The Panhandle is a narrow strip of land in San Francisco that has played an important role in the city's physical and cultural history. It began as an experimental area for Golden Gate Park's landscaping in the 1860s. In the 1960s, the Panhandle was the site of protests against a proposed freeway and became a center of the counterculture movement. It helped spark debates over urban planning and cultural values that spread nationwide. Though now simply seen as part of Golden Gate Park, the Panhandle has significantly influenced the development of San Francisco and broader social change in the United States.

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Byron Hurlbut
May 19, 2015
APUSH
Chris Martin
The Panhandle
On a map, San Francisco’s Panhandle looks like a simple extension of Golden Gate Park,
a finger of green that extends into an urban sprawl. At one block wide and three-quarters of a
mile long, the Panhandle has always been more than that, a reflection of physical and cultural
change within San Francisco. Today it’s a lush park, home to Saturday picnics and weekly games
of pickup basketball. Eucalyptus trees tower above the neighboring purple and yellow Victorians,
trimmed with iconic “egg and dart” molding. Bounded by Fell and Oak streets on the North and
South respectively, the Panhandle stretches from Stanyan to Baker. It is home to the oldest trees
in Golden Gate Park along with countless squirrels hoping for a misplaced bite of BenJerry’s
ice cream. Each morning, the serpentine paths down either side of the park are filled with streams
of commuter bikes heading downtown and the occasional jogger who checks each shoulder on
turns, careful not to interfere with cyclists. Every summer day, tourists fill the park, admiring
their trinkets from the gift shop Jamin’ On Haight. Every summer night, tourists abandon the
park after the onslaught of gray fog from the Pacific. No matter how cold and wet it gets, tourists
come back the next day, looking to experience the defining aspect of San Francisco, the epicenter
of American cultural change.
What they find in the Panhandle however, is something different. An out-of-place com-
memoration of man’s triumph over nature. The focal point for a fight over the city’s future. A
center of cultural change which would eventually spread across the country. With a rich history

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that parallels San Francisco’s rapid physical and cultural growth, Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle
is an unlikely source of historical significance, playing important roles in the creation of Golden
Gate Park, the battle over highways in San Francisco, and the formation of the 1960’s counter-
culture movement. Today, many people think of the Panhandle as just another park in a city full
of greenery but it is not only the model for much of that greenery, but has also eclipsed them in
historical import. As an integral part of San Francisco’s physical and cultural history, the Pan-
handle has acted as a dress rehearsal for movements that would play out across the city and even
the country.
By the late 1860s, Central Park in New York City, the largest city in the United States,
was known to be the pinnacle of both public green space and landscape design; on March 31,1
1866 however, San Francisco Mayor Henry P. Coon reached out for proposals to create a public
park that would rival the grandiose Central Park. The Daily Evening Bulletin, a local San Fran-
cisco newspaper, noted the city’s collective desire to “be like New York, a world-class city.”2
Following this ideal, Mayor Coon contacted renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmst-
ed, best known for designing Central Park. Having surveyed San Francisco’s semiarid environ-
ment and frequent sand dunes, Olmsted concluded that a large, rectilinear park like New York’s
would not be feasible, instead submitting a plan for what he called a “park system,” centered
around what is today Duboce Park. Much of the city’s conservative legislature however, did not
approve of what they saw as irresponsible spending and ultimately only granted a $500 budget
for the largest public works project in the city’s history. The city board also raised further objec-
Ethan Carr, Wilderness by Design Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service (Lincoln, NB:1
University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 23.
Terrence Young, Building San Francisco's Parks, 1850-1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
2
University, 2004), 52.

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tions, stating that they wanted something more similar to Central Park, a proven formula for suc-
cess.
3
Golden Gate Park and the Panhandle would not be held back. In 1867, former city super-
visor Frank McCoppin ran for mayor on the platform of creating a city park in a region called the
Outside Lands. Now the namesake for the city’s annual music festival, the Outside Lands con-
sisted of sand dunes stretching from the middle of the city all the way to the western coast. The
park, McCoppin’s most lasting achievement, was officially approved in May of 1868. The site
consisted of 1,019 acres, including a small strip of land on the eastern side called the Avenue but
known today as the Panhandle. The newly instated park commissioners called for bids to design
the park and approved the lowest bid they received at $4,860 from an unknown character with
relatively little experience in landscape architecture, William Hammond Hall. Hall’s surprisingly
ingenious contributions to the design and construction of the park all began in the Avenue, which
became the experimenting ground, the proof of concept; it was here, at the Avenue, in which
Golden Gate Park was born. Hall hired a horticulturalist, Frederick William Poppey, who had the
required expertise to tame the wild sand dunes. In the Avenue, Poppey implemented over twenty
different woody plants attempting to reclaim the Outside Lands’ sand dunes, a tried and true Eu-
ropean method of reclamation. Golden Gate Park’s first trees were planted in the Panhandle,4
some of these, including the invasive yet now iconic Eucalyptus trees, still stand today. Soon af-
ter Poppey’s experiments, the Panhandle flourished with growth, allowing planners to move for-
ward with the entire park which now stands as a testament to the ingenuity and fortitude of San
Ibid., 57.3
Ibid., 87.4

