What is a park?
Most of us probably think first of a green space with trees, picnic tables, playgrounds or campgrounds. There could also be a creek, river or reservoir — and hiking trails, too, maybe leading to waterfalls or mountaintops.
But the Bay Area’s spectacular variety of parks is on another level, with open spaces, recreation areas, islands, historic sites, gardens, wetlands, urban “pocket parks,” neighborhood playgrounds and Pacific beaches, along with a national seashore, 350 miles of trail circumnavigating San Francisco Bay and several world-famous tourist destinations. It’s a system that compares to any major metropolitan area anywhere in the world, parks experts say.
The best part is that with our mild Mediterranean climate, people can hike, bike, ride horses, rock climb, surf, hang glide, bird watch and study plants year-round — even in cold-weather months. Especially in cold-weather months, even, since thanks to the ever-climbing summer heat a November hike in the Bay Area can often be infinitely more enjoyable than one in late July.
Many of our Bay Area parks engage with history, culture and the people who’ve lived here, including Native Americans, Spanish missionaries, American settlers, Civil War soldiers, immigrants, Rosie the Riveters and famous writers, musicians, civil rights leaders and federal prisoners.
But it almost always starts with nature, whether the it be a park that stretched across thousands of acres of redwood and oak forest or one that occupies a city block amid urban high-rises. Even parks created around historic homes, forts, ships, factories, mines or a Cold War missile site tend to be set in some of the Bay Area’s most scenic locations. And our unique ecosystem is one reason there are so many different kinds of parks in the first place.
“I think that any story about parks in the Bay Area has to begin with biodiversity,” said Victoria Schlesinger, editor-in-chief of Bay Nature Magazine. “It’s that biodiversity that is born out of our really dynamic, diverse habitats in California and specifically in the Bay Area. Those habitats are the reason we all love parks here.”
Parks also wouldn’t exist here in such abundance if communities had not come together, in a very organic way, to protect favorite outdoor spaces for the benefit of the public, said Jessica Carter, director of parks and public engagement at Save the Redwoods League. “Parks and natural public spaces are a really integral part of the greater Bay Area landscape and culture,” she said. “You don’t have to go far to find a park and people enjoying time outdoors in a wide variety of ways that are meaningful to them.”
The desire for public parks actually originates from the revolutionary ideals on which this nation was founded, said Breck Parkman, a retired senior archaeologist with the California State Parks. By the mid-1800s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and “all men are created equal” translated into a growing imperative here and nationally to protect the natural environment, both for its own sake and for people’s health and happiness. Over the past century, residents in the Bay Area have shown their willingness to devote public money and other resources to create and maintain parks for the common good.
“The populace here has always been so much more aware and so consistently supportive of conservation efforts, voting over and over again to support these things, and the result of that is we just have some of the most spectacular public parks in the country,” said Sara Barth, executive director of the Sempervirens Fund. Given the history of Silicon Valley innovation, local parks enthusiasts also have been pretty inventive in devising ways to protect, fund and manage these resources, she added.
It’s hard to conceive of a time when public parks did not exist. From ancient Persia to Renaissance Europe, only royalty or the very rich had access to lush gardens and vast tracts of land for leisure and sport. Industrialization in the 1800s changed that, with the establishment of large urban parks in London, Paris, New York and San Francisco to offer a respite to overcrowded conditions.
Transcendentalist writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, rhapsodized over nature representing the divine spirt of God. Similarly, religious leaders on both coasts urged the growing middle-class to travel to the countryside to hike, camp and experience a sense of spiritual renewal and improved physical health, according to Kevin Starr, the late historian and California state librarian.
In 1860, Rev. Thomas Starr King, the newly appointed minister of the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco, returned from a transformative trip to Yosemite, writing and preaching about the need to protect it from encroaching civilization. He and others convinced Abraham Lincoln, amid the horrors of the Civil War, to sign legislation making Yosemite the first wilderness area in the United States set aside for preservation and public use. Initially ceded to California to be its official first state park, Yosemite reverted back to federal control in 1906.
In the Bay Area, John Muir and other early naturalists soon turned their attention to another precious California resource: coastal redwoods. Indeed, concern about rampant logging in the Santa Cruz mountains, following the Gold Rush and the opening of the transcontinental railroad, ignited the region’s parks movement, according to Barth.
