BLOSSOMING WITH SPRING
Welcome to the Bay Area Bucket List, where readers suggest things to do around the Bay, and we go out and do them. Today, Joe C. asks us to check out the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park and its backstory.
Inch for inch, there's no place more beautiful in San Francisco than the Japanese Tea Garden, especially in spring. Around every corner something new amazes: Historic gates tower over stone walkways, hummingbirds sip from waterfalls, cherry trees explode in blossoms like frozen fireworks.
The wonderment continues in the gorgeous teahouse itself, which overlooks the precisely manicured vegetation and offers a variety of Japanese snacks and green tea, and the gift shop with its ceramics, colorful kokeshi dolls and fortune cookies. Yes, fortune cookies — no offense to what others have claimed, but it's likely this garden in Golden Gate Park was the birthplace of this crunchy treat in America.
“The evidence points toward (caretaker) Makoto Hagiwara introducing the fortune cookie” between 1906 and 1914, says garden supervisor Steven Pitsenbarger. “It's a modification of a Japanese senbei, or cookie, that was more savory, like a rice cracker with soy sauce in it. Makoto took that model and then turned it to American tastes — he made it sweeter.”
The Japanese Tea Garden, the oldest of its kind in the U.S., owes its existence to Australian emigrant George Turner Marsh. “Marsh was a guy who sold Japanese art. He had a store down on Market Street starting in 1876 and then expanded to have stores in Monterey, Santa Barbara, Pasadena and Coronado,” says Pitsenbarger, who's writing a book about the garden's history. “Oftentimes in association with his stores, he'd have Japanese gardens.”
Marsh knew the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition (aka the Midwinter Fair) was coming up, and thought it'd be a grand opportunity to debut a representation of Japanese life