The National Park Service unveiled the new Tunnel Top Park in the Presidio with much fanfare last week, including a dedication by House Speaker, San Francisco’s own Nancy Pelossi. The renovation and building project cost $118M, with over $95M of it raised in private donations, which is a good thing. But I have to question just what those well-heeled donors got for their lucre.
I took my family to the “Outpost”, the newly opened children’s playground and learning center, donated by the Bennihoff foundation, a charity founded by Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff. They hired the same designers who created the award-winning Highline Park in NYC. Unfortunately the concepts that worked in NYC, fails in San Francisco.
In NYC, the Highline injected the natural world into the urban jungle and industrial decay of Manhattan’s Meat Packing District. The Presidio was and is a natural wetland area bordered by pine meadows. Injecting the “natural world” into this landscape is redundant.
The designers literally repositioned and moved rocks, boulders, and stones to create a simulation of a natural landscape in a natural landscape. It seems odd that the only difference between some of the rocks designated as a play space and nearby rocks used for erosion control is a rope fence and art-installation info plaques.
It puzzles me that now kids are encouraged to climb on play structures that look like piles of wooden poles and ropes, while these same kids would have been told to keep away in the ruins of the U.S. Army barracks and Air Corps hangers that used to occupy the same space. A play installation was named “Fallen Tree” and was just literally a fallen tree.
I’m a bit torn because I prefer slightly dangerous playgrounds where kids learn how to be safe by tripping and scraping a knee once and a while. I just wonder if $118M or $98M or even just $98K needs to be spent creating the playgrounds of the past; an empty lot with junk in it.
The Presidio is a historic former U.S. Army base that was decommissioned in 1994 and turned over to the National Park Service.