This park spreading around you should not exist. Golden Gate Park was created by act of the California legislature in 1870 on 1,017 acres of shifting sand dunes — the Outside Lands, as San Franciscans called the western half of the peninsula, which was considered useless wasteland. The engineer hired to design it, William Hammond Hall, and his successor John McLaren, who served as park superintendent for 56 years until his death in 1943, fought the sand with grass, trees, and an obsessive program of planting that turned the dunes into one of the great urban parks in the world.
McLaren hated statues — he called them stookies — and spent considerable energy hiding donated monuments behind bushes so they could not be seen from the paths. The park stretches three miles from Haight-Ashbury to the ocean, and contains a botanical garden, a Japanese tea garden, two major museums, a herd of bison introduced in 1891, tennis courts, a polo field, a golf course, and enough forest that it is easy to forget the city exists. On Sundays, a section of John F. Kennedy Drive is closed to cars; hundreds of cyclists, skaters, and walkers take it back.
The park absorbed the free concerts of the 1960s counterculture with the same equanimity it absorbs everything else. McLaren planted more than one million trees here. They are still growing.