethal spike in blood pressure. She was only 50.

With Stein’s death, her impressive story soon faded from public memory. But in the 1970s, her younger sister worked with Conservatory staff to bring it back by creating a memorial to her sister. In 1983, a beautiful turquoise ceramic bench was installed on a raised platform overlooking Conservatory Valley.

Its significance too was lost over time.

In 2001, as Conservatory staff were preparing for renovation and repair of the building, they came across the bench and puzzled over it. “Who” they asked, “was Sydney Stein Rich?”

That question ended up with horticultural historian Judith Taylor who began excavating Stein’s history. She published Stein’s story in Western State’s Jewish History in 2002. A later version was published in 2014 in Eden: Journal of the California Garden & Landscape History Society.

The bench now sits in the Conservatory’s Potted Plant room in a sweet leafy nook. It feels like a fitting tribute: unobtrusive, yet shining bright, sturdy and surrounded by plants. If there’s an afterlife, I imagine Sydney Stein Rich is happily spending it here.

++

For a fuller story, I urge you to read Taylor’s article, which has informed every subsequent writing about Sydney Stein Rich, including this piece. Another version of her article can be found here. Nicole Medahl, executive director of the Western Neighborhoods Project also has done a lot to publicize Stein’s story, including her essay in Outside Lands mentioned above. She also did a great Zoom talk for SFHeritage in 2020.

• It contains roughly 130,000 trees, including a shaggy elm in Robin Williams Meadow where Janis Joplin supposedly hung out and played her guitar.

• The nicest public restrooms are at the Lisa & Douglas Goldman Tennis Center and the Golf Course Clubhouse. The Clubhouse serves coffee, beer, and food, and its patio is one of the park’s most underrated places to linger.

• Bison have lived in the park since 1891.

• There’s a stone shaped like California tucked into the retaining wall of the hillside garden near the Dahlia Dell.

• The copper skin of the de Young Museum was patterned after photographs of light filtering through the park’s canopy.

• The California Academy of Sciences is home to a 100-year-old Australian lungfish — officially the world’s oldest aquarium fish. She likes figs and belly rubs.

• People have been practicing archery in the park since 1881, back when it was one of the rare sports open to women.

These factoids come from Discovering Golden Gate Park: A Native’s Guide by local author Marta Lindsey with Nancy Botkin. It’s the first truly comprehensive guide to the park — surprising considering the park draws about 24 million visitors each year. There are several guidebooks about Central Park, which is smaller and arguably has less going on within its borders.

Discovering blends history with detailed descriptions of attractions and activities, notes on the park’s flora and fauna, suggested hikes and bike rides, and practical tips — all delivered in the affectionate, knowing voice of someone who has explored every inch of the park’s 1,017 acres and loves it deeply.

That someone is Lindsey, who’s such a fan her home is filled with park memorabilia including a large late-1800s map of the park that hangs in her living room. She fell in love with it about 20 years ago, when she and her husband moved to the Inner Sunset. They lived “right by the carousel and our whole life started happening in the park.”

After her first child was born, Lindsey realized there were no children’s books about Golden Gate Park. So she wrote one. Golden Gate Park: An A to Z Adventure was published in 2020, just in time for the park’s 150th anniversary — and the pandemic. “I fell in love all over again,” Lindsey writes. The park “was a saving grace for my young kids, who could climb trees and ride bikes when their schools and the playgrounds were closed. With 1,017 acres, we never got bored — ever.”

As communications director of Walk San Francisco, Lindsey became active in the campaign to make permanent the pandemic-era closure of JFK Drive to cars. When voters approved the closure in 2022, one of the decorations Rec and Park put up on the newly created promenade was a story walk from her book.

By then, Lindsey had learned so much — from researching the children’s book and from simply spending time in the park — that she decided to write a guidebook. She spent several years combing through old newspapers and Park Commission reports, studying photographs and maps, interviewing Rec and Park staff, and connecting with the park’s many communities.

“I bought some horseshoes because I was like, I’m going to do everything in the park. I’m even going to start doing horseshoes,” she says. “I have not gone and done horseshoes.” At least, not yet.

She enlisted Nancy Botkin, an experienced bike tour guide, to design 11 walks of varying lengths through different parts of the park. (Botkin also did the park “lost streets” tour I wrote about last year.) Do them all and you too will know just about every inch of the park.

When I met Lindsey a few weeks ago, she suggested we try the walk named for former park superintendent John McLaren. It traces a route he often took in the mornings, beginning at McLaren Lodge, where he lived and worked for some 50 years. “It’s kind of sacred ground if you love Golden Gate Park,” she said.

We strolled along JFK Promenade — Main Drive in McLaren’s day. He would likely have approved of the move to bar cars from the road; for much of his tenure, he fought the encroachment of automobiles, believing they detracted from the feeling of being in nature.

Lindsey had recently been doing more research on McLaren and was now, in her words, “totally obsessed with him.” As we walked, she explained why.

“The park we have today would be so different if he hadn’t been in that role for 52 years,” she said. He didn’t create it — that credit goes to his predecessor, William Hammond Hall, who figured out how to tame the windswept dunes where it was sited, determined which trees would grow quickly, and began the plantings on the park’s eastern side. “Hall created the canvas,” Lindsey said. “But John McLaren was the artist” who brought the space to life.

His legacy surrounded us: an astonishing diversity of trees and plants from around the world, many planted by McLaren himself. We stopped at the Tree Fern Dell, begun with tiny stalks a New Zealand acquaintance sent him in a cigar box. “McLaren was really obsessed with dells,” Lindsey said. One of his favorite sayings was, “nature doesn’t run in a straight line.” Instead of formal beds of flowers, he favored forest-enclosed gardens that visitors might stumble upon by chance.

McLaren also developed most of the park’s lakes, creating and designing seven in the space of nine years. One of them, Metson Lake, was his favorite — and it’s Lindsey’s, too. “It’s just got such a great feel and has that little waterfall. My kids have spent many hours playing in it.”

Early in his tenure, he set his sights on establishing a Botanical Garden and patiently nurtured the idea for decades. He began planting trees for it in the 1890s, including a rare variety of magnolia, Magnolia campbellii, which bloomed for the first time in 1940 — the year the garden opened. “He’s 94 years old at that point!” Lindsey marveled.

He even helped expand the park. The original footprint was 1,014 acres. When the first Kezar Stadium and Pavilion were built in the mid-1920s, McLaren fought to prevent them from encroaching on parkland and managed to secure three additional acres, including Kezar Triangle.

“He was a visionary,” Lindsey said. “But he also had the political ability and the people skills to implement his vision, which is amazing. So much of what he laid down is still here today.”

Think of the millions and millions of people who have experienced that version of the park, she said — who have come to understand it through the landscapes McLaren shaped. That shared experience helps ensure that the park, as we love it, will endure for generations to come.

≠≠

AND…

Please join Marta, Nancy and I for this event March 8. I think it’s going to a ton of fun:

The word “vault” here isn’t a metaphor. The mini-room that holds the mini-museum once held the cash collected from the carousel and other park concessions. The heavy metal door with its locking handle is still in place, though the lock has been removed.

