Now You Have, Even More of the Rest of the Story - Part II

You may have been to Golden Gate Park or Coit Tower, even brought visiting relatives and shared with them your "insiders" information.  But most likely you are unaware of the whole story behind some of San Francisco's most famous and iconic locations.

Golden Gate Park is one the few grand urban spaces the average person knows by name, like Central Park in New York City or Hyde Park in London.  As the city evolved from a Gold Rush frontier port, to a major America metropolis, the need for a green space soon became paramount.

Even Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who famously designed New York City’s Central Park, said a park on the scale needed for a growing city would never take shape in the location the city was planning.  In the 1860s the western third of the city was colloquially referred to as the, ”Outside Lands” as it was covered by miles and miles of sand dunes.

Golden Gate Park

Legend has it that the first superintendent William Hammond Hall rode his horse to a particular spot on one of sand dunes, gave him a feed bag, and got to work integrating different plant species to see what would take root.  After weeks of nothing working, he happened to notice a little patch of vegetation where his horse stood.

Surprisingly and ironically everything he tried didn’t take root, but the combination of whatever fell out of the feed bag, poop, and the horse naturally shifting stamped whatever was underneath him into the ground. That accidental alchemy resulted in something taking root.  And from that little patch, William Hammond Hall was able to design the park now that he knew what worked and what didn’t.  From that happy accident, one of the great urban parks in the world was born.

The TransAmerica Pyramid building is well known as being synonymous with San Francisco.  Its shape alone is as easily identified as a silhouette of the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Big Ben in London.  Even James Bond had a rather painful interaction with it in the film, A View to a Kill.  However when its design was made public, there was such an outcry that prominent San Franciscans immediately expressed their outrage.

The TransAmerica Pyramid

Allen Temko, the San Francisco Chronicle’s architecture critic called the designs, “Authentic architectural butchery.  This building would be wrong in Los Angeles, where it was hatched, or Las Vegas, where it belongs, or in Dallas, where buildings vie for attention.  It certainly doesn’t belong in San Francisco, which is sensitive and easily hurt.”

Some called it the, “Splendid Splinter.”

The state assembly representative at the time, John Burton said the TransAmerica Pyramid would,” Rape the skyline of San Francisco.”

Ouch!

But Mayor Joe Alioto begged to differ.  He felt what a lot of people were feeling about post-war skyscrapers, “There is no reason that San Francisco should have a monopoly on rectangular slabs.”

It is similar to film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Volkswagen. Two other cultural phenomena which were decried, then accepted, then beloved.   When it was first revealed to the public, the TransAmerica Pyramid was reviled as a blight on the burgeoning skyline.  Fast forward 50 years and it has become a beloved iconic structure, as it is as prominent on post cards as the Golden Gate Bridge or cable cars.

As the late radio personality Paul Harvey used to say, "Now you have, the rest of the story."