| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Building San Francisco's Parks, 1850–1930. By Terence Young. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xviii, 260 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-7432-7.)

The New Urban Park: Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Civic Environmentalism. By Hal K. Rothman. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xiv, 258 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-7006-1286-6.)

The geographer Terence Young and the historian Hal K. Rothman have given us two well-researched and complementary books about the development of public parks on the San Francisco and Marin County peninsulas. Young takes the story into the 1920s but is most interested in the years from 1860 to 1910 when San Francisco's Golden Gate Park was being conceived, created, and developed. Rothman starts briefly with the 1960s but centers his account on the conception, planning, and development of Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) from the initial introduction of legislation in 1971 through the 1990s.

Both books are about the making, shaping, and reshaping of parks. The central figures are politicians, interest group leaders, park planners, and administrators. These folks are also the main sources of information through letters, reports, testimony, and, for Rothman, interviews. When users appear they are seen externally as constituencies to be served, visitors to be accommodated, and special groups whose desires create management challenges (those dog owners! those mountain bikers!!). This is an observation rather than a complaint, for such constraints are very understandable with first systematic histories of San Francisco parks.

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