urban legend: the ghost in the park

Posted on May 27, 2011 by fromthethicket

"ghost boots" in central park, photo from Nocturnalist-blog, 11/23/10

Stories about ghosts seem to haunt public parks.  In Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) is said to wander through the ancient forest, exiled from heaven and eternally weeping for her drowned children and her lover.

In Central Park there are the ghost boots (as per this account in the New York Times):

“There they were, just as the man had said they would be, just as they were almost every night: two brown boots.  In Central Park. On Monday. At midnight. Alone.

It was an eerie sight, the two patent mahogany-colored cowboy boots resting neatly by a green park bench in a pale wash of lamplight. According to local dog walkers, they sit there most nights, and have for years.

The Floridian November night and the fact that “Law & Order” plot lines no longer lurk behind the trees made the park a place for a perfect after-dark jaunt. Past sleeping sphinxes and the Temple of Dendur at 84th Street off Fifth Avenue, the park had gone to the dogs: free roaming pets reveled in the absence of leash laws that loosen after 9 p.m.

Lucky, a mixed breed, found the boots that night. He had a red LED light on his collar and glowed like a little Rudolf, prancing staglike around his owner, Marcus Giancaterino, a banker who had heard of the boots — though he had never seen them — from other night dog walkers. Park lore said the pair belonged to a man who lay moray-like in a bush, waiting to pounce on whoever touched the glossy shoes.

For some reason, Nocturnalist decided they were worth a visit. Mr. Giancaterino led the way, saying he doubted the boots’ existence. Midsentence, there they were, incongruous in a nightscape of crumpled leaves and Himalayan pine whose needles drooped like Spanish moss.

Lucky gamboled up to the shoes, sniffed, raised his leg, seemed to think better of it and blinked away into the brush. “It’s like art,” said Jimmy Cohen, who was passing by with his black mutt, Bogie. He said he had seen the items nightly for the past six years. Every so often, the boots were replaced by a new pair.”

via Central Park Ghost Boots – Nocturnalist – NYTimes.com.

In Golden Gate Park there is the “ghost cop” (as per many on-line chats and the occasional report in the mainstream media, like this one from The Examiner):

“The legend states that there was once a police officer that patrolled Golden Gate Park. Little is known about who he/she is except that the officer died over ten years ago. The ghost still remains in Golden Gate Park to this day.

There have been various sightings of the so-called, “Ghost Cop.” There have been no reports stating that the spirit is dangerous but be wary. The spirit can be drawn out in various ways including speeding along the roads, not having headlights on, and parking in designated zones that do not permit parking. This author does not encourage readers to attempt to draw out the ghost through these ways, as they are both illegal and dangerous. Indeed, the tickets for committing those crimes are rather expensive  .  .  .

.  .  .  if you are “fortunate” enough to encounter the Ghost Cop, you will be ticketed. But that is not what makes the encounter fortunate. First, according to the legend, if you leave the park while the officer is chasing you, the Ghost Cop will not follow you. Perhaps it is because his/her soul is tethered to the park. In addition, if one is given a ticket, the ticket will not be able to be paid. Many locals try to pay the ticket but the system does not recognize it. In fact, the officer listed does not exist and some even say that the citation passed away years ago.”

via Ghost of Golden Gate Park – San Francisco Tourism | Examiner.com.

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benches in the park for hugging?

Posted on May 25, 2011 by fromthethicket

The following editorial, quoted by Raymond Clary in The Making of Golden Gate Park, The Early Years:  1865-1906 (p. 39) is from The San Francisco WASP April 30, 1881.  Goodness gracious!

“The law-abiding people of this community were startled a few days since, and the greatest indignation prevailed at an editorial article in a contemporary, denouncing the practice of hugging in the public parks. The article went on to show that the placing of seats in the park leads to hugging, and the editor denounced hugging in the most insane manner possible.

Parties who object to hugging are old, usually, and are like the lemon that has done duty in the circus lemonade. If they had a job of hugging, they would want to hire a man to do it for them.

Let us call attention to the powerful paper, the Declaration of Independence, when it asserts that ” All men are created free and equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

When the framers of the great Declaration of Independence were at work on that clause, they must have had the pastime of hugging in the parks. Hugging is certainly a pursuit of happiness. People did not hug for wages, that is, except on the stage. It is sort of spontaneous combustion, as it were, of the feelings, and has to have proper conditions of the atmosphere to make it a success…..

