Saturday, April 20, 2013

Already Doomed

The playground at Huntington Park on top of Nob Hill, seen from the steps of Grace Cathedral. Mabel's Daddy (unlike Mabel's Grandpa) actually follows the news like a normal responsible citizen and therefore possesses the knowledge that the City of San Francisco intends to gut this place and 'renovate' it shortly. (The city goes through regular 5-year cycles of being flat broke and unable to pay for people even to mow the grass, and then of being crazy-rich and running around tearing things down and building them back up again.) This park in particular has hundreds of yards of mature privet (or privet-like) hedges surrounding it – these require at least ten years to establish and then forever-after require regular, labor-intensive trimming and care – so I will be mighty surprised if the privet survives the upcoming modernization. When Union Square (down the hill) was 'updated' during a recent earlier boom-time, the privet disappeared first – a too-traditional feature derived from French and English garden-models.

It seems safer to hope that at least the large trees might be spared, even though master-planners have a dire tendency to flatten everything before they begin, the better to service their own egos. That's why I took this premeditated picture, to document a landscape of high personal significance before the bureaucrats and their bulldozers get to work.