On the west side of San Francisco, stretching all the way from the Pacific Ocean to a point near the geographic center of the city, lies a rectangular park that covers 1,017 acres-174 more than New York's Central Park. This, covered with horse stables, over 1 million trees, and every kind of garden one could imagine, is Golden Gate Park. Running the length of 52 city blocks, Golden Gate Park receives more than 75,000 visitors on an average weekend, a welcome and beloved respite from San Francisco's bustling city life.

The park began life in the 1860s, after major mining discoveries and the transcontinental railroad had transformed San Francisco from a Pacific seaport to the most important metropolis on America's West Coast. Its citizens, while proud of their isolation from the East Coast, were keenly aware of their city's shortcomings in comparison to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, one of them being a great urban park. That, combined with the growing population crowding the city, led to the population demanding a secluded place to which they could escape from their working lives. However, the land that the city deeded for park development in 1870 was almost universally despised: it was a long swath of sand and shore dunes that locals knew as the "Outside Lands."

However, the park's visionary planners-William Hammond Hall and his assistant (and successor) John McLaren-blanketed the barren seaside with thousands of trees, grasses, and plants from all over the world. Fifteen years after its initial creation, Golden Gate Park had transformed into a pastoral oasis, accommodating up to a fifth of the city's population in a single afternoon. Its first buildings, the Conservatory of Flowers and the Fine Arts Building (later known as the De Young Museum), arrived in 1879 and 1894, respectively.

Today, Golden Gate Park is a symbol of the city and a point of civic pride. In addition to its many gardens and the De Young Museum, the park offers an incredible breadth of things to do, including fishing pools, golf courses and other athletic fields, and outdoor monuments and sculptures. The highlights presented here are some of the most popular and interesting, but represent a tiny fraction of what's available in Golden Gate Park.

The east entrance to the park is John F. Kennedy Memorial Drive, which is a busy thoroughfare but has a pedestrian and bicycle path running alongside it all through the park (and is closed to automobiles on Sundays). A short walk up JFK leads to the Conservatory of Flowers, a large glass-and-wood greenhouse that is the oldest public conservatory in the Western Hemisphere. The Victorian building serves as an enormous "flower museum," showcasing approximately 1,700 plant species from dozens of countries-including highland and lowland tropics, aquatic plants, and potted plants. In particular, the conservatory has the world's largest collection of high-altitude orchids, with 700 of 1,000 known species.

Farther down JFK Drive, the road intersects with Tea Garden Drive, which leads to several of the most famous and widely visited sites in the park. The first is the Music Concourse: an open plaza filled with maple trees and three large fountains. On the southwest end of the Concourse is the Spreckels Temple of Music, a large neoclassical bandstand built in 1900. Every Sunday afternoon at 1:00, the Golden Gate Park Band-a concert band that covers everything from opera to marches to swing music-gives a free two-hour performance at the Temple of Music.

The Music Concourse is sandwiched between two major museums. The California Academy of Sciences, one of the largest natural history museums in the world and the home of the Steinhart Aquarium and the Morrison Planetarium, is currently closed for major reconstruction. (It will reopen in 2008, and until then the museum's exhibits have a temporary home in San Francisco's South of Market district.) The other museum is the De Young Museum, the first fine arts museum in San Francisco (first built in 1894, although badly damaged in the 1989 earthquake and completely redesigned and rebuilt in 2005). The architecture of building by itself has merit as art: its postmodern structure is covered entirely in sheet copper and resembles a low earthen cliff in the park's natural setting-with the notable exception of a twisted 144-foot tower and observation deck at the top. Inside the museum are American decorative pieces, textiles, and paintings from the Rockefeller Collection of American Art, as well as African and Oceanic collections.

Behind the De Young and the Temple of Music is one of the most famous and exotic spots in Golden Gate Park: the Japanese Tea Garden. The five-acre garden, built in 1894 for the San Francisco World's Fair, is a carefully manicured landscape of paths, ponds, bridges, and sculptures, with a small teahouse in the center. The garden proper is comprised of a variety of Chinese and Japanese plants, including cherry trees, bonsai, azaleas, and topiary trees cut in the forms of dragons and Mt. Fiji-it was specifically designed as an overly romanticized Western vision of Asian gardens. And, although the garden is immensely popular, it is generally sparsely populated and free of noisy guided tours.

Upon returning to JFK Drive just north of the Tea Garden, you will soon arrive at Stow Lake and Strawberry Hill. Stow Lake is a circular, manmade lake, in which you can rent a number of different kinds of rowboats, paddleboats, and electric boats and see sweeping views of the park's interior. At the center of the lake is Strawberry Hill, an island that rises up to the highest point in Golden Gate Park. Strawberry Hill is accessible by two stone bridges that cross Stow Lake on either side. The winding trails leading away from the bridges culminate at the top, which offers a panorama of the entire park. At the edge of the island sits an isolated Chinese moon-watching pavilion, from which you can feed the ducks who swim the lake.

Continuing through the park from Stow Lake, one passes through many of the recreational features of the park: bike trails, running and walking paths, baseball diamonds, soccer fields, and fly casting pools. There are also three meadows: Speedway, Marx, and Lindley Meadows, all popular with picnickers and volleyball players. You can also see the Golden Gate Park Stables, formerly a public horseback riding school and now a long-term equestrian community. Nearby is Spreckels Lake, a smaller lake that is reserved for radio controlled model power boat and sail boat racing (although gas-powered boat racing takes place on the southern side of the lake).

Near the western end of the park is a paddock that holds the Golden Gate Park Bison: a herd of 11 of the large animals, introduced to the park in 1891 when bison were endangered. First-time visitors are often startled at the sight of intimidating wild animals in a big-city park, but their reserve in Golden Gate Park is a point of great pride for San Franciscans.

Finally, just past the golf course and archery ranges on JFK Drive is the west edge of Golden Gate Park-the Pacific shore. Here, by the ocean, are the Beach Chalet-home of the Golden Gate Park Visitor Center and the Beach Chalet Brewery and Restaurant-and the Cliff House, a restaurant, bar, and observation point that rises above the ocean waves on a seaside cliff. In particular, the Cliff House is a popular destination for whale-watchers and history buffs (not only is the House itself historical, it also overlooks the ruins of the Sutro Baths, used by bathers at the turn of the 20th Century), and is renowned for its delicious California cuisine.

These favorite spots in Golden Gate Park could be enough to have you exploring and enjoying the park for hours; however, there are scores of other opportunities for fun and interest, making the park an invaluable place to venture. Sundays are best, with no cars running through the park, but any day offers an abundance of unique experiences. Golden Gate Park is accessible by Muni train or taxi, and nearly all bus or coach tours of San Francisco spend plenty of time in the park (and usually make lots of stops). If you have time during the busy ICA conference calendar, don't miss this beautiful urban oasis.

Photos:
Conservatory of Flowers published under the GNU Free Documentation License
Japanese Tea Garden by SFCVB/Phillip H. Coblentz
Bison by Jesse Leake
Cliff House by SFCVB/John Lund