An ‘unsightly, sad’ place made beautiful
Even in a city as dense and strangled as San Francisco, there are still slips of land that go untended, where trash builds up and weeds stretch out, places that people pass but don’t bother to see.
That was quickly becoming true for a little parcel of earth in the Dogpatch, off Illinois and Mariposa streets. Just across the way from her office, landscape architect Topher Delaney watched its unraveling.
The land, owned but ignored by the Port of San Francisco, hadn’t always been that way. For years, Michael Denman, a port fixture, had taken care of the space, which sits alongside the entrance to the Ramp restaurant. But he’d grown older, his efforts fewer and the landscape bleaker.
About a year ago, after she couldn’t stand to watch the
disrepair continue, Delaney took over.
“Why should we have these unsightly, sad places until somebody decides what to do with them?” she asks. “We should take action and make them as beautiful as we possibly can.”
So that’s what she did, and now the space is full again — full of succulents and flowers, full of sculptural flourishes and places to rest, full of people eating lunch or just passing through. Most of this has been paid for by Delaney or the Ramp, though others have offered up donations of objects and plants.
Maybe it’s a small thing to revitalize such a small place, but there is something comforting about it, Delaney says. “Life is all right. Things are tended. Someone is taking care of something.”
There may still be those who refuse to see the space as they pass by, but they are missing a garden full of detail and care. There are the wind chimes hung high in the pine tree, the “R+F” scratched into the ear of a prickly pear cactus, the iridescent blue mussel shells scattered about, the concrete slabs with the outlines of river deltas etched onto their surface.
Mostly, recently, they’d miss a sculpture by artist Chong Hu, added about a month ago, that offers the whole space a sort of focal point. On the stump of a once-great tree, he’s placed a big, flat rock, and from that rock blooms a messy tangle of metal, an echo of the barbed wire just overhead. And then, with a single contorted bar, he’s written out the phrase “You are the material of transformation boundless by boundary.”
It takes a moment, and looking at it from a few different angles, to get the words just right, but they fit the space perfectly. The boundaries here are obvious — the road, the concrete, the building just behind it — and, yet, this garden, this work in constant progress, feels boundless.
Delaney approached Hu, whom she’d worked with before, to create the piece specifically for the garden. She couldn’t offer him money, but he didn’t mind. He spent about $100 on materials and then spent 40 hours sculpting the piece. “It’s only my time,” he says, with complete sincerity.
There’s another echo of the garden hidden deeper in Hu’s piece. Just as Delaney twisted a forgotten bit of land into something beautiful, Hu draws attention to materials that most people would dismiss as having little aesthetic value.
“Nothing is ugly,” he says. “Just find the right way to use it.”