San Francisco is insanely rich in open space: parks and playgrounds, wild hillsides, beaches and coastal bluffs, rocky outcrops, and enchanting outdoor stairways.
Just about everyone who’s lived here longer than a week has a list of favorites and delights in discovering new ones. But relatively few San Franciscans — or visitors — have ever set foot in one of our most edenic public gardens, a beautifully conceived exclave of paradise in the middle of Golden Gate Park and one of the country’s most impressive examples of the art of landscape design.
Just steps away from the California Academy of Sciences, the National AIDS Memorial Grove is easy to miss. Hidden in a vale behind dense foliage, the Grove is all but invisible from streets and sidewalks bordering it.
Five of its six entrances are as hard to find as a parking spot in North Beach, and most of the signs identifying it are as self-effacing as a shy teenager. In some cases, you have to look down at your feet, if you happen to be standing in the right place, where entrances are marked by nothing more than the Grove’s name etched in fieldstone.
It doesn’t help that the name itself is misleading. While there is indeed a characteristically moody grove of coast redwoods at the east end of the seven-acre site, the “Grove” also features a spacious wedge of grass open to the sky, a woodsy ravine bisected by a gentle creek, and chaparral-like slopes enlivened with colorful flowers and overhanging trees.
Maintained to the highest standard by a privately subsidized full-time city gardener and hundreds of volunteers, this park within a park offers a master class in the art of urban landscape design.
In recognition of this achievement the Grove won a prestigious Rudy Bruner Silver Award for Urban Excellence in 1999, an accolade later conferred on the redesign of iconic Columbus Circle in New York and on Chicago’s hugely popular Millennium Park.
The Bruner Foundation identifies Michael Boland, now Chief of Park Development & Operations at the Presidio Trust, as “designer of record.” But in an interview in his office in one of the restored and adapted barracks lining the Parade Ground at the Presidio, Boland stressed that collaboration forged the look and feel of the Grove — collaboration with other unpaid professionals and with the hundreds of volunteers and stakeholders who, working together in the 1990s, cleared, reimagined, and replanted the site.
Conceived in 1989, the Grove serves its main purpose — to provide “a dedicated space in the national landscape where millions of Americans touched directly or indirectly by AIDS can gather to heal, hope, and remember” — admirably, even brilliantly. Nature is foremost.
There are no statues in the Grove or monumental centerpiece, though one had been commissioned, promoted, and ultimately rejected when partisans of the status quo vigorously objected.
By design, the Grove is as much a destination for inspiration, pleasure, and joy as for remembrance and solemn reflection.
Permanent memorials consist mostly of simple etched boulders and stone terraces, many now weathered and blistered with lichen. The Grove was consciously designed to accommodate such paid tributes, as well as naming opportunities—The Maples, Dogwood Dell, North Dry Creek Trail—both to serve its mission and help support it.
Temporary memorials also abound: fresh-cut roses placed in the water-filled depression atop a stone wall, hundreds of origami paper cranes hanging from a dogwood tree, stacks of balanced Zen rocks, the fading photograph of a loved one.
We’re living in an era of memorial proliferation and arguably, memorial glut and fatigue. The National AIDS Memorial Grove, lacking the celebrity of say, the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, is hardly a magnet for the masses, most of whom have not been touched by the AIDS crisis personally.
And unlike Pearl Harbor or 9/11, world-changing events that literally exploded in the twinkling of a morning, AIDS was a slow-motion disaster that took years to infiltrate the national consciousness.
By design, however, the Grove is as much a destination for inspiration, pleasure, and joy as for remembrance and solemn reflection. As its creators understood, these are not opposites. Some come to the Grove to recall, mourn, and celebrate lost lives. But its orchestrated beauty also welcomes weddings, elaborate sit-down feasts, and the regular convening of exuberant flaggers, those West Coast whirling dervishes who gather to spread, twirl, and flutter gaily colored silk wings to pulsing dance music.
Frisbee players, sun worshipers, dog walkers, birdwatchers, garden lovers, solitary readers, ecstatic climb-on-everything toddlers, joggers, millennial picnickers, and nature pilgrims like me are repeat visitors. As intended, all feel right at home in the National AIDS Memorial Grove. The place celebrates life as much as the memory of lives.
