Solving sand dune challenge in making Golden Gate Park
As Golden Gate Park celebrates its 150th birthday this year, it’s hard to imagine how bleak its original terrain was.
Threequarters of its 1,019 acres consisted of sand dunes, some covered with scrub brush, some completely barren. With the exception of a few squatters, it was unoccupied.
William Hammond Hall submitted the winning bid to carry out the first survey of the park, as related in the previous Portals. He described one of its few homesteads, occupied by a man who lived on a little hill near the intersection of presentday John F. Kennedy Drive and Middle Drive.
“There was a ramshackle,
tumbledown little house, where an old, heavilywhiskered hermitlike man lived, with several dogs for companions,” Hall wrote. “Chickens and ducks which he raised there, and large frogs which he caught in the ponds out towards the beach and sold to the French restaurants, yielded him a livelihood . ... A few jackrabbits, cottontails and quail found refuge on the scrubcovered hills, and sustenance among the sparse herbage of the hillocks; and coyotes, from the San Miguel hills, visited the neighborhood of the chicken ranch nightly and with sufficient persistence to keep the old hermit and his dogs busy scaring them away.”
As Raymond H. Clary writes in “The Making of Golden Gate Park: The Early Years 18651906”: “Had someone had the temerity to suggest at that time that within fifteen years Golden Gate Park would become famous, he or she would have been rushed off to an insane asylum.”
Even if this “Great Sand Waste” could somehow be transformed into an oasis of grass and trees, it was so remote that it was questionable whether anyone would ever visit it. As Clary notes, for more than 10 years after work on the park started in 1870, “public transportation to the new park was nonexistent.”
The Geary Street Cable Road stopped at Central Avenue (now Presidio). From there, it was a long, dreary plod through sand dunes to the corner of D Street (now Fulton) and Stanyan. The only other public transportation was a horsecar line that went out Eddy to Pierce, after which it was a 10block walk down unpaved streets to the Panhandle at Oak and Baker streets.
According to Clary, this remote area was inhabited by unsavory characters who had been evicted from San Francisco by vigilantes more than 15 years earlier.
“A walk through the area was sure to subject any lady to cheers, jeers and insults, so it is understandable why the sand dunes were an unpopular choice for a park,” Clary writes. “Indeed, the area was so disreputable that the sheriff authorized early park workers to carry guns on their way to and from the new park.”
After he conducted his survey in early 1871, Hall was named park superintendent. He now faced the Herculean task of transforming this desert into a California version of Central Park or the Bois de Boulogne.
The biggest problem he faced was the dunes. It was impossible to grow trees and grass on them, and San Francisco’s prevailing westerly winds constantly blew the sand to the eastern end of the park site, where the drifts threatened to overwhelm the 270 acres of developable land. That acreage included the only native trees in what became the park — the beautiful live oaks that still stand near the horseshoe pits.
The only way to stabilize the dunes, it was widely believed, was to build a massive seawall at the ocean end of the park, which would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars — far more than the city could afford.
But Hall had a different and much cheaper solution in mind. As Terence Young notes in “Building San Francisco’s Parks 18501930,” Hall had learned of successful and inexpensive European efforts to stabilize sand dunes when he worked as a coastal engineer. French engineers had been able to control spreading sand at the mouths of rivers by planting grasses on the dunes closest to the ocean. The grasses’ powerful roots held the sand in place, while their blades blocked the flying grains.
Europeans had also been able to stop inland dunes from drifting and established vegetation on them, by planting shrubs and trees simultaneously. The shrubs grew first, and the trees took root.
Hall and his team tried the combination used by the French engineers, maritime pines and yellow broom, but the mixture failed to hold the sands. So they turned to local plants.
Noticing that native lupines were holding the sands farther inland, they planted a mixture of the imported broom and maritime pine, plus lupine seeds. This combination worked better, but still failed: As Hall later wrote, “The tiny pines died as seedlings, and the broom was being choked by the lupine when the advance of the sand drift completely covered the little plantation during the second winter after sowing.”
A lucky accident provided the solution to the problem. While Hall and his workers were camping out on the dunes for a month, one of their horses was corralled on a patch of sand. Its feed consisted of whole soaked barley seeds. One day, the horse spilled its feed on the sand.
As luck would have it, the rains soon came. When Hall happened by the spot a week later, the barley seeds had sprouted and “clothed several yards of loose sand with a vigorous green growth,” he wrote.
This gave Hall an idea. He conjectured that the quicksprouting barley would hold the sands through the winter and spring. This would give time for the lupine to establish itself, further stabilizing the dunes through the summer and following winter. By then, larger plants like broom would have put down roots.
In late 1872 and early 1873, Hall and his associates carried out a trial, scattering a mixture of barley, lupine, maritime pine and albizia distachya seeds over a 100acre area. After the experiment succeeded, Hall’s team began using the technique, with some refinements, on all the shifting dunes.
In the next two years, they stabilized almost all 700 acres of drift sands in the park. Hall had solved the riddle of the dunes for just $30,000.
As Elizabeth McClintock writes in “The Trees of Golden Gate Park and San Francisco,” “In only five years, Hall achieved what is, perhaps, the most remarkable landscape transformation anyone has ever seen.”
Hall would face other challenges in the five years he headed Golden Gate Park. But the greatest obstacle had been overcome. Thanks to a horse’s spilled nosebag, the seeds of what would become one of the world’s great urban parks had taken root.