Armed with only a jacket, a hat, a water bottle and yes a cell phone, I set out yesterday into Golden Gate Park for something of an adventure.  No, not the kind of adventure that ends with the protagonist limping back to the car, shirt torn into tourniquets for each of the limbs because something in the woods really didn’t want him there.  Nor the kind of adventure that finds its story told in the form of a deposition, polygraph around the tip of the fingers, sweat pouring off your face, unable to take your eyes off that scar extending from the corner of the detective’s mouth all the way to his earlobe, making him look like Heath Ledger after a lengthy day on the set of The Dark Knight.  Nay, this adventure, circumscribed with a clear beginning and end, would surely be a proverbial walk in the park, albeit one pulled along by an unearthly voice, a voice seeming to cascade from heaven itself, the voice of Marina McDougall.  For this adventure, an audio tour in fact, was organized by the Studio for Urban Projects for the exhibition entitled Groundscores: Guided Tours of San Francisco Past and Personal at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. 

Beginning at the Conservatory of Flowers, this tour, An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park, first asks you to sit down and behold the panorama before you.  Looking out across the manicured promenade you are asked to envision a time when all you would have seen before you would have been a vast expanse of sand dunes, one of the largest concentrations of ocean-produced dunes in the world, forbiddingly known in the 1850’s as The Great Sand Banks.  It was here that I found myself slipping into the trance that the Studio for Urban Projects engineered.  Ambient sounds that at times seem as though they’ve been lifted from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s deep sea Musak collection certainly had a hand in this.  Next thing I knew, I was staring through the cloudy glass of the Conservatory imagining how the first greenhouses were constructed in ancient Greece, satisfying a prescription for the emperor Tiberius to eat a cucumber every day the whole year round.  In this way An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park manages to delve into our great city’s past and at the same time introduce many profound historical overlays and intersections.

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