On one Saturday in April 1874, crowds of onlookers gathered on a plot of land at Mission and Valencia streets in San Francisco to watch the famous French balloonist Captain G. Barbier lift off the ground in a giant hot air balloon.
At 3:46, Barbier gave the command—“All hands let go!”—and the balloon “rose like a gigantic soap bubble and quickly attained an altitude of 6,000 feet,” according to a 1948 article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The crowd gasped and the six passengers on board, who included a dancer, a reporter, and a young society woman, cheered as they wafted out over the bay. From their perch in the sky, the balloonists lobbed a message in a bottle out of their basket, launched a carrier pigeon with a note for the onlookers below, and got ready to pop a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
Then, things went comically wrong. For reasons perhaps never determined, the carrier pigeon began behaving bizarrely which in turn frightened the passengers who demanded a return to the ground. It was when this command was given that Barbier’s skills revealed themselves to be stronger in the taking off of hot air balloons rather than the landing. The ill-fated flight ended with a crash conveniently in front of a hospital. (All injuries were promptly treated.)
For over a decade in the late 1800s, Woodward’s Gardens reigned as the most popular weekend attraction for San Franciscans. Residents young and old, those who had made their fortune and those whose only gold was still a glint in the eye all found something at the amusement park-cum-museum to entertain and divert them, including the spectacle of hot air balloon launches.
But while the famed park could overcome balloon crashes and the hazards of keeping exotic animals, it couldn’t weather the death of its founder or the fierce competition of the upstart Golden Gate Park. After just over two decades in business, the one-time most famous attraction on the West Coast closed its doors, auctioned off its treasures, and resigned itself to being a museum piece of its own.
The man behind the Gardens was one Robert B. Woodward, an East Coaster from Rhode Island who set out for the shiny new land of California during the gold rush. While throngs of millionaire hopefuls immediately got to work panning for gold, Woodward took a different approach: he hoped to make his fortune off of those seeking their own fortunes.
Woodward’s enterprises were varied and included a coffee house, a general store, and a piece of the burgeoning public transportation industry. But, most importantly, he owned the What Cheer House. This “temperance hotel,” as it is often described is where Woodward first began to make a significant amount of cash.
The puritanical Woodward refused to allow the two biggest temptations of the day—women and booze—into his hotel. But what was a short-sighted approach to gender equality, the hotelier made up for in an innovative approach to hospitality. Male guests of the What Cheer House—of which Mark Twain was one—could enjoy not only comfortable accommodations on site, but also a library filled with thousands of books, a selection of the latest newspapers from around the globe, and a museum.
These amenities paid off, and not just for Woodward’s bank account. Sailors became frequent fliers at the What Cheer House, and they showed their appreciation for the proprietor by bringing him curiosities from their trips around the globe. This growing collection of curios combined with Woodward’s burgeoning interest in art set the foundation for his eventual role as “the first real patron of the arts in San Francisco.”
In the late 1850s, Woodward decided it was time to upgrade his family home. He acquired a four-acre plot of land in what is now the Mission District and set about building his dream mansion and grounds. This project, of course, necessitated a trip to the continent to pick up some new art and furnishings.
While traveling in Italy, he met the American painter Virgil Macey Williams, who specialized in landscapes and reproductions of European classics. Woodward became a patron of Williams and eventually convinced the painter to relocate to San Francisco, where he lived at the What Cheer House, painted California landscapes, and helped his benefactor build an art gallery and lay out the gardens for his new home.
The Woodward estate was something to behold as the last details were put into place. There were meticulously manicured gardens dotted with fountains, statues, and an artificial lake; there was the art gallery that was covered in Pompeiian-style frescoes and hung floor-to-ceiling with Woodward’s growing collection of paintings; and there were curiosities galore that dotted the grounds which came in both the live variety and those of the stuffed and botanical persuasions.
The new private enclave was so intriguing that a constant stream of San Franciscans allegedly tried to sneak a peak through the gates.
