Golden Gate Park
— — the fog the city walks into on summer afternoons.
Not only on a wall.
“A long rectangle of green running three miles east from the Haight to Ocean Beach. Cypress and eucalyptus hold the wind off the Pacific. The Conservatory of Flowers sits white and glass on the east end; the Japanese Tea Garden keeps its small bridges and koi pond a few minutes' walk away. In summer the fog comes in over the Sunset most afternoons and the park goes cool and grey by four. The bison still hold the western paddock. — from the studio
Golden Gate Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Golden Gate Park covers 1,017 acres in the western half of San Francisco, running about three miles east to west from the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood to Ocean Beach, and half a mile north to south. It is larger than New York's Central Park by roughly twenty percent. The land was set aside in 1870 on what was then shifting sand dunes; the engineer William Hammond Hall laid out the plan, and John McLaren ran the park as superintendent for fifty-three years from 1890 until his death in 1943. McLaren's planting of windbreak cypress and eucalyptus is much of what holds the park today.
Through the summer the marine layer pushes in off the Pacific most afternoons, riding the western edge of the park and the Sunset District in a slow grey ceiling that locals call Karl. Average July highs in the western park sit around 18°C, ten degrees cooler than the inland hills the same afternoon. The eucalyptus and Monterey cypress that McLaren planted as windbreaks are what let the inner gardens stay still. Mornings are often clear; the fog reaches the bandshell by mid-afternoon and the park goes quiet under it.
The park holds the Japanese Tea Garden, opened in 1894 and the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States; the Conservatory of Flowers, dating from 1879; the de Young Museum; the California Academy of Sciences with its living roof; and the Botanical Garden's 55-acre collection. JFK Drive between Stanyan and Transverse closed to private cars in 2022 and is now a continuous pedestrian and cycling promenade through the eastern park. Admission to the park itself is free; the museums and the tea garden carry their own fees.