Thursday, February 3, 2011

Portals


Another stop on yesterday's walking tour of Golden Gate Park was a famous lakeside monument, reached by crossing stepping stones at the base of this squat and turbulent artificial waterfall. On a curving path halfway around the lake, in surrealistic isolation, the curious visitor will find a white marble edifice, quaintly known as the Portals of the Past.









In the nineteenth century this architectural fragment was the entrance to a rich man's Nob Hill mansion. After all the houses in that part of town were destroyed in the great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 the rich man's widow offloaded this surviving bit onto the park, and in the park it has sat ever since, gently weathering.