Somewhere along the way the vault got turned into a storage space for all the Park Commission files. “It was full of filing cabinets, and it had documents ranging from the 1870s to now.” Summers says. Eager to bring the archaic system into the 21^st century, Summers started digitizing the files. The originals went to the San Francisco History Center in the main library.

But Summers and Pollock knew there was a story to be pulled from the reams of records that included photos, minutes of Commission meetings, handwritten letters from John McLaren, binders filled with yellowing newspaper clippings. Over the course of a year, they put together an exhibit that tells a mini-history of San Francisco’s parks system decade by decade, starting in the 1850s when Portsmouth Square was fenced and landscaped to become the city’s first public park through to the present day. With the addition of Sunset Dunes last year, we now have 230 parks.

Concise text panels show how the number of parks grew as the city’s population increased. Park geeks like me may appreciate panels documenting policy changes: how the “Recreation” part of Rec and Parks evolved out of a “Playground Commission” started in 1908, or how passage of the Open Space Acquisition Fund in 1974 spurred a boom in park development. (Some 53 parks and open spaces were established that decade – more than any before or since.)

But honestly what I enjoyed most was poring over the historic photos and artifacts: John McLaren’s personal leather-bound guide to the 1894 MidWinter Fair; one of the driver’s licenses the Department issued in the early 1900s to motorists who wanted to drive in Golden Gate Park; a 1960s collection of camp brochures; a photo of Fleischhacker playground which would eventually become the zoo. And more:

Visiting the mini-museum is also a chance to see the inside of McLaren Lodge, which was built in 1896 and served as John McLaren’s office and home for nearly 50 years. It’s a beautiful building, especially the magnificent leather-walled room where the vault is located and the Park Commission used to meet before moving to a much blander room in City Hall.

For now, the museum is only open by appointment. To arrange a visit, email Summers at: Ashley.Summers@SfGov.org.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself.” She’s talking about gardening, but gardens have always served as metaphor for a way of living. The seeds planted by these unofficial stewards sow generosity. They sprout a sense of pubic good and a feeling of connectedness to the place and to other people. All of which we desperately need these days.

Let me tell you about two examples.

Ray Tracy’s spot

Ray Tracy watches over the ping pong tables on JFK Promenade (by the 8th Avenue entrance.) He’s been passionate about the game for years. Since retiring from working with juvenile offenders, he has ample time to devote to it. He competes, teaches youth classes at Goldman Tennis Center, offers private lessons. The coffee/dinner table in his studio apartment is a ping-pong table. He’s a font of table tennis trivia and information.

And so he was thrilled when in the early days of the pandemic, Rec and Park installed a concrete table on JFK. It quickly became a popular stop on the new promenade drawing people of all ages. Tracy, who lives nearby, became a fixture there. “I was kind of the hall monitor.”

When balls and paddles disappeared, he took it on himself to replace them. And when an elderly neighbor complained it was too crowded for her to play, he began bugging Rec and Park to put in more tables.

Months went by. He finally took matters into his own hands and installed two more tables himself, one that he bought and another he built with a friend. He moved around the potted trees to create a windbreak for players. To ensure everyone could get a chance to play, he marked the top of one with a Sharpie: Kids and newbies first.

“Everything was wonderful. I was literally getting 100 people on a Saturday and Sunday playing on these three tables,” Tracy recalls.

But it’s against the rules for people to bring their own equipment into the park — there are limits to even the best-intended stewardship — and eventually Rec and Park replaced Tracy’s tables with another concrete one. He doesn’t like that there are now only two tables, which, to his mind, are too close together.

Still, he continues as the ping pong spot’s hall monitor. He’s not looking for games — he only completes indoors — but took after the place. He brings a broom, squeegee and leaf blower from home to keep the area clean. He offers tips to players who want them. He lets Rec and Park know when new paddles are needed and replenishes the stock of balls. He was offended when someone suggested he was just there to trawl for students for his classes and private lessons. “I just wanted to bring people together and have fun and play ping pong. Make it a good place.”

Kathleen’s Corner

Kathleen Russell began making a good a place at the corner of Fulton and Stanyan more than four decades ago. She lived in the apartment building across the street and always had dogs that needed walking— first Love, then Poppy, then finally, a scruffy terrier named Gracie. Because of the dogs, she passed through the corner into the park several times every day for years. At some point, recalls her friend, Alison Kubick, “she decided to adopt the corner.”

She was taking on a tough charge. “It’s not the corner of happy and healthy” as Kubick put it. There’s a constant din of traffic, ambulances wailing from St. Mary’s, unhoused people sacking out on the bus benches, an endless tide of trash.

She focused on a small triangular island rimmed with cobble stones just inside the corner. It was an unloved, overlooked little spot, rarely visited by park gardeners. She pulled out the weeds, put in Icelandic poppies and other flowers and greenery. She hauled a hose from home to water it regularly. In the center, she planted one of her favorites, a Princess tree that bloomed big purple flowers.

“She was out there every day with her hoes ” says Kristin Tièche, who lived upstairs from Russell and bonded with her neighbor over their shared love of animals. “She was kind of like a neighborhood fixture. Everyone knew her.”

The garden was repeatedly vandalized. People pulled out flowers, left garbage, trashed the Princess tree. Russell took it all in stride; nothing could dim her sense of joy. “She would just keep planting,” says Kubick. She continued even as she grew frail.

Under Russell’s steady care, the corner was transformed and in 2014 San Francisco Beautiful honored her with an “Unsung Hero” award, noting “It isn’t just her garden that’s beautiful. Kathleen greets everyone – from tourist to neighbor to homeless person in need – with love and light.”

In 2018, Russell died at the age of 86. Friends gathered in the park for her memorial. The next day four of them decided they would adopt the corner and continue her work. The group included Tièche; Kubick, a long-time friend of Russell’s from their days working as nurses; and Elise Somerville, who got to know Russell because they both walked their dogs in the Panhandle. They didn’t really know each other before Russell’s death, but carrying on her legacy has turned them into friends.

They planted a sign on the island announcing it as “Kathleen’s Corner” and began monthly work parties to keep the garden going. (They meet the first Saturday of each month from 10-12 and all are welcome.)

In the seven years since, the group has picked up a few more volunteers and expanded the garden to cover the area flanking a wall along Stanyan Street. They’ve filled it with a host of plants, most of them natives, such as salvia, buckwheat, evening primrose, California phacelia and red flowering currant. They’ve taken special care with a new Princess tree that was planted at her memorial.

They also raised $6,000 to dedicate a park bench in her name. The plaque declares “She shared beauty and kindness with all who entered here.” The bench has drawn a new group to Kathleen’s Corner: people taking part in geocaching scavenger hunts. One of the clues directs participants to “sit with Kathleen.” Every so often, the garden volunteers find a geocacher sitting there.