A man who complains of a little natural, inspired hugging on a seat in a park, of an evening, with a fountain throwing water all over little cast-iron cupids, has probably got a soul, but he hasn’t got it with him…

The couple, one a male and the other a female, will sit far apart on the cast-iron seat for a moment, when the young lady will try to fix her cloak over her shoulders, and she can’t fix it, and then the young man will help her, and when he has got it fixed, he will go off and leave one arm around the small of her back. He will miss his arm and wonder where he left it, and go back after it. And in the dark he will feel around with the other hand to find the hand he left.

Certainly the two hands will meet; they will express astonishment, and clasp each other, and be so glad that they will began to squeeze, and the chances are that they will cut the girl in two, but they never do. Under the circumstances, a girl can exist on less atmosphere then she can while doing the washing.

It is claimed by some that young people who stay out nights and hug are not good for anything the next day. There is something to this but if they didn’t get any hugging, they wouldn’t be worth a cent anytime. They would be all the time looking for it.”

via sfpix: Benches are for hugging.

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quail in golden gate park

Posted on May 17, 2011 by fromthethicket

According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society web page:

“The haunting call of the California Quail, the California State bird, is now rarely heard in Golden Gate Park. Historically, San Francisco’s streams and coastal scrub vegetation provided the food, cover, and water necessary for healthy quail populations. As the growing city altered the natural environment, the quail survived in a few areas—Golden Gate Park, McLaren Park, and the Presidio—that preserved remnants of brushy habitat and provided food and protection from predators. Beginning in the 1980s, however, quail populations in the parks declined rapidly as new trends in park management resulted in removal of the quails’ brushy homes. Today, the city’s quail population has plummeted from more than 1,500 quail to under 12 birds in Golden Gate Park.”

via Save the Quail | Golden Gate Audubon Society.

Quail are so charismatic!  No surprise that they are the California State Bird!  They are also the perfect poster bird for efforts to restore native bird habitat in Golden Gate Park.  But I think the environmental history of the California Quail in Golden Gate Park is quite a bit more complex than the foregoing teaser implies.

The starting point for anyone interested in understanding the fluctuations of quail populations in Golden Gate Park would be A. Starker Leopold’s book:  The California Quail (University of California Press, 1977). Leopold was a professor of zoology and forestry at UC Berkeley and his book is now widely regarded as a landmark ecological study and remains the definitive study of quail in California.   In the book Leopold explains the historical fluctuations of California Quail in relation to impacts on their native habitat due changes in land use, as well as massive intentional interventions on the part of humans wanting to perpetuate them as a prized game bird.

Most interesting to me, in regards to quail in Golden Gate Park, is the fact that the quail population in California peaked between 1860-1895, the era of “settlement and crude agriculture” in California, which provided a temporary increase in the type of habitat that quail thrive in:  clearings rich in seed-bearing forbs (introduced Mediterranean species) that were perfect for quail foraging, lots of brush remaining around the edges and along riparian corridors and offering cover from predators, and plenty of trees remaining to offer safety and roosting.  Coincidentally this was just when Golden Gate Park was being developed.  And the park landscape was also designed (unintentionally) to be attractive to quail, providing a similarly ideal landscape in those years.  It was definitely an improvement on the dunes that previously dominated the Outside Lands and did not harbor many quail (if any).

It seems that the artificial landscape of Golden Gate Park supported a bloom in the quail population in San Francisco, mirroring what was happening in the state in general in the late nineteenth century.  In both cases the bloom in quail population was related to introductions of non-native plants and human-induced changes in habitat.  But then Golden Gate Park continued to support an abundance of quail even as the birds began to decline elsewhere in the state.

By 1935, when E.L. Sumner Jr. published “A life history study of the California Quail, with recommendations for its conservation and management,” (Calif. Fish & Game, 21:167-253, 275-342), quail in California were in marked decline due to a number of environmental factors, including the increasing dominance of invasive annual grasses (which are not a food source for quail), a result of overgrazing by live stock.

Yet, in Joseph Maillard’s book, Birds of Golden Gate Park (1930), quail are referred to as “abundant” in the park.  It seems that at that point, the environmental history of quail in Golden Gate Park diverges significantly from the environmental history of quail in the state as a whole.

But I lose the trail there.  I would love to know the rest of the story  .  .  . why did quail persist in the park and then what actually happened in the park to reduce the quail population so drastically at the end of the twentieth century?   If anyone has documentation of this chapter in the park’s natural history, please let me know!

