Salesforce Park

Sights of public misery on San Francisco's streets have become the new normal during the COVID pandemic and the fentanyl scourge among drug addicts.

We walked by the prone young man on Second Street in the Financial District before turning on Minna Alley...

...which led to a semi-secret elevator to downtown's newest oasis, Salesforce Park.

The park has posted a list of prohibitions, and the primal one is "Disturbing the park experience for other visitors in any way."

Salesforce Park is part of the Transit Center boondoggle that was heralded as San Francisco's version of New York's Grand Central Station. The $2 billion plus project instead ended up as the world's most expensive bus station when Caltrain and Amtrak both pulled out of participation.

The park stretches four blocks over the transit center, and there are entryways from a funicular tram, a monster escalator, and a few discreet elevators at street level.

Salesforce Park opened in 2018, but like many projects initiated during the systematically corrupt regime of Mayor Willie Brown, Jr., there were major construction problems. Two cracked beams holding up the park were soon discovered, and the place was closed off for a year along with the streets underneath, reopening in 2019.

Last month I visited the park for the first time and was happily surprised by the botanical richness.

Besides hosting plant species from all over the world, the place has had enough growing time to look like it's been there for decades.

Sports activities are one of the many prohibitions, but there is an amusing children's playground where we saw a grandfather almost breaking his neck trying to keep up with his grandchildren in a rope obstacle course.

On a second visit, we stumbled across "Saturday Sounds," a lunchtime concert program in a sylvan dale.

The performers that afternoon were The Knuckle Knockers (click here), an "Old-Time American Music" trio from Bernal Heights consisting of Bill Foss (banjo, mandolin and vocals), Karen Celia Heil (fiddle, guitar, vocals), and Martha Hawthorne (guitar and vocals). They were completely charming.

On Memorial Day, I went to see one of my favorite local actors, Rudy Guerrero, portraying Macduff in a free Theater Rhinoceros production of Shakespeare's Macbeth, "manipulated by John Fisher," the company's Artistic Director.

The "manipulation" consisted of throwing out much of the play's dialogue and replacing it with meta-nonsense about a struggle to become the Artistic Director of the Rhino. The production was also ambulatory, meaning there were various scenes set in different parts of the Salesforce Park and Transit Center, so the audience had to trundle around as a large group.

Theater Rhino bills itself as "The Longest-Running Queer Theatre in the World." It has had its ups and downs over the decades, but was an interesting local company until John Fisher became its Artistic Director in 2003 and turned it into what is essentially the John Fisher Company. The problem is that he is a mediocre writer and director, and a genuinely bad actor who casts himself in major roles. In this case, he was playing Macbeth in a shouty, declamatory style that was embarrassing to watch.

I love theater where the audience is allowed to move around and explore, but this production was so poorly planned that only about a quarter of the audience could see or hear the second scene, set 50 yards away. The rest of us were jammed against each other on a walkway with a pandemic still raging. "This is ridiculous," I said to the delightful Orange County tourist woman I had befriended while waiting for the show to begin. "It fills me with Gay Shame," and made a quick exit.