In addition to honoring Russell, the volunteers want to “make the corner more inviting and welcoming because it’s a major entrance to Golden Gate Park,” Tièche says. Unlike other park entrances, there’s no signage announcing that fact. Sometimes, Tièche says, she’ll be working there and tourists will stop and ask directions to the park. “And I’m like you’re in it.”

I made my first visit to Kathleen’s Corner with Tièche in late December. The volunteers had decorated it for the holidays with evergreen garlands on the bench and a nutcracker statue on the island. Tièche was distraught to see that something — the recent storms or vandalism — had knocked down the pink-blossomed mallow bush since she stopped by the garden earlier that morning. She called a Rec and Park Gardner to help her cut it back and stake what remained.

I visited again for the January workday. Kubick and Sommerville were there, as well as another volunteer whose name I never got and Dan Heckman, a Rec and Park gardener who’s been working with the group for the past two years. Kubick and Sommerville were wearing the Kathleen Corner “uniform”: a grey T-shirt with a purple princess tree blossom on the front and Kathleen’s Garden Volunteer in purple script on the back.

The tasks that day included raking up the mess of leaves from the walnut tree that spreads its branches over the garden and planting clivia, a plant with glossy long leaves that they are using to define the edges of the now-expanded garden.

“This is the worst time of year,” lamented Kubick. And it was true: most of the garden was bare. Still, you could tell the space was well tended.

As Sommerville was raking the island garden, a woman walking her dog stopped to read the sign about “Kathleen’s Corner.” The sign keeps being stolen and the group keeps replacing it.

The woman told Sommerville she had a bunch of succulents. “Would you like them?” she asked. Sommerville declined; they already had plenty. As the women talked, the dog lifted his leg and peed on the sign.

Sommerville wasn't bothered. She just laughed, saying later. “You can’t stop that, And maybe the dog was saying ‘this is mine.’ Kathleen would have liked that.”

And now the necessary disclaimer:

In case you’re wondering, as my husband was, whether anyone can just start gardening on on their own in the park, the answer is no. “Volunteer engagement is at the discretion of the operations staff,” says spokeswoman Tamara Aparton. The group tending Kathleen’s Corner is “a diligent and consistent group who has a strong partnership with the gardeners. As a result, the arrangement strengthens and enhances the area.”

I doubt that’s the reaction Lightscape’s creators were going for.

Culture Creative, the British-based producers of the show, has done similar installations at botanical gardens around the world. They partnered with Sony Music and the public-private Gardens of Golden Gate Park partnership to create a show for the Botanical Garden. Since its opening on Nov. 21, Lightscape has been wildly popular. Some 15,000 attended the first weekend alone. The Gardens estimate as many as 180,000 people will visit the show during its six-week run, and that it will bring in as much as $500,000 in revenue.

The show consists of a mile-long trail through 12 different displays, including giant glowing dragon flies, fiberoptic blades of light rippling like a wave across a meadow, floating illuminated sculptures that resemble water lilies, a tree outlined in neon stripes.

All told, Lightscape fills the garden with one million lights.

The incandescence can be seen for miles. When it first opened, SFGate reported, people in the Sunset and Richmond were baffled by the eerie green and purple glow that appeared above the treetops. “The spectacle set off a mini frenzy online, with Reddit threads titled “Is anyone seeing those lights in the sky” and “What’s happening near Golden Gate Park tonight?,” which filled up with speculation ranging from drone shows to secret city testing and, of course, alien talk.”

I can understand why the Gardens mounted the show as a way to raise revenue and draw people who might not otherwise visit the Botanical Garden. “It is a secular celebration of winter with the plants as the star of the show,” the Garden’s director of experience engagement told the Chronicle,

But it didn’t seem to me like the plants were the star. For most of the trail, the plants were all but lost in the blare. In the redwood grove, trees that are a miracle in and of themselves just about disappeared in the swirl of fake fog and colored lights that shifted and throbbed in time to a techno-New Agey music. Meanwhile, the California Native Plant Society has complained that the crowds, noise and light will disrupt the circadian cycles of both plants and wildlife in the park.

The zen-like Moon Viewing Garden was one of the few areas left relatively dark, the better to see a large glowing moon that hung suspended in a nimbus of twinkling fairy lights. It was like a night sky brought down to earth – utterly enchanting.

I don’t want to be the grinch here, grousing about something that so many others clearly are enjoying. But it all just seemed so synthetic, a Vegas-style grab for amazement, like the Bellagio Hotel fountains.

It also was clearly designed for Instagram. The trail kept clogging as people, including me, repeatedly stopped and raised their cellphones to capture the spectacle:

Looking back through my own pictures, I see how well the scene photographed. In fact, I appreciate the beauty more on the screen than I did in real time.

It left me thinking about the darkness that dominates this season of short days and long nights. As many have observed, the glare of modern life has virtually banished the night sky that for millennia filled our ancestors with awe. “For all of human history, we've walked outside and looked up and thought about our place in the universe, We've thought about our god, our spirituality, our religion.We've thought about who we are,” Paul Bogard, author of “The End of Night” said in a 2016 TEDX talk.

But today, true darkness is almost impossible to experience, unless you trek to one of the world’s designated “dark sky places.” In cities, especially, the night sky is a gauzy yellow grey that obscures all but a smattering of stars. Sky glow, it’s called; a poetic way to describe the light pollution that is radically disturbing the life cycles of all living things on earth.

Lately, I’ve been rising very early and taking my dog out of walks in the park before sunrise. As I’ve written before, pre-dawn is one of my favorite times to be in park.

“Don’t you feel nervous?” a friend asked me. Strangely enough, I don’t. Maybe because I know light is coming soon, I don’t feel scared or wary as I do at twilight.

It’s not really dark, but the dimness attaches a mystery and beauty to all it touches. Disembodied small lights bob toward me, a strange wonder until they’re close enough for me to see they’re attached to a runner or cyclist. A darker something glides by, and it takes my eyes and brain a moment to find a name for the shape. A barn owl, A hawk. A shadow passes near a streetlight and I make out the form of a coyote.

“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizak wrote in “In Praise of Shadows”.^[1]

I think what I like best at that hour is the quiet. There’s not yet the tinnitus of traffic filling my ears. Often the wind is still sleeping, so the trees are still. I hear the birds stirring awake, starting with a few tentative cheeps and chirps of towhee and song sparrows. Next the crows and ravens rouse themselves, squawking as they take to the sky.

In that quiet quasi-dark time in the park I feel at peace and connected to something essential. Night, wrote Henry Beston is “the true other half of the day’s tremendous wheel; no lights without meaning stab or trouble it; it is beauty, it is fulfillment, it is rest.”

How about a show about that?

^[1] This quote and the one from Henry Beston’s “The Outermost House” come from a gorgeous meditation on darkness by the always brilliant Maria Popova. If you don’t know her online publication The Marginalian, you should!

Dear friends, As befitting the season, I’ll be in hibernation until the new year. I wish you all a happy holidays and a joyous new year. Thank you for your support.

