San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Relief from city’s grit and grime awaits in cloud
A new month, a new lunar year. The sun was shining, the street trees were blooming. Just the time for a walk around downtown San Francisco to see what’s new. How’s San Francisco doing these days? Only one way to find out.
The beginning of the trip was not auspicious. The Muni bus shelter at 30th and Mission streets was occupied by one of San Francisco’s lost souls, a man wrapped in blankets surrounded by his motley possessions, dead asleep.
A trip on the 14 bus is a bumpy ride past the best and worst of San Francisco. Between 16th and 24th streets, Mission Street is a graffiti-covered mess. But the rest of the street is something else. I was interested in the something else.
Everybody knows about San Francisco’s failures. I took a walk in Salesforce Park, which is one of the city’s successes.
I got off the bus at First and Mission right in front of Salesforce Tower, up a couple of flights of stairs into a different city.
It’s a park that’s up above the city — four stories above the street, four blocks long, 5.4 acres, planted with 600 trees and 16,000 plants. It’s open in the daytime, everyone is welcome, and it’s a delight.
It’s a surprise as well. Like most people, I stayed away during the COVID years when downtown and the Financial District was a ghost town. But now it’s a new day.
The first impression you get is that you have arrived into a hall of mirrors. The park is surrounded by glass and steel towers, buildings reflecting each other. It is like a separate San Francisco with an older San Francisco visible in the distance, or down the streets below.
The second impression is green: green lawns, trees and plants. The third is blue, the deep color of a winter sky. There was no fog the afternoon I was there, only a watery sunlight.
There were plenty of things to see, including a unique “Bus Fountain,” 1,000 feet long on a slender path that shoots up little jets of foamy water every time a bus in the terminal below moves. It looks like bus magic, but it turns out the water jets are activated by sensors on the bus terminal floor. Environmental artist Ned Kahn designed it.
There were plenty of people, walking the paths, sitting on benches and chairs. There were little kids, some in a children’s play area with a “recess cart” where there were books, games, crayons and paper to draw pictures.
Some people were sitting in the Salesforce Park amphitheater in a group — an office lunch or maybe an outdoor business meeting.
But never mind that. There are other events: Zumba Wednesdays, storytelling for small kids, music on Thursdays and yoga on Friday afternoons.
I was tempted, however, by quieter things: the brewpub operated by the Barebottle Brewing Co., which has outlets in Bernal Heights and Santa Clara. A craft beer and an Argentine empanada in a midcity park. Not bad.
Salesforce Park is part of the multibillion-dollar Transbay transit center. It’s owned by the public Transbay Joint Powers Authority. Salesforce operates the park as part of a $110 million sponsorship deal. It’s unique in the city: a public park with a commercial sponsor. There is a significant security presence and no sign of the street problems that haunt San Francisco.
There is also a cart in one corner of the park filled with books: a park library. I picked a book by Richard Dillon, an eminent Western historian, and sat there to read.
It was very pleasant, and the afternoon soon slipped away. I wondered what Dillon, who wrote dozens of books about the old West, would have thought about someone reading his book in a city park surrounded by glittering glass towers and sponsored by a company that works in the cloud.