Out-of-towners may pay more at city landmarks
Tea garden, Coit Tower among sites poised for increase
A stroll along the rolling paths of Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden and a visit to the blossoms at the Conservatory of Flowers could soon become slightly pricier for out-of-town visitors.
San Francisco park officials are considering a proposal to adjust admission fees at a handful of major tourist attractions based on how many patrons are queuing up at any given time.
For nonresident, adult visitors, admission fees for the tea garden, the San Francisco Botanical Garden, the Conservatory of Flowers and the elevator to the top of Coit Tower could be raised by up to 50% during peak times and discounted by up to 25% when demand is slow. The proposal would not affect prices for San Francisco residents, and the fees charged for visiting seniors and youth would also remain the same.
The San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission’s Operations Committee recommended that the city approve the proposal in a unanimous vote Thursday. It still requires approvals from the full park commission and the Board of Supervisors. If that happens, park officials expect to implement the new pricing model in September.
The proposal has become a part of the city’s broader thinking around financial justice. Extra money brought in by the flexible model would allow the park de
partment to offer free admission to about 225,000 lowincome San Franciscans at the Japanese Tea Garden and the Conservatory of Flowers — admission to the botanical garden is already free to city residents.
Dana Ketcham, director of permits and property management for the park department, also said the flexible pricing would help ease congestion at major attractions, particularly at Coit Tower, whose tight corridors tend to jam with people during peak hours.
“This is not just about revenue generation, it’s about balancing when people come,” Ketcham said.
The tea garden, the botanical garden, the Conservatory of Flowers and the Coit Tower elevator all cost $9 for nonresident adults. With flexible pricing, a 50% maximum price increase would bring ticket prices to $13.50.
On a recent weekday afternoon, the proposal was met mostly with a shrugging indifference by some tourists who’d come to visit the tea and botanical gardens.
“What’s a few extra dollars?” said Chris Barnes from Newcastle, England, who was visiting the tea garden. “If you’ve come all this way — 26 hours door-to-door for me — another few dollars isn’t going to make any difference. You’re going to go or you’re not.”
Near a cluster of delicate purple morning flag flowers in the botanical garden, Leonie Zott, a biology student at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, said she’d gladly pay extra for the experience.
“Botanical gardens take a lot of work, so it’s worth it.”
She was more circumspect about the tea garden, which she also visited.
“It’s so much smaller. It’s less garden for the money,” she said.
A citizens group called Protect Coit Tower is opposing the proposal, partly because the flexible pricing model could create “logistical chaos for the operators of the extremely tight space inside Coit Tower, where there are already many logistical challenges to navigate in a jam-packed and bustling narrow space,” the group said in a letter to the Operations Committee.
Jon Golinger, a representative of Protect Coit Tower and a San Francisco political activist, said the flexible pricing would lead to “more lines, more confusion, more questions, not less” at the landmark attraction. He recommended keeping the $9 nonresident adult ticket price, but asking for additional donations.
The committee also approved a proposal Thursday to raise the baseline admission fee for the tea garden to $10 for nonresident adults to finance major renovations to the garden’s main pagoda. The extra dollar would raise an estimated $400,000 a year, and the repair work would cost between $1.5 million and $2 million. Park officials intend to lower the price back to $9 once fundraising for the work is completed.
“It’s not a forever charge,” Ketcham told the committee.
The Friends of the Japanese Tea Garden has pledged to put up 15% of the total costs for fixing up the pagoda.
Among the attractions considered at Thursday’s meeting, the Japanese Tea Garden is by far the most popular for tourists, drawing more than 400,000 out-of-town visitors annually. Built in 1894, it’s the oldest public tea garden in the country, Ketcham said.
The pagoda, she said “is in need of significant renovation.”
The park department hired Architectural Resources Group to examine the pagoda. David Wessel, a principal at ARG who specializes in historic conservation, said inspectors discovered structural weaknesses and broken joints “probably due to earthquake movement and wind loads.”
The pagoda has also been damaged by wood rot and needs new paint, Wessel said.