Like many of us, I have my regular routes around the park. One of them takes me by a quiet area of gravelly sand by the dog park that for years was marked only with a little sign reading “La Boule d’Or Pétanque Courts.” I often wondered: what the heck is pétanque. Apparently, I wasn’t alone. The title of a book about pétanque declares it “The Greatest Game You Never Heard Of.”

So I visited the court on a recent Sunday morning, one of the three times a week members of La Boule d’Or Pétanque Club gather to play. A few dozen Pétanquers (not sure that’s a word) were there, including Ann Krilanovich, the club’s energetic president, who is always eager to share what makes the game so great. After spending a few hours playing that day, I don’t know that I’d call it the greatest game. But I definitely had a lot of fun.

Pétanque originated in southern France and is much like Italian bocce ball or English lawn bowling. A poster on the club’s bulletin board explains it this way:

Step 1: You throw out a little ball.

Step 2: You toss bigger balls at it…Closest wins.

Really, that it?

Well… wine helps!

(In truth, while a good Bordeaux may help in France, here it’s barred by Rec and Park rules.)

Unlike lawn bowling or bocce, however, you stand in place to throw the ball, or boule, and the court you play on isn’t carefully manicured or perfectly leveled. The ground’s natural dips and rises are left in place to serve as factors in the players’ strategy.

The lack of fussiness makes for an accessible, plebian ethos that Krilanovich appreciates. “Bowling and bocce are too white shirt for me. They don’t get dirty. They’re ooty-snay,” she said, invoking Pig Latin. “There’s something about this that’s more proletariat that I like. You don’t have to be rich to play.”

The only necessary equipment are the baseball-sized boules, which can be had for anywhere from $50 to several hundred dollars, and a tape measure, since the difference between winning and losing can be a matter of millimeters. Membership in the club itself is “a whole $50,” said Krilanovich. “And we throw two parties!”

Some clubs thrive on exclusion – I’m talking to you Olympic Club – but La Boule’ d’Or eagerly welcomes newcomers. So much so that Krilanovich offers free lessons on request.

Since it was a game day, she suggested I and another newbie join her on a team, squaring off against two long-time club members. The veterans coached us through every move. They showed me how to toss the steel boules rather than roll them and how to negotiate little swells on the ground so my boule would roll in the right direction. “Aim here,” Krilanovich would advise, tapping the spot with her foot. “A little too spicy,” she’d murmur when I’d overshoot the mark. And when our team prevailed in a round, she’d turn to me with a grin, “And now we say neener, neener, neener!”

Practiced players can lob the heavy boule in a graceful arc through the air and land it smack dab on an opponent’s boule, knocking it out of the way. It’s a thing of beauty to behold and I couldn’t imagine ever getting that good. But the veterans assured me with practice everyone gets better. “Everybody wants you to do well,” Krilanovich said, adding mischievously. “And then they want to beat you. They’d rather beat you if you’re medium good.”

Pétanque is reportedly played by some 200 million people worldwide, but in the US it remains an obscure past-time enjoyed by just a few thousand players. “Perhaps the problem is that just about every aspect of Pétanque is un-American,” argues B.W. Putnam, author of “The Greatest Game…” “It violates the expectations of what constitutes an acceptable sport of leisure-time activity. It’s simple to play, but difficult to master; the strategy is utterly obvious, yet it’s superbly subtle and multi-layered.” The equipment is inexpensive, low-tech and lasts for years. It’s egalitarian, equally playable by young and old, men and women.

Most un-American of all: the game’s terminology is all in French. “And,” Putnam writes, “that’s extremely confusing to the average American because as Steven Martin observes, ‘It’s like the French have a different word for everything.’”

“Half the game is spent arguing, smoking Gauloises and swearing in French,” one club member jokingly told me.

It’s not clear how long people have been playing Pétanque in Golden Gate Park. Park historian Christopher Pollack’s book claims the first court was installed in 1907, which would be surprising considering that’s the year the game was invented — on the other side of the world. It’s definitely been a part of the park scene since 1959, when French importer Jean Bonstemps established the Club de Pétanque de San Francisco, which later was renamed La Boules D’Or Pétanque Club.

That same year, a French landscaper named Jaques Biscay secured the current location and built the courts now played on. After Rec and Park renovated the space earlier this year, the area was rededicated as “Jaques Biscay Place” in his honor. Biscay and his wife still occasionally play there. “He calls himself the champion,” Krilanovich said, giving the word a French pronunciation.

At the time San Francisco’s club was started, there was only one other pétanque club in the U.S., based in Worcester, Massachusetts, club member James Parke told me. “But they were from Bulgaria” and their club eventually disbanded. So now Boule d’Or claims the rather convoluted bragging rights as the country’s “the second oldest continuously operating Pétanque club.”

For years, Boules d’Or members were almost exclusively French emigres. (An invitation to a 1982 banquet, displayed on the bulletin board by the courts, is entirely in French.) Most of that generation have passed away and the accents you hear on the court today are mostly standard American.

Talking to club members, I learned they found this little-known game in different ways. Some have French roots or are Francophiles. Parke came upon it while visiting friends in the South of France. Two women said they were taking French lessons and their teacher told them to try it. Tom Blair, an old college friend of Krilanovich, said she pulled him into it, promising “I’ve got a game for you!”

Krilanovich herself discovered it during the pandemic, when a friend “with boules in their trunk” invited her to play with a group in Lafayette. She jumped at the chance to be out and around people without jeopardizing her health. Soon she was hooked. And then, ”I got the bug that I wanted to get better.” She began playing tournaments to improve her game. She loves the competition.

After just two years of playing, Krilanovich took over as the president of Boules d’Or. “Basically no one else wanted the job,” she said. The club had been in decline for several years, the membership had shrunk and the courts were in a state of disrepair. With the court’s new renovation, Krilanovich is determined to build Boules d’Or back up. To that end she adopted the phoenix as the symbol for her club business card.

She’s a zealous recruiter for the club and the sport. She wants to bring in more members, especially younger ones since the club currently skews gray. She hopes a new court south of Market will bring in the “techie bros” who live in that area. She also hopes to entice more women to play.

She also wants to up the club’s participation in tournaments, a goal not all her fellow club members share. Some just value the club for its community, for the camaraderie of being with others devoted to this little-known sport.

But Krilanovich is firm. “I want to develop a competitive winning club.” If nothing else, she thinks it help improve the game’s visibility. The sport’s governing body, the Federation of Pétanque, USA, is trying to do the same, she points out, noting that “The French couldn’t even get this in the Olympics. Wow, how disappointing is that?”

While we were talking, a man rode up on a bike and after perusing the club bulletin board, began watching the players.

“Man, this sure got popular,” he commented.

“Well, thanks,” said Krilanovich. “Are you ready to come join us?”

“Probably,” he answered non-commitedly. Krilanovich wasn’t about to give up.

As he got ready to leave, she called out, “I look forward to seeing you again.”

He equivocated: “Oh yeah, I’ll probably be back.”

“No, “ she persisted.“Let’s do a lesson. Okay?”

“Alright,” he answered.

