Taking a Shine to Golden Gate Park

By CRAIG NAKANO

Sept. 2, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAN FRANCISCO — If there’s one place that embodies all that is weird and welcoming and wonderful about the City by the Bay, it very well may be Golden Gate Park.

It’s here, after all, where civic leaders had the foresight in 1870 to set aside 1,017 acres--an expanse larger than New York’s Central Park--as a recreational haven. It’s where 200,000 San Franciscans sought emergency shelter after the 1906 earthquake and fire. It’s where a different generation runs the Bay to Breakers, the annual 71/2-mile race and costume party where some bold and not-so-beautiful entrants streak to the finish line naked. And it’s where, according to local lore, the fortune cookie was invented.

It’s also where you’ll find people walking, biking, skating, rowing, lawn bowling, playing tennis, fly-fishing and Ultimate Frisbee throwing on a patch of land that tourists often overlook. Add the Steinhart Aquarium, the Strybing Arboretum, the Asian Art Museum (considered one of the best in the country), the popular Japanese Tea Garden and the historic Beach Chalet restaurant, and you have a bustling urban oasis.

It wasn’t always this way. In the mid-1990s, years of budget cuts and neglect had left the park a dark and depressing outland. Homeless people covered the meadows with mini tent cities. Drug dealers used the gardens as office space. Visitors--smart ones, at least--stayed away, replaced by feral cats that spread through the park faster than the evening fog.

In the last four years, though, police have cracked down on drug dealers and relocated the homeless. The city boosted the budget for municipal parks by 78%, with Golden Gate as one of the biggest beneficiaries. Add to that about $12 million raised by the nonprofit Friends of Recreation and Parks, and the luster is back in Golden Gate.

In July my partner, Todd, and I spent a weekend touring the museums and getting lost on paths that crisscross fields and forested hills, past glassy ponds and landmarks of San Francisco’s quirky past. By the time we boarded the plane home, we had gone eye-to-eye with the aquarium’s goofy alligator gars, admired 9th century Japanese pottery, sniffed pungent skunk currant, cracked open an unfortunate fortune cookie and dodged flashbacking hippies in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The weekend was by turns odd and interesting and entertaining--in short, very San Francisco.

Golden Gate Park stretches like a long beach blanket from the Pacific Ocean east to the Haight. The land was mostly sand dunes until John McLaren, park superintendent from 1890 to 1943, planted more than a million trees and shaped its current form.

Renting recumbent bikes Saturday morning for an overview of the grounds would have been a good idea were I not descended from a long line of people with the navigational instincts of Mr. Magoo. A few bad turns landed us at the wrong end of the park, 50-something uphill blocks from where we were staying.

Todd would have yelled at me, but the quadriceps-searing, lung-busting climb left us too parched to speak. At least the odyssey provided a nice introduction to the landscape. We passed Stow Lake, where rowboaters circled a little island, and zoomed by the Conservatory of Flowers, an imposing 1878 replica of London’s Kew Gardens Palm House. (The conservatory, named one of the 100 most endangered cultural heritage sites by the World Monuments Fund, is undergoing a $19.2-million renovation to repair damage from a freak windstorm six years ago.)

After all that pedaling, we dragged our dirty, disheveled and slightly dazed selves to the Haight for lunch, where I figured we’d fit right in. We zigzagged between map-toting tourists looking for 1960s nostalgia and tie-dyed, lost-in-time hippies looking for the 1960s, period.

Mr. Magoo here managed to steer us toward a promising Thai place called Siam Lotus. The pleasant decor, respectably dressed crowd and good food (pad Thai, grilled lemon grass chicken) made me feel a little guilty for looking so much like a local.

The afternoon itinerary started with the Asian Art Museum’s wide-ranging exhibits: intricately carved wooden doors from India, Ming Dynasty porcelain, painted Japanese shoji screens of deceptive simplicity. The museum bustled, perhaps because its days in the park are numbered. The structure was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and rather than make extensive repairs, it’s moving to a new location near City Hall. Visitors have until Oct. 7 to catch the collection here; it won’t reopen in the new digs until fall 2002.

