Salesforce Park, in downtown San Francisco, sits atop the Salesforce Transit Center, above Salesforce Plaza, in the shadow of Salesforce Tower. It is a lush, five-and-a-half-acre rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows and meticulously landscaped, climatically harmonious, drought-tolerant flora. It contains a prehistoric garden of cycads, ferns, and Wollemi pines; plots dedicated to the plants of Chile, South Africa, and Australia; and a small wetland hydrated with gray water. It is a linear park—longer than it is wide—and is elevated about seventy feet above the sidewalk. Its lush, verdant lawns, deliberately overgrown, are two googly eyes short of a Jim Henson character. The buildings that surround it are a kaleidoscope of black and aqua glass. Millennium Tower, a ten-year-old, fifty-eight-story luxury development near the park’s eastern tip, tilts to one side, because it is sinking.
On a recent afternoon, young professionals in microclimate business-casual ambled through the park. A thousand-foot “water sculpture” by the artist Ned Kahn, titled “Bus Fountain,” runs along its northern perimeter; from time to time, streams of water shot upward, triggered by the movement of buses through the terminal below. The benches, pathways, and bathrooms were pristine. The mood was peaceful and upbeat. Light bounced off the surrounding high-rises, scrambling the shadows. In the central plaza, by a cabinet of board games and a foosball table, children paged through books from a mobile library. Strollers were pushed. Knowledge workers in sunglasses and fleeces sat at primary-colored chairs, munching on takeout from a fleet of culinarily diverse food trucks stationed below. In front of the on-site Starbucks—located inside Salesforce Tower and marked, confusingly, with Salesforce branding, as the Trailblazer Cafe—a topiary bear stood in a fixed salute. Everyone seemed to be talking about work. Snatches of conversation floated through a bamboo grove: A.P.I.s, banking, Stanford.
San Francisco is famous for its parks, and for its beaches, secret gardens, and open expanses; it is perhaps the only city in America where one can wander through a eucalyptus forest, stop for lunch on a bustling commercial strip, reënter a two-mile stretch of pine and redwood groves, emerge at the Pacific Ocean, buy a cup of coffee, and then hike along shoreline cliffs. Today, when most public parks in the Bay Area also double as dwelling places, Salesforce Park feels like a slice of another reality—the Sky Club, not the gate. (The park’s designers—and signage—insist that all are welcome.) Beneath the Salesforce Transit Center is a vast underground space. It’s currently empty—slated, in part, for California High-Speed Rail, which does not and may never exist. Taxpayer-funded, corporately branded, suspended above the homeless, the park is an irresistible metaphor for the city’s socioeconomic tensions. It also feels like a bid, or a prayer, for a certain vision of its future.
Beneath the Salesforce Transit Center is a vast underground space. It’s currently empty.
Salesforce Plaza is in a rapidly developing part of South of Market, in a slice of the city that real-estate agents have taken to calling the East Cut—a rebrand spearheaded by the local Community Benefit District, conceived by the branding firm behind Chobani and Mailchimp, and affirmed by Google Maps. South of Market’s stark economic disparities, which see multibillion-dollar software companies standing catercornered to homeless encampments, are largely responsible for the ascent of juxtaposition as a literary device in writing about San Francisco. In the second half of the twentieth century, the neighborhood was industrial, desolate, and considered seedy. After the Loma Prieta earthquake, in 1989, damage spurred demolitions and redevelopment, and, during the housing bubble of the early two-thousands, condominiums bloomed.
Construction on the Transit Center began in 2010, with the demolition of the original Transbay Terminal, a hulking slab of a building constructed in the nineteen-thirties. The terminal had been damaged in the earthquake, and the seismic plan for its replacement was so comprehensive that the project’s lead architect, Fred Clarke, predicted that it would be “probably one of the safest buildings in the world.” The new Transbay Terminal is a bulbous, four-level structure, fourteen thousand feet long, wrapped in airy, rippling, perforated white metal, resembling, from a distance, a slightly flattened Noguchi lamp. It took about a decade to design and build, at a cost of more than two billion dollars, and required an intervention from the city, in the form of a quarter-billion-dollar municipal loan. It opened as Salesforce Transit Center in the summer of 2018. (Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, has a twenty-five-year, hundred-and-ten-million-dollar naming-rights contract, and occupies three buildings along the transit center’s perimeter, including its eponymous tower.) Six weeks after an exuberant, heavily attended opening ceremony, workers discovered cracks in two structural steel beams. The center was immediately shuttered, and underwent nine months of halting repair work. This past July, it quietly reopened to little fanfare. It is slowly returning to its role as a hub for regional and intercity bus lines.
