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Golden Gate Park

Park · Golden Gate Park, California

The park runs between Fulton Street on the north and Lincoln Way on the south, from Stanyan Street west to the Great Highway, with the Panhandle carrying on east between Oak Street and Fell Street to Baker Street. The National Register nomination gives the property as 1,017 acres and describes the park as roughly a rectangle, half a mile wide and three and a half miles long. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 15 October 2004, reference number 04001137.

History

William Hammond Hall surveyed the site in 1870 and was appointed the park's first superintendent in 1871, serving from 1871 to 1876 and again from 1886 to 1889; William Bond Prichard held the post from 1876 to 1881, and F. P. Hennessey and John J. McEwen from 1881 to 1882. John McLaren became superintendent in 1890 and served until his death in 1943. In 1871 Frederick Law Olmsted wrote to Hall that the conditions were so peculiar and the difficulties so great that he regarded the problem as unique, and that it must be solved, if at all, by wholly new means and methods, requiring invention rather than adaptation. A man-made forest of over 30,000 trees covers the park, primarily Monterey Pine, Monterey Cypress and eucalyptus; in the eastern part some of the bedrock hills are covered with oak woodlands. Structures put up and later taken away include the First Superintendent's Lodge of 1874, the Casino restaurant of 1881, removed in 1896, the Aviary of 1890, the Suspension Bridge of 1891, and the Richmond-Sunset Sewage Treatment Plant of 1937, removed in 1996.

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