kers San
Francisco with refreshing green.
Farther uptown is Union Square, in the center of the hotel and retail
district. Over on the other side toward North Beach, at the foot of
Telegraph Hill, is Washington Square, one of the recreation spots of the
Latin Quarter, with church spires outlined above its willows. A park
that will command the entire harbor is being built on top of Telegraph
Hill.
In the Western Addition, Richmond, Sunset and Mission districts are many
parks that provide resting places for mothers, their infants in
go-carts, and romping children.
Golden Gate Park is the aureole of San Francisco's recreational haunts.
It was saved to the city in the beginning by Frank McCoppin and C. R.
Dempster and made an area of living beauty by John McLaren, Scotch
landscape engineer, who is Superintendent of Parks.
From the panhandle at Baker street to the Ocean Beach, the park
stretches like a massive gold-green buckler enameled with lustrous gems.
There are 1013 acres in the park, its Main Drive, including the
panhandle, being 4 1/2 miles long.
Whether you loiter along tree-shaded alleys, or stroll through
rhododendron dells in the late Spring, when the landscape fairly quivers
with color, there is an ineffable loveliness about Golden Gate Park. Its
opulence is heightened by its contrasts, as are all well-considered
landscape designs. Treading the expanse of daisy-starred emerald lawns,
loitering under the elms in the Band Concourse, or wandering through the
dwarf trees patterned against humpback bridges in the Japanese Tea
Garden, you find new lures in Golden Gate Park with each successive
visit.
The de Young Memorial Museum, the Academy of Sciences, the Steinhart
Aquarium, Stow Lake, the Dutch windmills, Huntington Falls, the aviary,
the buffalo paddock, the bear pit, the children's playground with its
goats and donkeys, the tennis courts, the harness racing in the Stadium,
the bowling on the green--almost every rod of the thousand odd acres in
the park unfolds unexpected allurements.
On a hill in the park is the granite cross which commemorates the first
church service in the English language on the American continent, held
in 1579 by Sir Francis Drake's chaplain on the coast just north of the
Golden Gate.
A copy of Rodin's bronze Thinker is here. The "Portal of the Past,"
taken from a Nob Hill residence after the fire of 1906, is seen in
idyllic whiteness against a clump of Irish yews across t
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