The playground at Huntington Park on top of Nob Hill, seen from the steps of Grace Cathedral. Mabel's Daddy (unlike Mabel's Grandpa) actually follows the news like a normal responsible citizen and therefore possesses the knowledge that the City of San Francisco intends to gut this place and 'renovate' it shortly. (The city goes through regular 5-year cycles of being flat broke and unable to pay for people even to mow the grass, and then of being crazy-rich and running around tearing things down and building them back up again.) This park in particular has hundreds of yards of mature privet (or privet-like) hedges surrounding it – these require at least ten years to establish and then forever-after require regular, labor-intensive trimming and care – so I will be mighty surprised if the privet survives the upcoming modernization. When Union Square (down the hill) was 'updated' during a recent earlier boom-time, the privet disappeared first – a too-traditional feature derived from French and English garden-models.
It seems safer to hope that at least the large trees might be spared, even though master-planners have a dire tendency to flatten everything before they begin, the better to service their own egos. That's why I took this premeditated picture, to document a landscape of high personal significance before the bureaucrats and their bulldozers get to work.