The local Civil War veterans association had a more cheeky idea. They asked the prominent San Franciscan if they could host their reunion on his property.
Woodward agreed and, after a successful first event, he was soon besieged with similar requests. And so the wheels of the hospitality maven began to turn.
Sure, his family had just begun to enjoy their gorgeous new mansion. But if there was this much interest, why not open his private home to the public and rebrand it the Woodward’s Gardens Amusement Resort?
Or, as the San Francisco Examiner put it in 1883, “Woodward realized that it was only a question of being pestered forever or quietly throwing open his place.”
On May 4, 1866, the doors of the new and improved Woodward’s Gardens were opened, first to close acquaintances and eventually to the wider public. (The Woodward family repaired permanently to their Napa quarters.) The hospitality tycoon knew he needed to expand his collection in order to attract more guests, and he set about assembling an even more fascinating array of exhibits to get locals to part with their hard earned quarters. (The entrance fee was 25 cents for adults, 10 cents for children).
Straddling the line between a Central Park and a Disney World, Woodward’s Gardens grew to include an art gallery, four museums of natural and anthropological history, and the first aquarium on the West Coast.
There were hot air balloon and boat rides, a roller skating rink, a merry-go-round, and amphitheaters for theatrical and musical entertainment. There were botanical garden-like grounds for strolling and picnicking, and a collection of exotic animals—think monkeys, lions, and camels; black swans, flamingos, and ostriches—that made it one of the biggest zoos in California.
“As a broad and airy holiday play-ground for tired pupils, as a romantic retreat for family picnics, as a pleasure-park for the quiet promenades of old and young, as a varied field of study for the naturalist, as one of the lungs through which the tired and dusty city may draw a cool, refreshing, healthful breath, and, finally, as a grand union of park, garden, conservatory, museum, gymnasium, zoological grounds and art gallery, no eastern city offers the equal of Woodward’s Gardens,” read the entry in Bancroft’s Tourist Guide.
Woodward’s Gardens also served up sideshow-style entertainment. In addition to the naturally occurring exotic curiosities like rare specimens of plants and animals, there were those displays of the more fantastical sort, like a stuffed two-headed cow and a five-legged dog. The hospitality guru realized special exhibits were necessary to keep the crowd coming back and he booked circus acts as well as hosted famous sideshow stars like General Tom Thumb.
The amusement park-cum-museum was a wild success. While Woodward wasn’t the first to dabble in the industry, he had an innovative approach that made his funfair a can’t-miss attraction and a regular subject of the imaginations of the city’s children.
“Americans have forgotten how unobvious, abnormal, and contrived parks seemed in 1850, when only a tiny handful of observers sensed their value,” Terence Young writes in Building San Francisco's Parks, 1850-1930.
In a 1958 essay for the California Historical Society Quarterly, Anson S. Blake fondly recounts his youth spent at Woodward’s Gardens and calls it the “Children’s Paradise of our generation.” A young Robert Frost had such a memorable visit to the park that years later he would write the poem “At Woodward’s Gardens.”
But things in the post-Gold Rush years of California were moving fast, and a prescient and attentive leader was required to keep up with the times.
When Woodward died in 1879, the park lost its main champion. Over the next decade, things slowly fell into disrepair and, according to Lost San Francisco, neighbors began complaining about the smell and the noise emanating from the grounds.
The kiss of death was the growing popularity of Golden Gate Park.
In 1891, Woodward’s Gardens Amusement Resort welcomed visitors for the last time. Two years later, the Woodward family held an auction, where another prominent San Franciscan, Adolph Sutro, snapped up most of the museum exhibits and curiosities. The property was sold off in smaller parcels.
The history of America is littered with innovative new forms of entertainment that blazed hot for one shining moment before being eclipsed by the next big thing. Like P.T. Barnum’s Museum or the pleasure grounds of Starin’s Glen Island, Woodward’s Gardens, for a short time, played a monumental role in the lives and dreams of San Franciscans. Today, it lives on only in memory.
