Candlestick Park – Endangered Garden

 Posted by on November 4, 2011
Nov 042011
 
Candlestick Park
The Endangered Garden by Patricia Johanson
“Endangered Garden”, a linear park along San Francisco Bay was commissioned in 1987 by the San Francisco Arts Commission. As co-designer of the thirty million dollar “Sunnydale Facilities”, a pump station and holding tank for water and sewage, Patricia Johanson’s intent was to present this functional structure as a work of art and a productive landscape. Other goals included increasing food and habitat for wildlife, and providing maximum public access to San Francisco Bay. Tidal sculpture, butterfly meadow, habitat restoration, seating, and overlook are all incorporated into the image of the endangered San Francisco Garter Snake, as is a public access baywalk, thirty feet wide and one-third of a mile long that coincides with the roof of the new transport / storage sewer.
This portion is the head of the garter snake.  While it is hard to discern at this point, if you are on the freeway driving into the city from the airport, you know it is a snake.  The colors of the pavement represent  the colors of the garter snake.
“Ribbon Worm-Tide Pools”, is a small sculpture within the “body” of the snake.  It provides a path down to the marsh and mudflats of San Francisco Bay. The intention was for the  worm itself to be  in tangled masses among mussels and barnacles during high tide, but judging by the amount of trash in amongst it, that doesn’t happen very often.
Depressions in the pavement, modeled on California Indian petroglyphs, fill with rainwater for birds. Hundreds of prehistoric shell mounds once dotted the shores of San Francisco Bay, and this site was continuously occupied from around 1500 B.C. by Native Americans who fished in the bay, hunted waterfowl in the marshes, and foraged for shellfish along the mudflats. When excavated in 1910, many human burials and artifacts were recovered from a shell mound on this site, which today lies buried under twenty-five feet of “landfill”.
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