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horses and the founding of golden gate park

Posted on May 11, 2011 by fromthethicket

photograph from the SFPL historic photograph collection

A horse actually played a key role in the founding of Golden Gate Park.  The story goes like this:

In the early 1870s, faced with the daunting task of establishing a vegetative cover on the sand dunes that had been set aside for the park, the young engineer in charge, William Hammond Hall, tried some techniques for dune stabilization that had been developed in Europe.  The method involved covering the dunes with planting mat and then seeding a combination of grasses, shrubs and trees.  The expectation was that the grasses would take hold in the planting mat and their roots would help keep the sand in place, forming a medium in which shrubs and trees would germinate and grow.  It was a method that essentially tried to replicate the processes of natural plant succession.  In the first experiments on the dunes of Golden Gate Park, Hall used species that had worked in France, a combination of maritime pines (Pinus nigra) and yellow broom (Cytisus spp.),  but these species failed to thrive.  So Hall and his colleagues tried adding some native lupines, which they noticed grew well locally.  The lupine proved more successful in the San Francisco coastal environment, but the pines and broom grew poorly and were soon choked out by the lupine and drifting sand.

At this point a horse saved the day.  Hall and some of his men were camped on the dunes and noticed that a horse, corralled on the sand, was scattering its feed of whole, wet barley.  By chance it rained and the scattered barley sprouted very readily, quickly covering the patch of sand with a green carpet.

This gave Hall the idea of adding barley to the seed mix they were using.  It worked to stabilize the dunes through the summer and the following winter, allowing the larger plants more time to establish themselves.  The dune stabilization was off and running!  In December 1872 and January 1873, Hall’s crew scattered a mix of barley, lupine, maritime pine and Albizia over an area of 100 acres.  And they established a nursery to give some trees a head start before planting them out in the stabilized dunes.

The rest is history!  Thanks to that horse!

(this information is from Building San Francisco’s Parks, 1850-1930, by Terence Young (pp. 84-87)

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horse stable to open in central park

Posted on May 7, 2011 by fromthethicket

horses and bicycles on main drive, golden gate park, n.d. (photo from SFPL historical photographs collection)

The following excerpt is from a recent article in the New York Times:

‘Central Park is laced with bridle paths and dotted with pastures, and its plants were once fertilized with manure. But though carriage horses trot through it, police horses occasionally patrol it, and wooden steeds gallop around the carousel, horses have not called the park home for more than 100 years.  This summer, they will return.  The Central Park Conservancy has, since last year, been overseeing the construction of a stable in the park, and it is now set to welcome its first two residents.  .  .  .

“We just thought it was really important to keep an equine presence in Central Park,” said Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the parks department, who said it was his idea to build the barn. Mounted officers are effective at crowd control, and their high visibility may be a deterrent to crime, he added.

“The park was built with bridle paths,” Mr. Benepe added. “It’s historically part of what happens in Central Park, and has over the past 150 years.”  Mr. Benepe said this might be a first step to a more expansive vision; the department announced on Tuesday that it was accepting proposals for a privately run riding center in the park.’

via Horse Stable to Open in Central Park – NYTimes.com.

This article reminds me that there’s nothing quite like a horse to evoke the nineteenth-century nostalgia that underlies our great, urban nature parks! And made me think about the absence of horses in Golden Gate Park lately. In fact, horses were a common sight on designated equestrian paths in Golden Gate Park until the Golden Gate Park stables closed in 2001, after being in operation since 1938.   For now San Franciscans have only ghostly memories of romantic carriage rides and sedate trots through the park.  But it seems that horses may return to the Golden Gate Park Stables before too long.  Local equestrians have plans to renovate the facilities.   For more information on the history of the stables and plans to reopen them:

http://www.golden-gate-park.com/horse-riding.html

http://www.bayareabarnsandtrails.org/sfr.html

golden gate park via horse and carriage, n.d. (photo from SFPL)

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chicken point: a long-forgotten story involving chickens and coyotes

Posted on May 2, 2011 by fromthethicket

view from the cliff house to outside lands, 1865 (photo source: http://www.sfimages.com/history/GGPark.html)

In The Making of Golden Gate Park:  The Early Years, 1865 – 1906, Raymond Clary recounted some fascinating anecdotes from the early history of Golden Gate Park.  Many of them have long been forgotten.  One story that caught my eye recently was about Chicken Point, a small hill that used to exist where JFK Drive now intersects Middle Drive.  It was called Chicken Point because it was occupied by an old man who lived there in a rude shack and kept chickens and geese to eke out a livelihood.  The birds roamed freely during the day and the old man rounded them up each evening into some ramshackle pens he had constructed to protect them from coyotes.  According to Clary’s account, one evening in 1871 the old man fell while rounding up his flock and broke his leg.  He was taken to the hospital and was frantic with worry about the safety of his flock in his absence.  To ease his mind, William Hammond Hall, who was then superintendent of the nascent park, appointed one of his crew to stay in the old man’s shack and mind the chickens until he returned from the hospital.  (Clary, p. 14).