Next door is the Japanese Tea Garden, full of koi ponds and waterfalls, manicured juniper bushes and expertly trimmed bonsai. Even in July, the 40-foot Oriental maples were already an autumnal orange, tricked by San Francisco’s fickle seasons.

One of the garden’s early caretakers is said to have invented the fortune cookie here, although a Chinatown bakery also lays claim to that piece of history. We plopped down in the teahouse and munched cookies and sipped jasmine tea as our afternoon exercise (arm curls: cup to mouth, cup to mouth).

I saved my fortune cookie for the end: “You are capable, competent, creative, careful. Prove it.”

Dinner was in the Sunset District, just beyond the park’s southern border. Park Chow is a casual Italian place with a few Asian dishes thrown in. San Francisco Chronicle critics rank it as one of the top 100 restaurants in the Bay Area, but almost everything on the menu is less than $10.

After the Caesar salad, Todd tackled a heavenly four-cheese lasagna served on a bed of fresh spinach, and I dug into a spicy orange-miso noodle dish with shiitake mushrooms. I’ve eaten spicy, I’ve eaten orange and I’ve eaten miso, but never in the same dish. It was interesting in a good way.

Having been lost enough for one day, we returned to Inn 1890, which is laid-back by B&B; standards. Guests come and go as they please, thanks to electronic security codes for the front door, and help themselves to snacks in the kitchen.

Our room, $119 plus tax per night, had a 12-foot ceiling, a hardwood floor, mustard-colored walls and its own bathroom. We were a short stroll from the contrasts of Haight Street (head shop, Starbucks, head shop) and a block from the park’s eastern gates.

That made it a convenient starting point for Sunday, when we set out for Strybing Arboretum. The 55-acre site is a maze of trails with 7,000 kinds of plants. We got lost--again--this time on the Redwood Trail, finding our way just in time to bump into a dirty, disheveled and slightly dazed dude talking to the trees. (“He must be drunk--I hope,” another hiker commented.)

We moved on, inhaling the scent of Siamese ginger in the Garden of Fragrance, cooling off among dewy ferns in the New Zealand garden, and admiring as best we could the odoriferous purple flowers of the skunk currant.

Brunch followed at the 1925 Beach Chalet. Downstairs has been converted into a park visitor center with restored 1936 Works Progress Administration murals depicting sunbathers toweling off by the Golden Gate Bridge and fishermen plucking crabs from nets. Upstairs, I ordered a grilled chicken Caesar salad, and Todd had the grilled chicken riso salad with Gorgonzola, walnuts, currants and rice over a bed of romaine. Gauging by the prices, you pay for the view, but with such a fine panorama of Ocean Beach, we didn’t mind.

Time allowed two more stops. The first was the California Academy of Sciences, a modest complex that encompasses a natural history museum, the Morrison Planetarium and the Steinhart Aquarium. We stuck mostly with the Steinhart, intrigued by the Fish Roundabout. Visitors sit in the middle of a 100,000-gallon doughnut-shaped tank, watching Pacific mackerel, jacksmelt, yellowtail and California barracuda play follow-the-leader in an endless circle. Looking a bit confused, a family of white sea bass swam in the wrong direction; I figured they must be distant relatives of mine.

From there, it was on to Lloyd Lake and, of course, more getting lost before finding the trail to a portico standing at water’s edge. This is “Portals to the Past,” five columns that were the only remnants of railroad executive A.N. Towne’s Nob Hill mansion to survive the 1906 earthquake. It’s the sole public quake memorial in San Francisco.

“Portals” isn’t the most impressive sight, little more than cracked marble with traces of graffiti on the facade. But the surroundings couldn’t be more fitting: a park that has endured tough times, dusted itself off and now waits patiently, ready to be rediscovered.

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Budget for Two

Round-trip air fare, L.A. to Oakland--$201.00

Inn 1890, two nights--271.32

Bike rentals--20.00

Admission, Asian Art Museum--14.00

Admission, Japanese Tea Garden--7.00

Tea and snacks, tea garden--8.50

Admission, California Academy of Sciences--14.00

Lunch, Siam Lotus--18.00

Dinner, Park Chow--31.41

Brunch, Beach Chalet--28.84