Pleasure Gardens vs Pastoral Parks
San Francisco's earliest parks and what they tell us about ourselves
Last fall I was walking through a field when suddenly, a tiny train went by. Beyond it, kids screamed with pleasure as they hurdled down slides on swaths of carpet. There was a maze. Giant sculptures. Several bounce houses. Pigs, horses, goats, and cows jostled for handfuls of treats from delighted toddlers. A band was setting up, and a nearby grill looked like it was preparing for a feast. Scattered around me were hundreds of pumpkins. I looked up and realized that the pumpkin patch I found myself in was also something else: a pleasure garden.
What is a “pleasure garden”?
Pleasure gardens were the predecessors to modern parks. They served some of the more basic functions of recreation before the well-tended lawns, open meadows, and clumps of trees of pastoral parks became the norm. As relayed by local treasure Gary Kamiya, the historian Philip Dreyfus described these spaces as “a unique artifice — a blend of circus, museum, rural dale, and sometimes saloon.”
Pleasure grounds became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries when crowds began to leave the countryside to fill factories and cities. Access to greenery was often scarce, as public space was often an afterthought in these rapidly urbanizing places. Pleasure gardens offered an antidote. They differed from other types of gardens by being oriented towards entertainment. San Francisco’s pleasure gardens had attractions galore, from beer halls to bandstands, shooting galleries to art galleries, aviaries, zoos, amusement rides, and more.
The first to open was Russ Garden, which, fittingly, is now the site of SOMA’s Victoria Manalo Draves Park. Harbor View Resort, The Willows, and The Chutes were also among the many raucous resorts available to early San Franciscans. The largest and most notable pleasure ground though was Woodward’s Garden, which contained everything from a 97-pound gold nugget to the grizzly bear that would later be memorialized on our state flag. Situated in the Mission between Mission and Valencia, and spanning from 13th to 15th streets, Woodward’s Garden was an irresistible combination of park, museum, zoo, art gallery, amusement park, and circus. It was San Francisco’s most popular destination for a recreational outing for 25 years during the late 1800s.
By that point, Golden Gate Park had begun to establish itself, having been founded in 1870. Perhaps not coincidentally, Golden Gate Park’s early days resemble a pleasure garden in many ways. A casino, aviary, menagerie (zoo), carousel, and bandshell were all included in early iterations of the park—many of which still exist today in one form or another.
While it may be surprising to learn that there were bears and a casino in Golden Gate Park, we shouldn’t be surprised that pleasure was what the park was optimizing for. If anything, we should be encouraged that this spirit of cultivating delight lives on, evolving to suit each new generation.
One of the early ways this evolution took shape was to move away from pleasure gardens, as a pastoral view of parkland emerged in tandem with the rise of public parks. Much of our understanding of what a park is has roots in the pastoral park. With less of a profit motive than the privately owned pleasure gardens, as well as a growing understanding of the benefits of nature, these spaces were meant to be an escape from the dirty, noisy city. The pastoral park offered respite for the visitor by providing an idealized version of nature. When you look at pictures of pleasure gardens, it’s easy to understand how this evolution took place. The pleasure garden was fun, but it was very much of the city, while the pastoral park offered an escape from it.
Today, we’re increasingly finding room for both the pleasurable and the pastoral. The bandstand concerts of the early park gave way to the Human Be-In and Jimi Hendrix playing in the Panhandle. Those concerts in the 60’s paved the way for modern festivals like Outside Lands and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass—both of which take place on meadows that were once part of a speed road made for horse racing. The glow and location of the recently departed Ferris Wheel harkened back to the Bonet Tower that stood as the centerpiece of the 1894 Midwinter Exposition (itself a version of a pleasure garden). The tower had a spotlight that was reportedly strong enough to illuminate a newspaper miles away at 3rd and Market, making the entrancing lights of the Mother Elder tree currently on display on the Promenade seem downright tame by comparison. The footprint of the Midwinter Exposition was where the Music Concourse is today, and landmarks like the DeYoung can trace their origins back to it. The DeYoung faces the newly refurbished Spreckles Temple of Music, a reminder that a good bandstand will never go out of style. In all these ways and more, the pleasure garden continues to live on.
Pleasure gardens came about at a time when there were few rules and expectations for what a park should be. They offer a glimpse of what we might create if the most hedonistic version of ourselves were offered a blank slate. The pastoral vision of a park is a remnant of a later era, one with higher ideals for how we craft spaces for people. Influenced by both the industrialism and romanticism of the time, the pastoral park was an idealized version of nature meant to nurture a more healthy and civilized society. These virtues have stuck, and many still see the pastoral park as what a park should be. Yet the pastoral park and the pleasure garden are simply of their time. What today’s parks should be is an open question, and new answers seem to arrive every day (though you’d be forgiven if you thought the answer was more pickleball courts).
If pastoral parkland is what you’re after, San Francisco provides plenty of places to enjoy, and an even greater bounty lies beyond city limits in just about any direction. Yet for the urban park, and San Francisco is among the most urban of park systems, pleasure grounds have their place too. We’d be wise to recognize the “recreation” as much as the “parks” in the naming of our Recreation & Parks Department. Recreation in the time of pleasure grounds meant many things, but at its core, it was about delight. Walking along the JFK Promenade and seeing all of the art, games, skaters, food trucks, lawn chairs, and pianos on display, the sense of delight is palpable. In this place, the pleasure ground and pastoral park embrace.
So the next time you find yourself at a pumpkin patch, Christmas tree farm, zoo, park, or festival, remember that you’re part of a long line of like-minded pleasure-seekers. And when you’re outside enjoying these delights in the company of others, keep your eye out.
You might discover the next great idea for our parks.
“This elegant park, with its delightful combination of the beautiful in nature and the wonderful in art, with the rarest curiosities of both. As a broad and airy holiday play-ground for tired pupils, as a romantic retreat for family picnics, as a pleasure-park for the quiet promenades of old and young, as a varied field of study for the naturalist, as one of the lungs through which the tired and dusty city may draw a cool, refreshing, healthful breath, and, finally, as a grand union of park, garden, conservatory, museum, gymnasium, zoological grounds and art gallery, no eastern city offers the equal of Woodward’s Gardens.”
-Bancroft’s Tourist Guide