As people started realize that this once “vast, unending forest” could soon disappear, a “real shift in mindset” occurred, accompanied by a growing appreciation of the trees themselves, “as a remarkable feat of nature to be in awe of and to celebrate,” Barth continued. With a focus on saving old-growth forests in Big Basin, San Jose photographer Andrew P. Hill and the newly formed Sempervirens Club lobbied the state to purchase 2,500 acres there to open a park in 1902.
Another Bay Area nonprofit, the Save the Redwoods League, took the battle for forest preserves statewide, leading California to establish a statewide parks system in 1927. The following year, the public overwhelmingly voted for a $6 million bond to acquire more land for state parks. This new system also would include historic and cultural sites around the Bay Area, such as the Bear Flag Monument and General Vallejo’s Petaluma adobe in Sonoma County.
“It’s like they tossed this rock into a pond, and the ripples were not just the protected acres at what is now Big Basin, but it spurred the creation of a state park system here in California, which became a model for what other states have since emulated,” Barth said.
Meanwhile, Bay Area cities, towns and counties also got into the parks business, if only to create leafy town squares as civic gathering spots. San Jose had grander ambitions, turning more than 700 rugged acres in Alum Rock Canyon into one of the state’s first municipal parks just two years after San Francisco opened Golden Gate Park in 1870.
The Great Depression in the 1930s provided impetus for even greater parks expansion. Franklin Roosevelt initiated the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Work Progress Administration as part of the New Deal, putting destitute Americans to work by building roads, dams, bridges, libraries, schools — and parks.
Even during this national crisis, “Americans rolled up their sleeves, stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and worked to improve our nation,” Parkman said. The WPA upgraded municipal parks in San Francisco, while also building Berkeley’s aquatic park and rose gardens there and in San Jose and Oakland.
Meanwhile, the “CCC boys” installed stonework camp stoves and the Summit Museum at Mount Diablo State Park and built trails and the fire look-out on top of Mount Tamalpais. They also crafted the historic, wood-timber headquarters building at Big Basin State Park, which sadly was among buildings destroyed in the CZU Lightning Complex wildfires of 2020.
CCC and WPA labor also was crucial to the establishment of the East Bay Regional Parks District. Launched in 1934, this special district became a national model for how to balance public access with protecting thousands of acres of watershed, experts say. For four of the original parks — including Tilden and the future Dr. Aurelia Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park — CCC and WPA workers built trails, restrooms, bath houses and even a botanical garden in the hills above downtown Oakland. More than 90 years later, the district has expanded to 73 parks in Contra Costa and Alameda counties, encompassing vast wilderness areas, major reservoirs, historic buildings and scenic shorelines.
The environmental movement of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s spurred the next wave of major conservation efforts. Santa Clara County formalized its parks department in 1956 to eventually encompass 28 parks, including Almaden Quicksilver County Park, Guadalupe Reservoir and Joseph D. Grant County Park. The Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space was founded in 1972 to create a future 70,000-acre “greenbelt” of wetlands, grasslands and redwood forests stretching across San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
That same year, a consortium of local residents, conservation groups and politicians successfully lobbied for a federal bill, signed by Richard Nixon, to establish the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The bill allowed the National Park Service to buy up some of the Bay Area’s most spectacular real estate from the U.S. Army, eventually opening public access to Alcatraz, the Marin Headlands and the Presidio. The GGNRA, which also includes Fort Point, Chrissy Field and Muir Woods, is now one of the largest urban park areas in the world.
To be sure, parks here face challenges, including threats from wildfires, periodic budget cuts and, more recently, political intrigue in Washington D.C. But they also continue to expand and evolve, with periodic news about a park acquiring new acres of open space or creatively reclaiming land in a former military base, industrial area or even under a freeway. These days, parks serve as hubs for public education and research on environmental sustainability and strive to make themselves as accessible as possible to the largest number of people.
As Barth put it, parks don’t “just happen.” And, even once a park is established, managers have to help people “experience it in different ways as recreational needs change,” she said, adding, “It’s an ongoing process.”