The best way to experience this paragon of landscape design is to start at its most prominent entrance, marked by a big engraved boulder, at the corner of Bowling Green Drive and Nancy Pelosi Drive. (San Francisco’s longtime congresswoman was an early and effective backer of the Grove.) Look for the narrow walkway zigzagging downward through lush foliage and flowering plants to the Circle of Friends, where over two thousand names, some famous, are etched in the terrace in tribute to lives touched by AIDS.
Continue into the redwood section, where sequoias, newborns compared with old-growth giants of Muir Woods and the North Coast, nonetheless strike every chord of mood and magic associated with those celebrated forests. On sunny days, light skims and dances among the shadows.
In fog or rain, visitors are transported to the Cretaceous 100 million years ago when dripping redwoods much like these covered vast swaths of North America, Europe, and Asia. Round stones suggest a sinuous dry creek bed at the base of the trees, adding mystery and a fitting sense of longing to the composition — a simple but powerful gesture.
Even on days when the marine layer hovers or fog clings to the canopy, the far end of the redwood section entices with apertures of light reminiscent of a million enchanted boundaries where forest meets meadow. The evocation of real-world natural places and experiences in California is a key feature of the National AIDS Memorial Grove and a testament to the skill and sensibilities of its designers.
Walking west, tall visitors have to duck beneath shaggy redwood boughs to reach the expanse of well-tended lawn framed by protective, densely planted slopes on two sides. This open space, aptly called “the Meadow,” is big enough to practice the 50-yard dash but feels intimate, a world away not just from the teeming city, but from the rest of Golden Gate Park. This is where dogs romp, flaggers twirl, and Millennial picnickers sit in tight circles talking, laughing, and plotting — enjoying ephemeral membership in the Tribe of Youth.
Continuing west across the lawn, stone steps beckon visitors onto earthen paths that lead upward through a narrow ravine. A trickling creek flows through this little canyon under the canopy of what looks and feels like oak woodland, recalling a thousand places like it in the Bay Area and elsewhere in California. The harmonies of this oasis are such that tree ferns, calla lilies, and other horticultural exotics growing in the mix of native species fail to break the spell.
The creek itself is fake, relying on a silent hidden pump. There are other artificial creeks and waterfalls in San Francisco, including several nearby in Golden Gate Park and the elaborate one at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio, but these delightful contrivances are unmistakably false. The faux stream in the AIDS Memorial Grove, though modest, is the best simulacrum I’ve seen anywhere outside of Berlin’s Viktoriapark.
The National AIDS Memorial Grove benefits from the good bones of its predecessor, Golden Gate Park’s de Laveaga Dell.
The ravine paths ascend to Fern Grotto, a stone terrace surrounded by lush plantings, recalling a California habitat familiar to many hikers in the Coast Range and Sierra foothills but out of reach to most. Two sets of rustic stone steps lead up and out of the Memorial Grove. Exiting this secret garden is a little startling, like waking from a wonder-filled dream: It’s not that the real world lacks beauty, only that its familiarity, routines, and urgencies tend to jam our innate sense of wonder.
Deer run and bear pit
The National AIDS Memorial Grove benefits from the good bones of its predecessor, Golden Gate Park’s de Laveaga Dell, named for Jose Vicente de Laveaga, a Spanish settler and early philanthropist who donated the land to the city. Under park superintendent John McLaren’s leadership, the Dell acquired some of the features incorporated in the present-day Grove, including the redwoods, ravine, and creek. At one time, its attractions included a lake where the lawn is today, a deer run, and even a bear pit.
De Laveaga Dell remained a popular destination for San Franciscans into the middle of the 20th century, but competing priorities and changing tastes led to a decades-long decline of the site, which became an overgrown and largely forgotten dumping ground.
Low-lying, the area often flooded, though this did not discourage illegal camping and drug use, contributing to the area’s reputation in the 70s and 80s as the most dangerous part of the park.
When a small group of San Franciscans began lobbying in 1989 for a “serene place … dedicated to all lives touched by AIDS,” according to the Grove website, city leaders offered six prospective locations in Golden Gate Park. The “motley crew” of early AIDS memorial activists, as Michael Boland affectionately calls them, soon rallied around de Laveaga Dell, and officials quickly agreed. After all, a highly motivated outside group could bring a bleak landscape back to life and at the same time liberate Recreation and Parks Department spending for other priorities.
