Early in my work on Robert Barbour Johnson I read his short The Magic Park about the Golden Gate Park.   At the time, I did not get a whole lot out of it.  It’s not clear what the book is supposed to be.  He touches on the history of the park—but then goes on to say that while he would love to do a fully detailed historical reconstruction, that is not what his book is about.  He sometimes writes as if it is a guidebook—but then admits that’s impossible, since the park has no beginning and no end: it is fifty-two blocks long and eight blocks wide, and one can enter or leave at any point.  He touches on some of the main attractions—the Academy of Sciences, the bison and elk enclosures, the DeYoung Museum—but then admits that these are not always as interesting as the quail and rabbits running about and, besides, gives no directions how to get there.

In essence, it’s a paean to the park, a love song.

And in that sense, it can be understood as part of what Kevin Starr called the enchantment of San Francisco, the making of the myth of Baghdad by the Bay.  In other words, part of the same project that engaged Herb Caen, whom Johnson claimed as an acquaintance, at the very least.

What makes the park magic, to Johnson, is not is natural becauty: it’s that the park was created by human hands, a green oasis crafted from seaside wastelands where, he says, nothing had lived before.  He imagines that the whole endeavor started as a joke on the park superintendent, John McLaren, a Scotsman who came to San Francisco in the late nineteenth-century to make his fortune as a . . . landscape architect.  Such a carer seemed out of place in the (very provincial) and rough San Francsco of the time, Johnson suggests, and McLaren could only have gotten the job of creating a park from the city on a lark.  But he showed them!

There are obvious Fortean tones in this history of the park.  First, there is the little guy battling mainstream and making good.  There is the sense that all of creation is a cosmic joke.  And a sense that what counts is art, not nature, and that through art magic can be conjured.

The book also has some more obvious Fortean analogues.  Johnsons spends time talking about the ghosts and unusual things that have been reported in the area—and some even caught, as when an Arctic Owl was found to haunt the park, although officialdom had dismissed the possibility.

Johnson’s view of the park, then, is an attempt to find an enchanted geography in a world where such enchantment seemed impossible—the park operates for him the same way that the ptach of uncanny ground near Monterey did.