I find this story so evocative of the tentative early years of the park, when Hall and his men were struggling to establish some vegetative cover on the barren sand dunes.  It must have seemed perfectly appropriate that an old man would be living a marginal life there, raising chickens.  Perhaps it was harder to imagine, in those days, the verdant, forested landscape that we now take so much for granted!

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perils of the park: man beaten in early morning attack

Posted on April 28, 2011 by fromthethicket

"Perils of the Park" National Police Gazette, 19 October 1878

Lately there have been reports of some violent incidents in Golden Gate Park, fueling official discussions about possibly restricting use of the park at night.  This echoes for me a long journalistic tradition, commencing in the nineteenth century, focusing on the perils of public parks  .  .  .  a genre exemplified by the above illustration from the National Police Gazette, published in 1878 (referring to Central Park in New York).  I’m reminded that from their inception public parks have been perceived as places of alternating “sunshine and shadow”  .  .  . potentially both delightful and dangerous  .  .  .  perhaps embodying a kind of primordial dichotomy.

The following article from the SF Examiner is indeed shocking, but I wonder whether the park is actually a more violence-prone place than other parts of the city.  Or is it just that this kind of incident plays on some visceral predisposition to experience a shiver of fear in the deep, dark woods  .  .  .  ?

“A 33-year-old man was beaten to the point of memory loss Tuesday in yet another alarming assault in Golden Gate Park during the early-morning hours, police said.

The victim said he was knocked unconscious and could not remember what happened, telling cops he’d been attacked sometime between midnight and 2 a.m., spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said.

A passerby found the beaten victim and brought him to the Safeway on La Playa Street in the Richmond district, where cops were called, Esparza said.

He was transported to San Francisco General Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. He described the suspect as a white man in his 40s with a pony tail, Esparza said.

The attack was the latest in a string of brutal violence in Golden Gate Park that led to calls for an overnight closure of the park, where transients are known to live.

Just past midnight Friday, thieving thugs pistol-whipped and stabbed a 50-year-old homeless man and set fire to his tent in the park, police said. The attack occurred in the area of Transverse Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

There have been no arrests in either case.

Last month, The San Francisco Examiner reported that a plan to close Golden Gate and McLaren parks at night had stalled with the change in mayoral administration.

As one of his final pieces of legislation, Mayor Gavin Newsom in December called for the two parks to be closed between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. daily. The plan was in response to a rash of violence and vandalism in Golden Gate Park, including the fatal stabbing of a transient, the mauling of a park visitor by a dog belonging to a homeless camper, and the destruction of 32 rose bushes and three holes at a golf course.

The park crimes reinforced the idea that “nothing good happens at Golden Gate Park in the middle of the night,” Recreation and Park Department Director Phil Ginsburg said.

Currently, visitors can be in the park at any hour, but it is against the law to sleep there. However, that law has not eliminated camping by homeless people, according to police. If the park was officially closed, cops could bring campers or loiterers to jail on trespassing charges.”

via Man beaten in Golden Gate Park early-morning attack | Mike Aldax | Crime | San Francisco Examiner.

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urban ecology: how native ants are faring in golden gate park

Posted on April 19, 2011 by fromthethicket

California gray ant, formica spp. (photo from UC IPM: http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/)

Have you been worrying about the health and safety of native ants in Golden Gate Park?  I recently realized that maybe I should be paying more attention to these small creatures.  This epiphany occurred after I read a scientific paper published in 2008 in the journal Urban Ecosystems, co-authored by Kevin M. Clarke, Brian L. Fisher (California Academy of Sciences) and Gretchen LeBuhn.  The authors begin by observing that “ants are an integral part of almost every terrestrial ecosystem, including urban environments.”  And they note that urban parks harbor a variety of ant species and may play an important role in maintaining biodiversity in the face of rapid urbanization at a global scale.  But which characteristics of urban parks best support ants and which ants are thriving in these park environments?  Do invasive Argentine ants outnumber native ant species in San Francisco’s urban parks?  With these questions in mind, the authors surveyed 24 protected natural areas within urban parks in San Francisco “including mosaic, scrub, herbaceous and forest habitats.  .  .  .  The data provide[d] insights into the distribution and abundance of ant fauna in San Francisco natural areas, as well as which characteristics of parks have the most influence on ant community composition.”

