From our John King. Happy Fourth and stay cool, especially in Livermore.
By John King, Urban Design Critic July 4, 2024 - San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco’s Embarcadero has no shortage of crowd-pleasing attractions, from Pier 39 on the north to the Giants’ ballpark down south. In some ways, though, the spot I treasure most is a nook that passers-by can easily miss: Levi’s Plaza.
Specifically, the curving half-block space due west of Pier 19 with its tumble of hills and waterways and gnarled-trunk trees folding together with an idyllic ease that’s also, somehow, distinctly urban in the most timeless of ways.
What feels like a sylvan remnant of nature is less than 45 years old. The design was inspired by the Gold Country, part of a 9.4-acre compound developed for a company that had net revenues last year of $6.2 billion.
All of which is irrelevant to the sensations of the moment — the sense of being transported to an Edenic refuge where mounds of white and blue agapanthus rise along a rippling creek amid granite slabs. You can bask in the sun on the lawn, or savor the lazy scene from a shaded wooden bench. Dragonflies skim the water and if you sit on one of the folding chairs near the meadow’s edge, a black phoebe might touch down nearby.
No other spot near downtown San Francisco’s core offers such an antidote to the grind of modern life. And it just gets better with age, like all great landscapes do.
This is the best park along S.F.’s Embarcadero — and it’s all but hidden from sight
Greg
Mark my words, Is that Mark?
