INTEL Museum, Friday, April 9th, 2025
By Peter Hartlaub, Culture Critic April 3, 2025
It was 1885 in San Francisco, and much of the city was still an unrealized dream.
Golden Gate Park was still mostly saplings and sand dunes. The Richmond District was cemeteries to the east and windswept rocks to the west. The cheapest path to Lands End was a steam railroad that chugged precariously over San Francisco’s northern cliffs.
But the reward upon arrival was huge. The city’s wealthiest man had opened the 20 acres surrounding his home to the public. There were statues of animals and gods, flowers everywhere and stunning views looking over the edge of a castle-like parapet — looming high above the ocean and beach below.
Sutro Heights Park was once the most posh corner of the city. And 140 years later it may be the most mystical. I visited last Friday and found a transportive space where ghosts from the past still dominate. And yet the park fits modern San Francisco — arguably even better than in its glory days.
John Martini, a historian and retired park ranger, who first visited Sutro Heights Park in the 1950s, calls it “a survivor from another time period.”
“It’s evocative of a different time that had a huge impact on San Francisco,” Martini said. “And you don’t have to know much about the history to get those feelings, the lonely, windswept, romantic feelings of an abandoned site.”
This mystical San Francisco park was once a posh getaway. (It still is)
Greg