“Okay!” she said

You may wonder why the heck I’m talking about cigarettes when this is a newsletter about Golden Gate Park. Well, the point is social values change, which is what inspired Nancy Botkin to dig deep into the history of cars and roads in the park. I met Botkin recently after learning that she occasionally hosts a tour of the “lost streets” in the park.

Botkin is a long-time cycling advocate, passionate devotee of the park and co-author of a forthcoming guide to the park which I can’t wait to read. No surprise then that she was thrilled when part of the park’s central artery, JFK Drive, was closed to cars as an emergency measure in the early days of the pandemic. Activists, including her husband Mike Smith, a co- founder of Walk SF, had been campaigning for years to make that section of JFK car-free and they could see now, in the daily tide of people walking, running, cycling, and playing what that space could be.

Botkin knew there would be pressure to reopen JFK once the emergency eased. To help the case for keeping cars out permanently, she set out to”to show that there were other roads in the park that had been closed.”

She pored over old maps and planning documents, studied vehicular flow analyses, scrutinized aerial photos and waded through the immense photo archive of OpenSF History in search of park photos with cars. She found an incredible resource, a city planning website that allows you to compare a 1938 aerial photo of the city with ones from succeeding years up to the present day. It offers a stunning reminder of how the park has changed over time.

She discovered many streets had been removed -- and without any public outcry or commotion. Indeed, some of the sweetest, quietest spots in the park today were once busy with the loud drone of passing cars and all the attendant dangers.

Botkin compiled the examples in a small 8-page guide wonderfully titled “A Short Guide to the Long History of Car Free Spaces in Golden Gate Park.” They stand as proof, that “once a road is closed to cars, park users quickly forget they were ever able to drive that way,” she writes.

We spent a few lovely hours slowly riding through the park as she pointed out some of the sites of ex-roads. Here are the places we stopped:

The Panhandle. Cars once zipped down the middle in both directions, following much the same curving roadway that was originally laid out for horse-drawn carriages. The road was closed in 1955, but city planners still contemplated running a freeway through the Panhandle until neighborhood activists succeeded in getting the plan quashed in 1966. All that remains of that long roadway is a patch of asphalt near the playground. It served as stage for Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead during the 1966 Love Pageant Rally. The Urban School later rented it for parking. Today, the only traffic there is outdoor recreational classes and basketball games.

The Skating Place sits on the grounds of what once was the 6^th Ave. entrance into the park. The road was closed in 1981 on a trial basis, never to be reopened as roller skaters claimed the spot as their own.

The Rose Garden covers ground that once held a street leading north to 14^th Avenue. Completion of the Park Presidio Bypass in 1939 made the entrance obsolete. The road was removed in 1951. A decade later, the city decided to install San Francisco’s first municipal rose garden there.

Marx Meadow. Cars once ran through the meadow along a road connecting JFK Drive to Fulton St. It provided critical access to the park for the Richmond District, but that became less important after Crossover Drive and the Park Presidio Bypass were built. At the same time, there was a growing demand for places in the park to hold events; the meadow was a space where the permit office often scheduled bands to play. The road was removed in 1979, replaced by a sandy pedestrian path.

Spreckels Lake. Motorists once could drive around the entire lake. The northwest part of that circle was informally blocked and used as “sort of dumping ground” in the 1970s, Botkin says. It was officially closed to cars in 1986. Now, she says, “if you come at certain times, it’s packed with badminton players or people doing tai chi.”

Chain of Lakes. Drivers once could do a leisurely circuit around North Lake. In 1986 the northwest part of the street was closed. Though the asphalt remains, it has a pleasantly overgrown, abandoned feel.

Bernice Rodgers Way is a short stretch of roadway between JFK and Martin Luther King Drive. Planners first suggested blocking it off in 1985, but that didn’t finally happen until the pandemic.

Other lost roads that we didn’t visit include: the Page Street Gate, which admitted cars to the park from 1904 to 1926; the block of Waller between Stanyan and Kezar that’s now a mini skate park; a short stretch of Arguello between Kezar and Frederick; parts of Middle Drive; the stretch from Metson Road to Overlook.

Stand in many of those spots today and it’s hard to see them as streets, even if they still sport asphalt and traffic signs. They may hold the ghosts of cars, but their life is people-paced, a traffic of walkers, cyclists, runners and skateboarders.

And that’s the point, says Botkin. One day, she imagines, we’ll look back of pictures of park roads crammed bumper-to-bumper with cars and say to ourselves, “that’s not a park.”

The big Monterey Cypress at the eastern end of Hellman Hollow was one of the oldest, most iconic trees in the park. It soared 90 feet above the meadow, with spreading branches dripping Spanish moss. The lowest hung broad and flat like the batwing underside of an old woman’s arm and invited you to climb on. I am using the past tense because yesterday the tree was taken down.

While its massive crown was still green and seemingly healthy, a long crack had formed in the trunk. A tree expert examined it two days ago and determined the crack had deepened and widened, meaning the giant could split and crash to the ground at any moment. The tree was in danger of a “catastrophic failure,” as one gardener put it.

How do you take down something that’s as big as an eight-story building with a spread as wide as a couple of cars? It took a team of eight people, including one tree trimmer in a cherry picker and another up on ropes in the tree itself, skillfully amputating massive branches and stems with their whirring chainsaws. Though the work was sad, it’s also hard and dangerous and they couldn’t help letting off triumphal whoops each time their carefully aimed cuts dropped another hunk of wood to the ground. Their excitement was contrast with the somber mood among those of us on the ground.

The men looked tiny, like lethal ants scrambling around a massive being. And yet their work was efficient and surprisingly swift. The air filled with sawdust and the tangy scent of pine. A tree that had climbed toward the sun for some 120 years — its precise age is unknown —was whittled down to stubs within the space of five hours.

Each branch fell with a sickening crack and ground-shuddering thud. Bulldozer cleared away the branches and big logs. It’s hard to capture what it was like to watch the tree being dismembered. Maybe some of the images below will help:

The tree was witness to horse drawn carriages and the arrival of automobiles, to untold numbers of picnics, barbecues, birthday parties, cross-country relays, Summer of Love festivities, and 25 years of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass concerts. (The tree stood right next to the Banjo stage.) It shaded readers snuggled against its trunk with a book, sheltered mourners spreading ashes among its roots. ”If only that tree could speak,” one person wrote on Facebook in response to the Rec and Park announcement about the tree’s demise.

“We’re all heartbroken,” said Robert Salas, supervisor of one of the urban forestry crews dismantling the tree. Many felt the same way.

“It was my favorite tree in the whole park. It’s so big and majestic. You don’t see many trees like this,” said Keith Roberts, a supervising gardener who’d gotten to know the cypress well during the 16 years he’s worked in Hellman Hollow. He used to refer to it simply as “The Tree.” If he told any of his staff to meet him by The Tree, they all knew which one he meant.

“When I was working overtime, my wife would bring me dinner and we’d eat at that picnic table there.” Roberts recalled. He pulled up a picture on his phone of his kids standing in front of the tree. “That’s my kids about ten years ago.” His son and wife were also sad when he told them Wednesday night that the tree had to go.

