The future of urban parks is coming to Battery Bluff in San Francisco

When you’re searching for a terrific pure expertise in a Nationwide Park website, it’s not usually you go stare at a freeway. But that’s what folks will have the ability to do beginning April 23, when Battery Bluff debuts on prime of the busy Presidio Parkway in San Francisco.

“It’s the way forward for parks in cities, proper?” says Michael Boland, chief park officer on the Presidio Belief. “We actually need to create fairness and ensure everybody has entry to parks. However in so many cities, we’re not making extra land. So sooner or later, increasingly more parks are going to should be like Battery Bluff – constructed over highways or different kinds of constructed options, as a result of that’s the one means we’ll actually have the ability to create parks for everybody.”

The six-acre area options picnic tables, 60,000 vegetation, historic gun batteries that haven’t been publicly accessible because the Thirties and sightlines rumored to be spectacular.

“The very first thing the general public goes to note is the positioning has probably the most unbelievable panoramic views – the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay, Alcatraz and Angel Island and the downtown skyline of San Francisco,” says Boland. “You’ll be able to really see the freeway coming below the park after which taking pictures out the opposite finish, which is fairly cool – there aren’t that many locations the place you may be on prime of a freeway and having a very good time.”

About these gun batteries: The Presidio was a navy base for greater than 200 years, with units of weapons aimed towards the Golden Gate. (There have been different batteries on Alcatraz and in Marin.) These particularly had been constructed between 1899 and 1902 by the U.S. Military and languished after the Thirties, as a result of freeway development partly buried them and minimize them off from the general public. With the brand new land bridge, folks will have the ability to discover them at size and be taught in regards to the historical past of conserving malicious entities out of the Bay.

“What I do know is, they had been huge weapons,” says Boland. “The Golden Gate is actually the gateway to Northern California, particularly within the nineteenth century. The entire Bay Space was an important metropolis within the west, and all this defensive infrastructure was designed to guard the doorway to the harbor.” (World Battle II would see large submarine nets strung throughout the Bay, for example, to stop intruders from slipping in and blowing up navy ship-building operations in Richmond and elsewhere.)

Battery Bluff is a part of the fruits of an immense redesign challenge that started after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which revealed how the New Deal-era Doyle Drive resulting in the Golden Gate Bridge actually wanted to get replaced. It’s considered one of two new freeway-mounted parks opening within the Presidio this 12 months; the opposite, a 14-acre inexperienced area known as the Presidio Tunnel Tops, will welcome guests in July.

Developing these pure areas on prime of a significant commuter thoroughfare took some technical engineering. “Every little thing put up there can’t be too heavy, it might’t exceed the loading capacities of the freeway,” Boland says. “And since there are limits by way of the soil depth, we needed to make it possible for we designed a park that may thrive for actually centuries. We had to ensure the vegetation would develop on this pretty shallow soil and that the drainage was good.”

As a man who frequently has to cross over I-80 in Berkeley the place he lives, Boland hopes to see extra of those road-spanning parks in years to come back.

“Think about if the freeways that bisect our cities over America had been become parkways, and there have been stunning parks constructed over them, stitching communities that had been damaged aside by the freeway system again collectively. What a robust, transformative factor that might be.”

If You Go: Battery Bluff opens Saturday, April 23 within the Presidio, San Francisco. It’s a 10-minute stroll alongside Lincoln Boulevard from the Presidio Transit Middle.

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