Earlier this fall, Adam Greenspan, a landscape architect and one of the lead designers of Salesforce Park, stood at the edge of the central plaza, taking in the patterns of refracted sunlight. Greenspan is in his mid-forties, with tattooed biceps and spiky, salt-and-pepper hair; he wore a Patagonia vest, desert boots, and a small hoop in one ear. As we walked through the park, he rattled off species names enthusiastically, offering backstories for incense cedars and Gunnera—clusters of gigantic, sandpaper-like leaves often referred to as “dinosaur food.” (Salesforce Park has nearly five hundred trees and pines; a local tree expert, Mike Sullivan, has created a thirty-minute walking tour.) “One of the concerns, early, was, are people going to go up?” Greenspan said. “Are people going to know that it’s public space? Are there going to be people around here?” In fact, the thousands of office workers in the surrounding buildings are easily enticed down to the park for lunch, a meeting, or a jog. Salesforce Tower and 181 Fremont, a luxury mixed-use building with commercial space leased by Facebook, have their own designated entrances; on the street level, in Salesforce Square, large granite boulders studded with wayfinding plaques—some carrying an image of Astro, a trademarked Salesforce “Trailhead” cartoon character, clothed in an ersatz National Park Service uniform—point the way up. Pedestrians can ascend by taking elevators, escalators, and a single-cabin, single-purpose gondola. (The journey takes forty seconds.)
“People really relax here, I’ve noticed,” Greenspan said, taking a photograph with his phone of shadows in the prehistoric garden. “But they also do a lot of work. People are working a lot, both having little walking meetings, but also sitting down by themselves and just typing.” I told him that every conversation on which I’d eavesdropped had been about work of some kind. “A lot of people talk about plants,” he proposed, cheerfully. “That’s a part I’m really happy with. The botanical life here, and the bird life, are two things that really have caught people’s attention, and their conversation.” He noted that many of the plants in the park were selected based on their capacity to handle dramatic shifts in climate, which helped explain their variety.
As we walked, Greenspan pointed out that some tenants had affixed large, three-dimensional signage to windows at the park level. Colorful logos for Slack, BlackRock iShares, Trulia, I.B.M., and Deloitte floated behind monkey-puzzle trees and redwood groves. On the windows of the Slack office, an arrangement of Post-it notes spelled out “You look nice today”—a default loading message for the company’s chat software. “At this point, certain tech companies and members of that community are becoming long-term makers of the city, and the region, and are committed to long-term relationships,” he said. “Salesforce, Facebook, Google—all of these places are, I think, working to have more long-term physical impact that’s looked at in a beneficial way. It’s nice to see these groups as they have matured, and are thinking in a more established way, rather than just a startup, non-centered, digital kind of attitude toward places.” We passed a playground, and Greenspan bent down to squeeze a leaf of mint geranium, encouraging me to do the same: it released a toothpaste scent. At the western end of the park, a yoga class performed synchronized contortions on a large lawn facing an amphitheatre. Against the backdrop of the corporate logos, the scene felt like sponsored content.
Salesforce Park’s programming is run by Biederman Redevelopment Ventures, a “placemaking” consultancy that rose to prominence after its role in the transformation of New York City’s Bryant Park. A robust, wellness-oriented calendar offers a range of creative and athletic diversions: salsa, Tai Chi, yoga, meditation, HIIT boot camps, Zumba, power walking. There are children’s crafting classes, adult knitting circles, and a literary series, “Writers in Salesforce Park.” That evening was “Thursdays on Vinyl,” a ninety-minute d.j. set, organized in partnership with HUSHconcerts, a leader in the silent-disco space. There was no discernible vinyl, or turntable, but, after the awkward sonic imposition of Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” the d.j. put on Evelyn King’s “Love Come Down.” The song floated seductively over the main plaza. I had been feeling down on San Francisco, becoming apocalyptic and gloomy about the city’s exacerbated inequality and increased homogeneity, but, as I watched a man in sandals, socks, and loose yellow pants dance across the glass floor, draping himself with a blush-pink scarf, I felt over-oxygenated, sentimental, and optimistic. I took a short video of the dancer, with the backdrop of 181 Fremont, and texted it to a close friend who had lived in the area before its reboot, expressing my fondness for the city. “This could be anywhere,” he replied.
I had noticed the security guards: they strolled the grounds wearing jackets identifying them as “Ambassadors.” On one visit, I watched a muttering, fitful, probably harmless man wander the park while an Ambassador walked five feet behind him, like an ibis trying to catch an updraft. I had also seen the posted rules, which prohibited “disturbing the park experience for other visitors in any way,” and the hours: in the winter, the park is open between 6 A.M. and 8 P.M. (Unlike other parks in the city that are street-level and therefore more porous, access is easily restricted.) But it wasn’t until my fourth visit that I noticed the security cameras. They were perched on gray-and-white poles that studded the park’s perimeter. “It’s like ‘Minority Report,’ ” the friend I was with remarked, looking up. In a way, the cameras completed the picture: Salesforce Park as a model for the rest of San Francisco—vertical, expansive, ecologically minded, expensive, sponsored, and surveilled.
