If you’re seeking a great natural experience in a National Park site, it’s not often you go stare at a freeway. Yet that’s what people will be able to do starting April 23, when Battery Bluff debuts on top of the busy Presidio Parkway in San Francisco.
“It’s the future of parks in cities, right?” says Michael Boland, chief park officer at the Presidio Trust. “We really want to create equity and make sure everyone has access to parks. But in so many cities, we’re not making more land. So in the future, more and more parks are going to have to be like Battery Bluff – built over highways or other kinds of built features, because that’s the only way we’ll really be able to create parks for everyone.”
The six-acre space features picnic tables, 60,000 plants, historic gun batteries that haven’t been publicly accessible since the 1930s and sightlines rumored to be spectacular.
“The first thing the public is going to notice is the site has 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 can actually see the freeway coming under the park and then shooting out the other end, which is pretty cool – there aren’t that many places where you can be on top of a freeway and having a good time.”
About those gun batteries: The Presidio was a military base for more than 200 years, with sets of guns aimed toward the Golden Gate. (There were other batteries on Alcatraz and in Marin.) These in particular were built between 1899 and 1902 by the U.S. Army and languished after the 1930s, because freeway construction partly buried them and cut them off from the public. With the new land bridge, people will be able to explore them at length and learn about the history of keeping malicious entities out of the Bay.
“What I know is, they were big guns,” says Boland. “The Golden Gate is really the gateway to Northern California, especially in the 19th century. The whole Bay Area was the most important city in the west, and all this defensive infrastructure was designed to protect the entrance to the harbor.” (World War II would see giant submarine nets strung across the Bay, for instance, to prevent intruders from slipping in and blowing up military ship-building operations in Richmond and elsewhere.)
Battery Bluff is part of the culmination of an immense redesign project that began after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which revealed how the New Deal-era Doyle Drive leading to the Golden Gate Bridge really needed to be replaced. It’s one of two new freeway-mounted parks opening in the Presidio this year; the other, a 14-acre green space called the Presidio Tunnel Tops, will welcome visitors in July.
Constructing these natural areas on top of a major commuter thoroughfare took some technical engineering. “Everything put up there can’t be too heavy, it can’t exceed the loading capacities of the freeway,” Boland says. “And because there are limits in terms of the soil depth, we had to make sure that we designed a park that would thrive for literally centuries. We had to make sure the plants would grow in this fairly shallow soil and that the drainage was good.”
As a guy who regularly has to cross over I-80 in Berkeley where he lives, Boland hopes to see more of these road-spanning parks in years to come.
“Imagine if the freeways that bisect our cities over America were turned into parkways, and there were beautiful parks built over them, stitching communities that were broken apart by the freeway system back together. What a powerful, transformative thing that could be.”
If You Go: Battery Bluff opens Saturday, April 23 in the Presidio, San Francisco. It’s a 10-minute walk along Lincoln Boulevard from the Presidio Transit Center.
The Bay Area boasts near-endless options for outdoor adventures, tasty bites and unexpected day trips. So we created the Bay Area Bucket List, a project that asks our readers to help us find the best activities.
Send us your ideas below. Then we’ll post a sampling so readers can vote and help us pick what cool activities to explore. Be sure to include your contact info, so we can ping you if we select your idea to investigate.
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Wondering about those reader votes? Check below for our latest voting round.
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