The proponents of retaining Sharp Park as a golf course cannot base their case on the popularity of golf, as the sport is declining rapidly across the nation. Nor can they tout the financial benefit of golf, as Sharp Park loses money every year. So they have instead turned to sophistry, claiming the site should be landmarked because Alister MacKenzie designed it.
MacKenzie helped revolutionize golf architecture in the last century by insisting that courses “imitate the beauty of nature,” rather than be in conflict with it. But MacKenzie ignored his own maxim when he designed Sharp Park. The project required dredging and filling this delicate coastal landscape for a staggering fourteen months in order to create enough dry land for an 18-hole golf course. And in perhaps his greatest ecological mistake, MacKenzie leveled a coastal barrier that provided Sharp Park with natural protection from the surging Pacific Ocean, replacing it with seven links so that golfers could view the sea.
The flaws in this design became evident almost immediately. Opening day of the golf course was delayed twice due to excess water on the course. Then in 1938, a massive coastal storm surge, no longer held at bay by the natural barrier MacKenzie destroyed, inundated the course and severely damaged all seven of MacKenzie’s signature beach-side holes. The subsequent routing of Highway 1 through Sharp Park destroyed another MacKenzie link, permanently bifurcating MacKenzie’s original design.
San Francisco eventually decided to radically alter what remained of MacKenzie’s layout. The city constructed a levee along the coastal edge of Sharp Park, in places 30 feet high, destroying the ocean views that were a defining element of MacKenzie’s design. And in 1972 Robert Muir Graves redesigned Sharp Park, moving several links into an upland canyon.
But rather than solving the flooding problem, the levee and redesign exacerbated it. The new design blocked the natural water seeps and outflows through Sharp Park to the ocean, and the course now floods annually during normal winter rains: with freshwater.
Normal winter rains flood many areas of Sharp Park, and the Golf Course's attempts to drain the water kills California red-legged frogs, the largest frog in the West, made famous by Mark Twain's Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
Currently San Francisco attempts to prevent the freshwater flooding of the golf course by pumping water through the levee, but this is killing the California red-legged frog—a threatened species also known as Twain’s Frog, because it is the central character in Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. In addition, the operation of the golf course threatens the San Francisco garter snake—an endangered species considered to be the most beautiful serpent in North America—as mowing operations kill the snakes while they bask in the sun on the course’s fairways. Because these two species are protected by the Endangered Species Act, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service warned San Francisco in 2005 to stop harming these species or face potential civil and criminal liabilities. The golf course managers responded by leaving standing water on the course for most of the year, causing further damage to the course.
A California red-legged frog at Sharp Park.
A San Francisco garter snake at Sharp Park on September 29, 2008.
Consequently, there is simply no MacKenzie legacy at Sharp Park today. Joe Faulkner, a San Francisco golf program employee and author of a history on San Francisco golf, wrote in 1978 that MacKenzie’s design “would never be the same” after the coastal storms decimated the course, and claimed the Robert Muir Graves redesign was like “taking a house with a beach view and turning it 180 degrees to face a mountain slope.” Daniel Wexler, writing in his book “Missing Links,” noted that MacKenzie’s Sharp Park was “shortly lived” and “washed into oblivion by a coastal storm.” He concluded that “no appreciable trace of [MacKenzie’s] strategy remains in play” at Sharp Park today.
But there are cultural and historic artifacts on the land that can and should be preserved: Sharp Park was the home of a temporary internment camp during World War II, and Native American artifacts have been found throughout the area. Currently these legacies go uninterpreted and remain inaccessible except to individuals with the ability and desire to pay around $40 for a round of golf: all other users are escorted from the course.
Moreover, In 2004 a recreational survey of San Franciscans conducted by PROS Consulting found that the number one recreational demand is for more hiking and biking trails: golf finished 16th out of 19 options in the same survey. Yet the City is currently forced to cut services at recreational centers and open spaces while it subsidizes the underused golf course at Sharp Park, exacerbating the existing inequity in the distribution of recreational services in the Bay Area.
This is why residents of both Pacifica and San Francisco, historians, landscape architects, various recreation proponents, as well as conservationists, environmentalists, and park advocates have come together to urge the restoration of Sharp Park. Restoring Sharp Park will preserve an important ecological landscape, link us to the history of the land, provide increased recreational opportunities that Bay Area residents currently demand, guard our coastline from flooding events exacerbated by climate change, and help recover two endangered species. Nothing could be more prudent or cost-effective for the public than restoring Sharp Park and creating a protective habitat and recreational site that many can enjoy for generations to come.
Alyssa Bird, Pacifica Resident
Ron Maykel, Pacifica Resident
Isabel Wade, Board Member, Neighborhood Parks Advocate
Chris Carlsson, Director, FoundSF.org, a living archive of San Francisco history
Lawrence Cuevas, Landscape Architect
Brent Plater, Director, Restore Sharp Park, www.restoresharppark.org
Derek Hoye, Golfers Against Sharp Park
Recent Comments