Parks, like cities, reflect their times. In 1982, the architectural sociologist Galen Cranz published “The Politics of Park Design,” an examination of urban green spaces that identified four historical phases of city parks. The “pleasure grounds” of the late nineteenth century (sprawling, pastoral, landscaped areas on the city’s outskirts, enjoyed primarily by the bourgeoisie) were followed by the “reform parks” of the early nineteen-hundreds (urban areas meant to engage idle children and encourage immigrant assimilation). The early-to-mid-twentieth century saw the “recreation facility” (athletic facilities and spectator sports, commonly in family-oriented suburbs), which gave way, in the nineteen-sixties, to the “open-space system” (smaller, freer-form spaces, used by a broader range of city residents, created in the name of urban revitalization and psychological relief). In 2004, in the academic publication Landscape Journal, Cranz added a fifth phase: the “sustainable park.” She and her co-author, Michael Boland, suggested that the new form was a response to the anxieties of the late nineteen-nineties, when ecological crises were beginning to be understood as social concerns.
Last month, Cranz met me in the lobby of Salesforce Tower with her research assistant, Chelsea Rushton. Cranz, who teaches at U.C. Berkeley, wore turquoise Birkenstocks, burnt-orange socks, a burnt-orange sweater, and a fanny pack; short white curls spilled out from under a turquoise cloche. As we rode the gondola up to the park, both women remarked that, upon entry, they had immediately been approached by a Salesforce employee, identifying himself as a Lobby Ambassador. “There’s an issue of social control,” Cranz observed, as we glided to altitude. “They don’t want homeless, right?” We exited the gondola and walked along “Bus Fountain,” toward the main plaza, which was bustling with office workers. It was a bank holiday, and the park teemed with children; two S.F.P.D. cops, distinct from the Ambassadors, stood near the foosball table.
As we looped the park, Cranz made small observations about the plant life, the abundance of children, and the positions and sizes of the benches. (They are notably short and generously spaced, with about four feet between them, such that they best accommodate single adults.) Rushton wondered if prickly, geometric plants had been planted so abundantly because they might deter people from sleeping in the flower beds. In front of a cluster of monkey-puzzle trees, she softened. “I think it was Martin Heidegger who said that in order to have a real contemplative walk, you need to be able to walk in a loop or a circle,” she said, squinting at the path. “So I appreciate that about it.” We paused at the southern edge of the park, with a view of the 280 on-ramp. “I feel totally orchestrated,” Cranz said, placing her hand on the railing separating us from the plant life. “I’m acutely aware of how managed everything is.”
Rushton compared the park experience to visiting the Sistine Chapel, with the rigidity of its flow. “You’re threaded through—there’s no choice,” Cranz said. “You can’t pause in front of one masterpiece. Here, you can pause, you can relax—but, still, I feel a little bit like I’m an animal, like a cow being led through this maze, and eventually”—she made a throat-slitting gesture—“you know, I’m heading to my end.” We continued walking, past a row of narrow benches, all of which were occupied by people sitting alone and looking at their phones. At the end of the line were a father and son who sat facing each other on separate benches while the child laid waste to a colossal, foil-wrapped burrito. “It feels like being on a big ship,” Cranz said. “You can’t have complete freedom on a ship. You can’t just wander around and fall off. It’s not a replication of nature, in any nineteenth-century sense.” Salesforce Park represented “open-space” ideology, she said, referring to the fourth phase in her schema of urban-park evolution. “It’s taking advantage of urban opportunities, spatial opportunities, and saying that a park isn’t necessarily on land.”
We walked into the prehistoric garden, past a plaque detailing the discovery of a woolly-mammoth tooth during the transit center’s excavation. (Evidently, Salesforce does not have naming rights: the tooth, which is on display at the California Academy of Sciences, is described as having belonged to the “Transbay Mammoth.”) The area offered some private spaces, both occupied: one by a couple, the other by a woman reading a book. Cranz paused, and looked at the cluster of Gunnera, which was framed by residential buildings across the way. An orange crane hovered in the background. “I have to say, I find this kind of thing extremely moving,” she said. “These plants have made me feel like crying a couple times. Certain plants, I’ve never seen. And you get to be very close to them.” We rounded the corner, arriving near the top of the gondola. Cranz admired the bamboo grove clustered around the public bathrooms, and wondered aloud whether the park had to deal with squirrels or rats. “In capitalism, we have this split between environments of production, which we allow to be crappy, and environments of consumption, which we want to be perfect, like a utopian space,” she said, settling onto a bench. The lunch hour was winding down, and the plaza was emptying out, as people filtered back to work. Children ran through the fountain. “This has a little bit of a utopian element to it.”
