Sutro Heights Park is an historic public park in the Outer Richmond District of western

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. It is within the

Golden Gate National Recreation Area The Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) is a U.S. National Recreation Area protecting of ecologically and historically significant landscapes surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area. Much of the park is land formerly used by the United ...

and the Sutro Historic District. It is located above the Cliff House in the

Lands End Land's End ( kw, Penn an Wlas or ''Pedn an Wlas'') is a headland and tourist and holiday complex in western Cornwall, England, on the Penwith peninsula about west-south-west of Penzance at the western end of the A30 road. To the east of it is ...

area, with views of the Seal Rocks, Ocean Beach, and the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the conti ...

History

Review of reviews and world's work (1890) (14598310127)

The park is on the site of the former "Sutro Heights" estate of

Adolph Sutro Adolph Heinrich Joseph Sutro (April 29, 1830 – August 8, 1898) was a German-American engineer, politician and philanthropist who served as the 24th mayor of San Francisco from 1895 until 1897. Born a German Jew, he moved to Virginia Cit ...

, a

Comstock Lode The Comstock Lode is a lode of silver ore located under the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, a peak in the Virginia Range in Virginia City, Nevada (then western Utah Territory), which was the first major discovery of silver ore in the Unit ...

silver baron, and a major land owner/developer in and

mayor of San Francisco The mayor of the City and County of San Francisco is the head of the executive branch of the San Francisco city and county government. The officeholder has the duty to enforce city laws, and the power to either approve or veto bills passed by ...

.U.S. National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA): Sutro Heights History
/ref> In 1881, Adolf Sutro purchased of undeveloped land south of Point Lobos (San Francisco) and north of Ocean Beach at the western edge of the city. It included a promontory overlooking the Pacific, with scenic views of the

Marin Headlands The Marin Headlands is a hilly peninsula at the southernmost end of Marin County, California, United States, located just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge, which connects the two counties and peninsulas. The entire area is p ...

Mount Tamalpais Mount Tamalpais (; ; Miwok: ''Támal Pájiṣ''), known locally as Mount Tam, is a peak in Marin County, California, United States, often considered symbolic of Marin County. Much of Mount Tamalpais is protected within public lands such as Mou ...

, and the

Golden Gate The Golden Gate is a strait on the west coast of North America that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. It is defined by the headlands of the San Francisco Peninsula and the Marin Peninsula, and, since 1937, has been spanned by t ...

. Sutro built his mansion on a rocky ledge there, above the first Cliff House. The grounds consisted of a spacious turreted mansion, a carriage house, and outbuildings set in expansive

garden A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is ''control''. The garden can incorporate bot ...

s. The estate dominated the Lands End area, with an elaborate entrance gate. He spent in excess of a million dollars to recreate an Italian style garden. It was filled with fountains, planted urns, and statues, Victorian flower beds, hedge mazes,

parterre A ''parterre'' is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths. Typically it was the part of ...

s, forests of trees, a glass plant conservatory, and other garden structures. Vista points included the "observation plaza" overlooking the Cliff House, and the "Dolce far Niente Balcony," a long terrace-like structure along the cliff overlooking Ocean Beach. To provide garden decorations, he imported over 200 concrete replicas of Greek and Roman statuary from Belgium, to provide examples of European culture to visitors.Sfcityguides.org: Sutro Heights Park
/ref> By 1883 Sutro opened his estate's gardens, named Sutro Heights, to the public and allowed strolling the grounds for the donation of a dime. That small fee helped to pay the 17 gardeners, machinists, and drivers he employed to maintain the grounds. Other features he developed on his land holdings in the Lands End area include: the Sutro Baths (1894-1964), the second and elaborate Victorian style Cliff House (1896-1907) and an amusement park named Sutro Pleasure Grounds at Merrie Way (1896-1898). To provide inexpensive transportation for visitors to these he built a passenger steam train from downtown San Francisco to Lands End. Adolph Sutro died in 1898, land rich but cash poor following his frustrating tenure as Mayor of San Francisco. His daughter Emma Sutro Merritt moved to the Sutro Heights estate then. As she aged she could not maintain the grounds, and the house became seriously deteriorated, though she lived there until her death in 1938. Throughout the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, people took away many of the rose garden plantings and vandalized the statues.

Park

The Sutro family donated the estate to the City of San Francisco in 1938. In 1939 the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

(WPA) demolished the residence. Remaining statuary was removed, with the exception of The Lions, copies of those in London's Trafalgar Square at the entrance gate, and a statue of Diana the Huntress (Artemis), a concrete copy of the Louvre's Diana, itself a Roman copy of a Greek statue. The city park then opened. Sutro Heights Park is no longer a city park, it is part of the

. It is maintained by a neighborhood group, Friends of the GGNRA, many of whom live on the surrounding streets.Parksconservancy.org: Park Stewardship in San Francisco
/ref>

References

External links

NPS−Golden Gate National Recreation Area: Visiting Lands End

— ''digital guidebook''. {{authority control Parks in San Francisco Golden Gate National Recreation Area Urban public parks History of San Francisco Historic district contributing properties in California Richmond District, San Francisco National Register of Historic Places in San Francisco Parks on the National Register of Historic Places in California Protected areas established in 1938 1938 establishments in California

History

Park

See also

References

External links