Squatters, Shootouts and Music: The Wild Stern Grove Story

Relieved by the pandemic, stern grove concert meadow remains a place for visitors.

One of the most productive things about living in San Francisco is that each and every resident is no more than 10 minutes from a park, which meant a lot this year of pandemic, when our lives were reduced to our walls and our rapid shelter on site. .

This long and endless year made me appreciate more than ever the nearest park, Stern Grove, and I discovered myself in the park almost every day. With his methy smile eucalyptus trees, he has a sanctuary for the rest of my life.

For many citizens of San Francisco and the Bay Area, Stern Grove is more productive known as the loose music festival site named after him. This year, for the first time in its history, the concert series was cancelled. He was calm, although there were occasional guerrilla concerts at his level during the summer, with individual musicians playing in front of an attentive but much smaller audience.

However, there is much more to the park than the music festival, however fabulous. If you pass all the way through the park, you will have the opportunity to explore fairly simple trails, practice many birds and dogs, and take a look at a story that begins even before San Francisco officially becomes a city.

What appeals to me here most of the time now is Pine Lake Park, one of the 3 remaining herb lakes in San Francisco, the others are Lake Merced and the mountain lake in the Presidio, and the smallest and least known.

A of men and boys sailing in Pine Lake in 1903.

Pine Lake feeds through the waters of the same aquifer that feeds Lake Merced. Like your wonderful cousin, I wouldn’t propose swimming in Pine Lake. Its waters are regularly a strange and murky color. No wonder to anyone, formerly called Pig Lake: in summer, when the algae overwhelm it, the lake stinks of sewer-scented paradise.

With this strong recommendation, you may wonder why you attracted me. The answer is the birds that live and visit. Despite its small size, Pine Lake plays a vital role in the Pacific migration route, and there are a lot of birds. which can be discovered here every day.

Here abound the royal anades residents, rarely accompanied by heron cormorants diving in search of the tent that lives in the waters of Pine Lake; other permanent citizens come with black foebes, brown back reeds and black eyes; hummingbirds abound here, too. Once, to my delight, I saw a hummingbird not harass one, but two of the red-tailed falcons that lived far from a log.

A black phoebe in Stern Grove. Se can discover many birds in the park, as Pine Lake Park is located along the Pacific migratory route.

All those birds, and many others, thrive on eucalyptus trees around Pine Lake and Stern Grove. The trees themselves are part of the park’s history. Like all other San Francisco eucalyptus trees, they are not locals of the domain, but were planted in 1871 through other people who first remodeled a domain that once became sand dunes in The Grove that you see today.

In 1847, Stern Grove began as reclaimed farmland through the green circle of relatives (also spelled Greene), who moved from Maine in the 1850s and even moved a space from Maine to San Francisco, according to a July 1953 edition of Recreation and Parks News Bulletin. The brochure began on what is now 19th Avenue and Sloat and continued to Ocean Beach.

Grove near the Trocadero.

But in the 1850s and 1960s, the Greens faced legal situations that required their right to land in the “illegal occupier wars” of the time. When they lost the case, they refused to leave. Instead, they built a “strong”, a 14-hangar standing covered in metal, according to the new Recreation and Parks bulletin. It would take three months and a congressional law in 1887 to repair his land rights.

This is not the end of the color times for the Greens. In 1892, George M. Green built the Trocadero Inn, now the oldest construction in the Sunset District. The Trocadero San Francisco, the most elegant position at the time, and visitors flocked to the resort. , which included everything from domesticated bears to games of possibilities and drinks with other characters. Some laughed too much and there would have been gunfire at the Trocadero. This story can still be noticed today in the bullet holes in the front. Trocadero Gate.

The Trocadero Roadhouse around 1920.

Bullet holes can still be seen at the Trocadero’s front door, a legacy of the building’s wild history as a beach hotel and possibly encouraging one or two shootings.

Despite clever rumors, the Ban closed the Trocadero. “I didn’t need a smuggler scenario there,” Green said.

Green and his circle of relatives would continue to live in the Trocadero until he sold the construction and the rest of the land to Rosalie Stern, foreshadowing a new era for the land. Although Green and his circle of relatives shaped the area, it was Stern who bought the pamphlet and then sold it to the city to honor her husband, Sigmund Stern, a famous philanthropist and nephew of Levi Strauss. act: the land can only be used for recreational purposes.

Secluded trails wind through the park. During concerts, these trails are much more frequented because they allow spectators to pass through the herb amphitheatre of the valley.

An outdoor amphitheatre was built to take advantage of the valley’s herbal acoustics, and in 1932 the San Francisco Symphony performed the first concert at what was now Stern Grove. The Festival itself began in 1938, and over the decades concerts have been loose to keep music available to audiences.

Today, Stern Grove is much quieter and louder and shoots, you’re more likely to see birds, dogs and children, but even if it’s a little more docile, Stern Grove is still a gem at the crown of San Francisco parks. .

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