Treasure in the ruin
Boland cites three factors that drove the Grove’s winning design: the de Laveaga site itself, community involvement, and the participation of professional architects, landscape architects, and other specialists.
About the site, Boland singles out “that incredible creek channel … and some great natives in the understory — the oak trees in the back, for example.” This is a key point. Once they removed brambles and decades of accumulated garbage, Boland and others recognized “great raw material” in the Dell’s topography and many original plantings. “The site was … revealed to us as it was cleaned up.” They found treasure in the ruin.
The second factor, the community of volunteers, activists, the bereaved and ailing, played a central role at every turn. “It was amazing,” Boland recalls. “At that time the community was in such a state of pain and crisis. Everybody was dying. We were all losing friends and family. The minute we said we were going to build this AIDS Memorial Grove and started having workdays, hundreds of people would come every weekend to pull weeds and clear the site.”
Boland, a native Californian who earned Masters degrees in Landscape Architecture and City and Regional Planning at Berkeley a few years earlier, first learned about the nascent plan to create an AIDS memorial at a Gay Pride booth. “At that moment, I had an uncle who was incredibly sick and was declining rapidly. One of my mentors … a kind of spiritual guide … was dying.”
As time passes, it is increasingly difficult to fathom the depth and extent of the crisis. Between about 1982 and 2002, over half a million Americans died of AIDS, including many famous in their time: artist Keith Haring, Studio 54 cofounder Steve Rubell; fashion designers Perry Ellis and Halston; photographers Herb Ritts and Robert Mapplethorpe; Broadway director Michael Bennett; tennis pro Arthur Ashe; writers Isaac Asimov and Harold Brodkey; dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey; network news anchor Max Robinson; lawyer and early Trump mentor Roy Cohn; and actors Rock Hudson, Anthony Perkins (“Psycho”), and Amanda Blake (Miss Kitty in “Gunsmoke”), among many others. Noted non-Americans also died of AIDS in these years: Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, French philosopher Michel Foucault, and English rocker Freddie Mercury, to name just three.
‘An incredibly collaborative experience’
Michael Boland describes the third factor as “great minds in the world of place-making … with experience around spatial design, planting design, the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act], and materials.” These fellow professionals included landscape architects William Peters and Todd Cole and architects Ira Kurlander and Connie de Laveaga Stoops, a great-niece of the man who contributed the land in the 19th century. Another key participant, Clare Cooper Marcus, then on the faculty at the Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Berkeley, is a renowned expert on the social and psychological implications of landscape design and had been one of Boland’s professors. Her husband Stephen Marcus died of AIDS.
Volunteers did most of the physical work, week after week, year after year.
“We were just bringing all of these forces together and sort of marshaling them to the outcome, which is the Grove,” Boland recalls. “It was this incredibly collaborative experience, both because there were so many designers involved but also because these three parties — the site, the community, and this cadre of designers who were leading the effort — were co-creators. So it was really an interesting process.”
Designers led the effort, but other volunteers did most of the physical work, week after week, year after year. They also provided an early blueprint for the memorial. Boland explains: “We let people know … that they should start to use the Grove for memorial services because we wanted to see how they used it. We started this series of rituals associated with the workdays like the ‘noon gathering’ or the ‘morning coffee’ because we wanted to see how people and the space could interact. We wanted to create a design that felt natural but that would also support the kind of activity the community needed. … It had to operate in so many different ways. People began to use the space in ways we never imagined.”
You cannot visit the Grove without experiencing what all this process, the years of work, the enduring commitment to maintenance, have wrought: an enchanting retreat in our restless city where the living and dying seek grace in natural beauty. Which is to say, a place that speaks to every open heart. But the Grove also succeeds as a showcase public garden serving many purposes, none separated from its identity as a memorial but by design integrated, overlaid, synonymous nearly.
The Grove encourages pleasure and delight as well as contemplation, activity as well as stillness. Beyond this achievement, it is remarkable and significant that by evoking California’s long-receding redwood forests, grasslands, oak woodland, and chaparral, the Grove adds a third dimension, one readily evident and cheering to Californians who know and treasure these landscapes. But wait! There’s more: The visible palimpsest of the Grove’s origins as the de Laveaga Dell lends this remarkable venue a backstory as rich and complex as an individual life.
The National AIDS Memorial Grove is a versatile masterwork of landscape design as spectacular in its way as it is sublime. It belongs on every San Franciscan’s list of favorite outdoor places.