QUIET PLACES

The best part of living in a city is the convenience of walking instead of driving, going to events such as baseball games and parades that occur nearby, eating in numerous restaurants, attending plays and listening to newsworthy speakers, and living within a diverse community. I learned long ago that I also needed to discover quiet, green places in a city to stay connected to nature.

Right out of college, I moved to NYC. Luckily my roommates and I found an apartment on East 88th Street, a half block away from Carl Shurz Park with its Gracie Mansion, where the mayor lives. We couldn't have found a safer place to live in a big city. I could walk through the park, look towards the 59th Street Bridge, and watch the ships and boats ply the East River.

When we moved to Tokyo in 1998, we were lucky to find an apartment close to our son's school, Nichimachi. To reach the school we walked through Arisugawa Park, along a pond full of turtles, green meadows, walking trails, and a 700-year-old ginkgo tree. Early in the morning when we came to the sports fields at the end of the park, we could watch groups of young teenagers, dressed in baseball uniforms, performing drill after drill before they left for school. Once Theo and I left the park, we would pass a woman outside her front door. I would greet her with a slight bow and the formal morning greeting, "ohayo gozaimasu."

When we moved to Paris, we were close to the Bois de Boulogne where we could watch groups of men playing petanque, the French version of bocce ball. We spent more time in Passy at the Jardin Ranelagh with its puppet shows, at the pond in the Tuileries near the Louvre, and at Parc Monceau, on the Boulevard de Courcelles, with its elegant mansions surrounding the park's meadow. Besides the public places in Paris, we had the traditional window boxes filled with geraniums that are seen everywhere. Those geraniums helped to brighten my day.

Here in San Francisco, we've again been lucky to find an apartment next to Mission Creek with three small parks on each side of the building. The two of us walk over to the park that lines the creek to sit and watch seabirds and people going by.

We will be moving soon to a new place in South Beach at the bottom of Rincon Hill, just blocks from the Financial District with all its traffic, concrete, and glass high rises shading the streets below.

I've discovered my new quiet place, South Park, (named long before the TV Show), a block-long park sandwiched between 2-to-4-story red brick and Art Deco buildings. It's a hidden gem, not only because the height of the buildings reaches my maximum for human-scale buildings, but because it has a long history. South Park, the oldest park in San Francisco, was designed as an English strolling park in the 1800s and the street has housed everyone from well-dressed strollers to longshoremen to families and pensioners. Recently, small tech companies have opened up shop in the buildings that line the park. The employees, mostly young, collect together at lunchtime on the metal tables spread throughout the park. Families gather around the unusual climbing structure at one end of the park, and solitary people rest on the benches in the shade. The park is already a good place to go after picking up a coffee from the cafe around the corner. A quiet place in the city. 

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Reimaging South Park:

https://www.fletcher.studio/southpark