Roberts said he’d stayed late the day before to take pictures of The Tree on its last day, one of which is at the top of this post. It was a blessedly sun-drenched afternoon that showed off the cypress in all its glory. And he made a point of getting in early yesterday, so he could spend a few minutes alone with The Tree before the tree-cutters arrived. I asked if he’d shared any last words with the tree. He paused awhile before answering: “Basically, it’s been good knowing you. It’s been a good run. I’ll see you some other time.”

David Iribarne, superintendent of the park, stopped by to watch the dismantling. “I feel like I’m losing someone in my family,” he said. “It’s devastating. We knew that the tree was struggling with all the lichen on it, and it was a matter of time, but I just wish it was past my time.” That Spanish moss we all loved, that fluttered with every breeze and wrapped the tree with a magical air, is a parasite that over time weakens its hosts.

Passersby stopped to watch and take pictures. A firefighter pulled up in his engine to snag a branch as a souvenir. He said he planned to make it into a sign. A group of ravens circled overhead, perhaps anxious they were losing a favorite roost.

Lucy Goodhart had been driving by when she spotted the tree crews at work. She came hurrying up to ask Roberts why the tree was being cut down. “It’s the best tree in the whole park!” she exclaimed, as if declaring that fact would stop the saws. She had often visited the tree on walks and sat under its canopy. It felt to her “like an ancient being.” Roberts explained about the crack. She accepted the reasoning even though it grieved her. “Well tree maintenance is important. I’m glad I drove by now so I got to say goodbye.”

The Facebook thread in which Rec and Park Facebook announced the tree was being cut down quickly filled with dozens of tributes and memories:

“I have always referred to her [as] the Grandmother!”

“I climbed you in the sixties!”

“Noooo not yet!,” wrote one woman “I have dance[d}, meditated, partied, cried and laughed with joy by this tree especially during covid times. It was a sanctuary every weekend for us to gather. even did my birthday party with a Covid virus Piñata from its branches.”

Another woman wrote of the many ballgames her family played by the tree. “On one occasion, my kids were playing ball and we lost 3 in the tree that day. My father in-law wrote a story about it, The Taking Tree.”

“That’s Dan’s tree named after my brother,” wrote another person. “He came to HSB from Wi for 4 years and fell in love[with] this tree. He passed away too early at 49 and I spread his ashes on that tree during the COVD weekend that would have been HSB. Love live DANS TREE.”

And then of course there were those second-guessing the decision to cut it down, arguing the tree could have been saved with cables or supports or steel bands, by more careful trimming or by erecting a fence to keep people away. “Why not bandage it back together??” one man asked.

But the park staff were insistent there was no other choice. ““There was really no saving the tree,” said Roberts.

In its announcement, Rec and Park emphasized the tree’s “story isn’t over.” The logs will be made into benches, to line pathways and put to other uses in natural resources areas. The stump itself may be fashioned into some kind of picnic table, said Roberts.

He had hoped the big tree would outlast his time in the park. “I have another five or six years before I retire,” he said. “I always told people I want the tree to be there when I leave.” Still, he’d planted another cypress nearby 16 years ago in anticipation of this day. It’s not much of a replacement yet — more like a tall Christmas tree than a imposing giant, but with proper pruning and growth he’s hopeful it too will become a landmark tree.

Meanwhile, the cypress was still heavy with seedpods, clumps of them on most of the branches dropped to the ground. During breaks in the cutting, Roberts and another gardener gathered several handfuls of the hard knobbly cones and cracked them open to collect the surprisingly minuscule seeds.

They’ll give some to the park nursery. But they also plan to plant scores around the meadow, in the hopes that at least half might survive and grow.

“It’s like a going away gift for us,” he said. “It’s 100 percent certainty an offspring from this tree will be growing in this meadow, not in the same spot, but close by. And then for another 120 years gardeners can watch after it and make sure it’s safe.”

By the end of the morning, all that was left of the tree was a bare snag and a litter of branches, sawdust and lichen on the ground. The crews will be back with a crane to take apart the remaining stem and branches. Once the stump is laid bare, Roberts and his crew will be able count the rings and determine exactly how old the tree was, how many years it takes to become a giant.

PS. Angus Macfarlane emailed me with his eulogy for The Tree. If anyone else has memories they’d like to share, please send them to me. Here’s Angus’s:

FAST TIMES AT POLY HIGH

For the three seasons that I ran cross-country for Polytechnic High School, (1962-1964) THE TREE was the finish line for the city’s high school 1.9-mile cross- country course. Starting in Lindley Meadow, we ran west past Dudley Carter’s (now gone) sculpture Goddess of the Forest to Chain of Lakes Drive, around Middle Lake, and then followed bridle trails eastward till emerging onto Speedway Meadow.

By now, about 1.6 miles along the course, oxygen debt has become oxygen bankruptcy. Hitting the 1/3-mile-long greensward of the meadow became a living nightmare. There, infinitely far away, was THE TREE—the Promised Land. The finish line. It probably took all of two minutes to cover that distance, but time and distance had no relevance on this stretch. It was a foreign dimension where nightmares were born and the mind lost its mind.

During my cross-country years, there was a drainage problem in Speedway Meadows, turning sections of the meadow into a marsh. The slushy, quicksand-like quality of the surface not only made running difficult, occasionally a shoe would be sucked off an unfortunate runner’s foot.

Despite running and running and running, for an eternity THE TREE got bigger, but it never got closer. All of the elements of running along Speedway Meadow to THE TREE probably gave rise to my recurring nightmares of running but not moving, merely “spinning my wheels in place”.

Finally, passing THE TREE and hearing my finish time, I had reached the Promised Land and magically all was good again.

Those were good times.

RIP: THE TREE

Everything comes and goes
Marked by lovers and styles of clothes
Things that you held high
And told yourself were true
Lost or changing as the days come down to you

It’s really just the first line that won’t let go. (Though assuming the song’s right, it eventually will.)

Maybe it’s the season. This time of dark mornings and falling leaves, summer blooms fading as the bright orange nasturtium pop to life, clover springing up out of the dry withered grass, song birds readying for migration, young coyotes venturing further from their natal dens as they prepare to disperse.

Change is the one constant, as I’m reminded whenever I’m out in the park, whether what catches my eye is a dead Monarch butterfly in the dust or a curve of red concrete blocks peeking out from the dirt at the top of Strawberry Hill.

Those mossy blocks are all that’s left now of a structure that once sat like a crown high above the park: the Sweeny Observatory.

The Observatory was a gift to the city from Thomas Sweeney, an early inhabitant, landowner (and likely land speculator) of the mostly unpopulated Outside Lands on which the park was built. Sadly for Sweeney the stoneworkers misspelled his name on the dedicatory plaque, leaving out the third ‘e’.

Sweeney lived at what is now Seventh Ave. and Judah. The creation of a new city park steps from his door vastly increased the value of his property turning him into a rich man.