They found considerable species diversity in the areas surveyed.   “A total of 2,068 ant individuals representing 15 species were collected.”   They also found that “there was little or no impact of the Argentine ant on native ants.”

As far as landscape characteristics, they found that “natural area size and shape were not important in explaining variations in overall ant species richness and abundance  .  .  .   with many smaller natural areas harboring ant populations that are just as diverse and robust as larger areas.”  But the type of vegetative cover did appear to affect ant populations.   “A regression analysis revealed that urban forests [such as those found in Golden Gate Park] reduced ant richness and abundance.”

So, what does this study signify for Golden Gate Park?   It seems unlikely that we will start removing trees in Golden Gate Park to provide better native ant habitat.  But this study clearly illustrates (for me, at least) the complexity of urban ecology and how difficult it is to create and maintain habitat that maximizes species diversity, a measure of ecosystem health.  It makes me wonder about other efforts at habitat restoration, targeting more charismatic fauna, such as birds or butterflies in our parks.  Do we fully understand the ecological ramifications of these efforts?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I really appreciate this study of ants because it seems like the right direction.  I would love to see more of this kind of scientific research to help us better understand the habitat value of urban parks like Golden Gate Park and the relationship between native and invasive nonnative species in urban parks.

Here’s a link to the full article:  http://www.univet.hu/users/pszabo/teaching/oak/2_adag/urban_ants.pdf

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the vigor of weeds: got to admire them!

Posted on April 14, 2011 by fromthethicket

Annual bluegrass/ Poa annua

Working at the San Francisco Botanical Garden nursery, repotting native plants for the past few weeks in preparation for the annual plant sale, I’ve noticed a miniature battle going on in the pots.  It’s actually the same battle that goes on in my garden and in the lawns of the park.  It’s all about territory!  Which plants get to have the pot (or the wide open spaces of the park?)  .  .  .  the precious seedlings we plant and root for, or the hardy opportunists that leap into the voids around the edges and try to take over?

I think you have to admire the vigor of weeds!  The weed I seem to be pulling most often this month is a little annual bluegrass, Poa annua.  This is one of the most common weeds in California, happily takes over gardens and fields, golf courses and roadsides.  Although it originated in Europe, it has spread around the world.  It reproduces by seeds and thrives in disturbed areas;   treats any patch of bare earth, no matter how small, as an opportunity.   In fact, large areas of “green space” in our parks, when you look closely, consist mainly of this so-called weed.

Maybe we should learn to love it?

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great horned owl chicks wow birdwatchers

Posted on April 12, 2011 by fromthethicket

owl chicks in golden gate park (photo by Janet Kessler)

The following is excerpted from an article by Katie Worth in the San Francisco Examiner (4-9-11):

“In the mottled light behind the trunk of a pine tree, four poofs with eyes huddle together. And they’re watching.  Those poofs are in fact baby great horned owls, and for the last few weeks, they’ve been watching — and being watched by — a growing number of birders, gardeners, joggers and the occasional lucky tourist.

The nest is high in a pine tree on Strawberry Hill, the waterfall-laden lump of an island in the middle of Stow Lake  .  .  .  The nest is one of two that are common knowledge among Golden Gate Park birdwatchers; the second is near the buffalo paddocks.

Golden Gate Audubon Society member Dan Murphy, who leads San Francisco’s annual Christmas bird count, said it’s possible there are a handful of other great horned owls in the park that haven’t been spotted by birders. However, the species is territorial enough that there’s not room for many in the park.

Murphy says all of the babies are unlikely to survive. Many die in their first year, sometimes being pushed out of the nest by their larger siblings or mother if food is scarce.  “As long as there’s plenty of food, the younger ones will probably survive,” he said.  There once were also barn owls and screech owls in the park, he said, but they haven’t been spotted in a long time.”

Read more via Great horned owl chicks a hit with birdwatchers | Katie Worth | Local | San Francisco Examiner.

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