Or so he told Park Commissioner William W. Stow, when he dropped by Stow’s office one day in 1891 with an unexpected offer. As the San Francisco Examiner recounted, Sweeney “said he had been in the habit of climbing Strawberry Hill to get the wonderful view of the summit. When he went up on foot, he said he got all warmed up, and when he stood in the face of the wind and looked over the country, he always caught cold. If he drove up his horses suffered. So he said he wanted to build a shelter on the summit.” He offered $8,000 to execute his vision.

The result was a large ring with two crenellated towers framing an arched entry way, grandiose as a castle, but there was no castle. Just a wide open space big enough for carriages that climbed the spiraling gravel drive up the 409-foot hill. The slopes of the hill itself were still mostly bare save for the wild strawberries for which it was named. Facing the archway was a 50,000 gallon reflecting pool that served as the headwaters for Huntington Falls when it was added a few years later.

From the outlook at the top, visitors had an unparalleled view of the city and countryside. They could see the ocean, the Farallones and the Golden Gate, to the west; Mount Tam to the north; San Mateo County to the south; the growing city to the east. And below in all directions, the park, which was still very much a work in progress.

A plaque over the archway read “Park Panorama, Gift of Thomas U Sweeny, 1891”.

As Raymond Clary points out in The Making of Golden Gate Park, The Early Years 1885-1906, up until then, most features in the park had been given “natural names” such as such as Strawberry Hill, Deer Glen, the Dairy. By acceding to Sweeney’s demand for recognition, the Park Commission was “completely reversing former park policy that the park was to be rustic in nature and that all forms of personal advertisement and self-aggrandizement were to be prohibited,” Clary writes.

At the time, monuments were so scarce in the park that The Chronicle complained that it was “not very well endowed.” Indeed, at the dedication of the Observatory, former mayor Frank McCoppin used Sweeney’s example to not so subtly prod other potential benefactors. “Rich, powerful, ambitious, and sometimes unscrupulous persons, in all ages and countries, have made gifts to the people…But here we find a humble citizen, one of the masses, unmoved by ambition, or the love of power, giving largely of his means for the benefit of his fellow townsman. An example like this is certain to bear abundant fruit.”

And it did. Hence, Stow Lake (now Blue Heron Lake) built in 1883; Huntington Falls created in 1894; Spreckels Temple of Music erected in 1895; and over time the various gates marking the park’s entrances: Brown Gate, Breon Gate, Brayton Gate and so on.

Whatever Sweeney’s offering was called, its very presence rankled William Hammond Hall, the park’s designer and first superintendent, (though at the time the observatory went up, John McLaren was in charge.) Hall considered most any building beyond a picnic pavilion an intrusion on his vision of a bucolic woodland space. When a glassed-in second story was added in 1892, he commented privately that “it was a disgrace,” according to Clary. And when the whole thing collapsed in the 1906 earthquake, Hall told friends, “Apparently a Higher Power has taken matters into His own hands.”

Today all that remains is that bit of wall and some of the boulders that once rimmed the reflecting pool. But if you plant yourself within the ghost outlines of Sweeney’s dream, you’ll still find amazing views.

Now, it’s a three-day affair drawing half a million people to hear dozens of musicians spread out across six stages, most of which bear plain, old-timey names hearkening to the roots music Hellman loved: Banjo Stage, Rooster Stage, Arrow Stage, Horseshoe Hill. (I’m not sure of the source of Swan Stage but the name fits in with the homespun vibe.) Then there’s Towers of Gold, a flash of glitz in that bolt of calico.

If you’ve ever wondered about that name, it’s from the title of a book about Hellman’s great-grandfather, Isaias Hellman, written by Isaias’s great-great-granddaughter, author and journalist (and friend of mine), Frances Dinkelspiel.

Were there no Isaias Hellman and his towers of gold, there would have been no Warren Hellman with his own towers of gold to create Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Strange as it may be, the Big Twang, as a new book about HSB calls it, has its roots in the life of a distinctly untwangy immigrant banker. Dinkelspiel has an essay about that history in the book (which will be on sale in the merch booths) and I asked her to tell me about it.

Isaias Hellman was born in 1842 in the small Bavarian town of Reckendorf (the same birthplace of the Haas family who married into the Levi Strauss family and eventually leaders of the company). He left at the age of 16 with his younger brother, both eager to escape the economic insecurity and persecution facing Jews of that era. Bavarian laws barred Jews from entering professions, restricted their movements and land ownership, even limited the numbers who could marry.

Landing in Los Angeles in 1859 with less than $100, Hellman went on to become in Dinkelspiel’s words “California’s premier financier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a man whose financial acumen catapulted the state into the modern era and laid the groundwork for one of the world’s most dynamic economies.” He started LA’s first bank – Farmers and Merchants -- and helped build up two more, the Nevada Bank in San Francisco and Wells Fargo and presided over or was on the board of 14 others.

But his influence extended far beyond banking. He was one of LA’s largest land owners and developers. He helped back the city’s municipal water system and introduce trolley lines. He donated the land and funds to start the University of Southern California. He helped bring the Southern Pacific railroad to LA, boosting the young city’s fortunes with its new connection to San Francisco and the East Coast. He funded oil wells and vineyards. He was a long-time regent of the University of California.

After moving to San Francisco in 1890, he became one of the city’s leading philanthropists, and part of the finance committee charged with rebuilding the city after the 1906 earthquake. He was, in short, a central force in many of the industries and institutions that shaped modern California, according to Dinkelspiel. I’m hard pressed to think of a figure with a comparable breadth of influence today.

Warren Hellman greatly admired Isaias and encouraged Dinkelspiel’s decision to write a biography of their shared ancestor. In 2009, a year after the book came out, he told her he was adding a new stage to HSB and naming it after the book, in his grandfather’s honor.

“It was thrilling,” she says. “It’s still thrilling. I love to think of it as my stage.” An impressive roster of musicians have performed on the Towers of Gold stage: Buddy Miller, Nick Lowe, Betty LaVette, Marcus Mumford, Glenn Hansen, Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens and more.

“I used to think it was the rock and roll stage,” she said. Then she learned, the line-up had more to do with the fact that it’s the most accessible stage for equipment trucks, so it’s assigned to performers who bring their own equipment. (Many others use equipment supplied by the festival.)

I asked Dinkelspiel what she thought her great-great-grandfather would make of HSB? “Well, he liked music,” she said, but more of the operatic variety. “I’m not sure he would have liked having to contend with a lot of crowds and sitting on the ground. But I think he would have liked doing something that supported the arts.”

This year performers on the stage include Patty Griffin, Jeff Tweedy, Jimmy Dale Gilmore and The String Cheese Incident, each in their own way a musical tower of gold.

By Mailliard’s count, some 119 species were coming and going through park at that time. Only about two dozen were commmon, full-time residents (including the robin, a relative newcomer first sighted in the park in 1915, according to Mailliard.)

Some of the birds he listed have since disappeared, including, most famously, the California quail. But even more striking – and revealing of how things have changed – are the birds that have settled in. Namely: ravens, crows and Canada geese.

In 1930, according to Mailliard, there were no ravens in the park and crows were a rarity “probably only stopping in [the] Park on their way” to Lake Merced or the shores of the ocean or the Bay. The Canada geese, intentionally introduced to stock Stow Lake, mostly kept to their new home.

The relative scarcity of those three wasn’t surprising. At the time Mailliard was writing, all were in trouble. The once-vast flocks of Canada geese migrating south each winter had sharply declined due to over-hunting, egg-collecting and loss of wetlands habitat. Crows and ravens, considered vermin in the rural areas they inhabited, had been shotgunned and poisoned to near-oblivion.

But, thanks to human efforts, over the last century, all three have spectacularly – and some would argue, disastrously – rebounded.

What’s Good for the Goose

Starting in the 1930s, wildlife agencies and conservationists launched captive-breeding programs of Canada geese, releasing them into the wild as well as urban and suburban areas. While the urge to migrate is innate, the young of some species, including geese, need to be shown the way. But the captive-raised geese had no elders teaching them migration cues or routes, so they lost the habit of flying south in winter. The geese like short fertilized grass and easily accessible bodies of water, one expert told the New York Times. In many American cities, “we’ve created the perfect circumstances for them.”

Which is why in towns across the US there are now millions of these “honking water fowl with a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans,” as author John Green described them so well in his podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed.

Every morning, I hear a chorus of those dying balloons as V’s of geese head to the Polo Fields, the meadows or the park’s various lakes, where they spend the day pulling up grubs and pushing out prodigious quantities of poop. (How much?, you may wonder. Science is here with an answer: about a third of a pound of poop a day, per adult goose, according to one study —roughly on par with what the average human produces.)

At the Polo Fields, the gardeners try to chase them off with their Toro trucks, or at times, a remote-controlled toy car. But the geese come back every morning. Short of culling the numbers by killing some birds, a politically unacceptable solution, the only successful way to control their numbers is by oiling their newly-laid eggs, which prevents them from hatching.

Foster City, where geese were leaving 400 pounds of poop a day on parks and lawns, made headlines last month for a $400,000 plan to use dogs, drones and lasers to drive the geese out of town. Even if it succeeds I have to wonder where the birds will go. San Mateo? Redwood City? Hillsborough?

Counting crows (and ravens)

Crows and ravens were brought under the protective wing of the Migratory Bird Treaty in 1972, making it illegal to kill them without a federal permit. By the end of the decade, the birds began showing up in San Francisco. In the early 80s, birders started spotting small numbers of crows and ravens in the annual Bay Area Christmas Bird Count, according to veteran birdwatcher Dominik Mosur, the animal exhibit curator at the Randall Museum. Since then, their populations have exploded. In 1983, there were 14 ravens in the count; in 2023, there were 1,119. The number of crows skyrocketed from 9 in 1983 to 2,630 in 2023.

“It’s mind boggling that in such a short amount of time, in 40 years, that a population can expand that much,” said Eddie Bartley, a long-time bird-watcher and founding partner of Nature Trip. The draws of urban life are understandable. No predators, Lots of tall trees for perching and nesting, Ample supplies of good eats, much of which was never intended for birds. (The other day I watched a raven carefully pick through a bag of Sour Patch Kids gummies, selecting only the yellow and green ones to eat.)

When I mentioned to one park gardener I was looking into the ravens, he said without missing a beat, “And how we loathe them. And let me count the ways.”

The birds pull garbage out of the trash cans and strew it all over the place. They pick apart cardboard in the sheet mulching used to deter weeds. They destroy ornamental plantings, plucking flowers out of beds and buckets. In the nursery and some other gardens, the gardeners cover plantings with netting to try to deter the birds, but the birds are relentless.

Even more significantly, they predate on other birds, stealing eggs and killing nestlings. Josiah M.T. Clark a consulting ecologist to Rec and Park and founder of Habitat Potential, shared a grisly story to explain why he, a bird lover, does not love these particular birds. One time, near his home in Potrero Hill, Clark heard a robin “just freaking out.” He looked for the source of the bird’s distress.“There's a raven that has two almost fully grown robins in its mouth. And it won't leave because it's trying to get the third one in his mouth, but it's so big that it can't fit. And the mom is just there screaming, trying to protect the young.”

The street trees around his house used to be filled with robins, he says. ”There are no robins in my neighborhood anymore.”

He says ravens and crows have caused a 70 to 80 pecent decline in Brewer’s blackbirds and red-wing blackbirds. Another veteran birder, Alan Hopkins, told me they’re responsible for the virtual disappearance of olive-sided fly-catchers from the city.

Smaller birds aren’t the only ones getting picked on. Ravens harass hawks and have been known to go after heron eggs, fledglings and even adults sitting on a nest. Their predations at Audubon Canyon Ranch – a nesting site for Great Blue Herons – led the herons to stop nesting there for several years.

Elsewhere, ravens are having major impact on a number of threatened and endangered species, including the California least terns, western snowy plovers, piping plovers, marbled murrelets and sage-grouse, according to a 2023 report by US Fish and Wildlife. They are the single greatest threat to the endangered Mojave Desert Tortoise.

Such thuggery makes the collective nouns for both birds seem especially fitting: a murder of crows and an unkindness of ravens.

But even knowing the havoc and harm they wreak, I can’t bring myself to loathe these birds. Their crimes, after all, derive from their extraordinary intelligence and adaptability to human environs.

“They solve puzzles that stump human children, plan for the future, make tools, remember birds—and humans—they encountered years earlier, and on and on,” according to Brandon Keim in Bay Nature. “Offered a choice between a small snack now and a larger treat later,” scientists have found they will “delay gratification—an exercise in self-control and future-awareness that’s considered a developmental milestone in humans.”

They’re playful. Ravens have been observed sliding down snowy hills, playing catch and teasing dogs and wolves. They teach one another and communicate in dialects of croaks and caws and knocks. They not only recognize each other as individuals, they famously can distinguish individual human faces. They’re monogamous, with males and females working to build a nest together. They’ve been known to grieve when a mate dies.

In short, they’re a lot like us – in ways both good and bad. “They're smart and callous and they’ll exploit a resource til there’s none left,” Alan Hopkins told me.

When I first started writing this newsletter, I posted a video of a man who feeds the crows and ravens at Big Rec every day. The birds spot him coming down 9^th Avenue and trail him ‘til he stops to scatter kibble or cereal for them.

I envied the connection he’d cultivated with the birds. I didn’t yet understand why feeding the park’s birds – or any of its animals -- was so problematic. Knowing that now, I would never feed them. But, I still wish I had a way to befriend some of these remarkable birds.

Our relationship with urban wildlife is fraught with so much complexity. Wittingly or unwittingly, we’ve created the conditions that bring these animals into our proximity. We wanted to help geese and ravens and crows and we succeeded so well that now we just want these birds to go away. But, why would they leave the cushy life we’ve helped create for them? Of course, they’re here to stay.