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Francisco. Golden Gate Park solidified the city’s claim to greatness, affirming to the world its
importance
Over the century that followed, San Francisco experienced explosive population growth,
expanding to nearly five times the population of the 1880s. Like other metropolis areas in the5
United States, San Francisco underwent significant cultural changes following World War II.
Almost one hundred years after the creation of the Panhandle, it became the center for young
people in San Francisco to express their discontent with the establishment. The hippie movement
that arose from this expression would explode into a country wide phenomenon during the
1960s. Before it spread however, tremors of the anti-establishment movement were felt in San
Francisco’s “Freeway Revolt.” Prompted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Highway Act of
1956 and a desire to encourage new business, many San Francisco leaders embarked on a quest
to build highways criss-crossing the city. On July 10th, 1964, an initial plan for the Panhandle6
Freeway was released, showing a design that would connect the Golden Gate Highway with Park
Presidio. After a series of defeats, including the construction of the Golden Gate Freeway along
the Embarcadero, activists rallied around defending the Panhandle and the residents of the
neighboring Haight. The Panhandle became pivotal in the fight to save San Francisco’s cultural
Cindy Bell, William Acevedo, and Janis Taylor Buchanan, Dynamic Mapping of Urban Regions:
5
Growth of San Francisco / Sacramento Regions, U.S. Geological Survey, last modified
December 2012, accessed May 18, 2015,
http://landcover.usgs.gov/urban/umap/pubs/urisa_cb.php.
Griffin Estes, The Panhandle Freeway and the Revolt That Saved the Park, Hoodline, last modified
6
March 29, 2015, accessed May 18, 2015, http://hoodline.com/2015/03/panhandle-freeway-revolt.

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identity and inspired similar movements around the country like protests against Boston’s Inner
Belt Expressway and New Orleans’ Riverfront Expressway.
7
Dubbed the “San Francisco freeway revolt,” the fight over the Panhandle Freeway was
the start of a decade of political tension. Future San Francisco politicos like Willie Brown and8
Dianne Feinstein stood up to the Mayor John Shelley who seemed bent on building highways
across the city. Despite their protest, the city Recreation and Parks Department unanimously ap-
proved the proposal for a partially above ground freeway, earning the nickname the Wreck-Parks
Department from some old-timers. To go ahead with the project however, the proposal had to9
receive a majority of votes on the eleven-person board of supervisors. With slogans like “Save
our City,” local activists and community organizations went before the board to plead their case.
Arguments ranged from noting the discriminatory nature of the proposed plan, which unfairly
removed black communities from their homes, to simply saying that a freeway like this would go
against the cultural and social makeup of San Francisco. In a landmark decision in 1966, the
board, led by Supervisor William Blake, known as “Freeway Bill,” rejected the proposal in a six
to five vote. This event, like others in the Panhandle’s history, was a precursor to similar action10
across the country including most notably, Boston and New Orleans. The defeat of the Panhandle
Freeway proposal signified a turning point in San Francisco culture: away from conservative
policies of the early 1900s towards the liberal ideals that now define the city.
William Issel, Land Values, Human Values, and the Preservation of the City's Treasured Appearance:
7
Environmentalism, Politics, and the San Francisco Freeway Revolt, The Pacific Historical
Review 68, no. 4 (November 1999): 632.
Ibid., 628.8
Estes, The Panhandle Freeway and the Revolt, Hoodline.9
Laurence E. Davies, Foes of Freeway Triumph on Coast, New York Times, March 27, 1966.10

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The fight over the Panhandle Freeway became a springboard for social and cultural
change that would occur over the following decade. Counter culture ideas like the hippie move-
ment which began on San Francisco’s Haight Street, revolved around the Panhandle. During the
1967 “Summer of Love,” the Haight received an influx of nearly 100,000 people, searching for a
culture of acceptance and change. In San Francisco they found both of these along with hard-
ships inherent to urban life. The Panhandle, which is two blocks north of the iconic Haight-11
Ashbury intersection, became a heart of the revolution. Two movements in particular arose
around the Panhandle, the “free movement” and the “sexual revolution.” As San Francisco was
overrun with incomers during the Summer of Love, the Diggers a “troupe of political provoca-
teurs” began to arrange a “free” movement, in which they provided free clothes, food, and other
items necessary for survival in the city. They owned a Free Store in the Haight, famously telling
confused shoplifters that stealing from them was impossible, as they could take whatever they
wanted. Most significant however, were the food give-aways in the Panhandle, a regular occur-
rence that helped many survive the grueling conditions. The park also became a place of sexu12 -
al revolution. Hall had designed the entire park in a Romantic style, never expecting it to became
a center of brazen sexuality like during the late 20th century. It was not uncommon for naked
couples to emerge from the wild hedges so carefully planned one hundred years earlier. This
sexual freedom helped define the 60s in San Francisco and its ideals, if not its very essence,
spread across much of the country. Ultimately, after a century of existence, the Panhandle13
David Talbot, Season of the Witch (New York, NY: Free Press, 2012), 36.11
Ibid., 36.12
Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (Oxford, UK:
13
Oxford University Press, 2009), 133.

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reemerged as a central location in San Francisco’s history books, helping define the modern con-
cept of the city.
If the world is a stage, San Francisco’s Panhandle is its dress rehearsal. After helping
shape the physical growth of the city during the 1800s, the Panhandle adopted an even broader
importance, playing out national conflicts on a small scale. Both the Freeway Revolt and the hip-
pie movement of the 60s sparked nation-wide discussions over significant directions for the
country. Today, the Panhandle is again the center of a city-wide debate: the future of biking in an
urban metropolis. The result of this experiment in biker safety and preference is still yet to be
determined but one thing is sure: it will again change the direction of San Francisco and maybe
will become a model for the country. Ultimately, the Panhandle has acted as a microcosm for ma-
jor issues that would eventually be seen at a much larger scale. The narrow sliver of park has in-
spired cultural change from San Francisco to New York; acting as an experimenting ground, for
the rest of the country to watch cultural and societal concepts develop and flourish.
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Bibliography
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Davies, Laurence E. Foes of Freeway Triumph on Coast. New York Times, March 27, 1966.
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!
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Panhandle-1882. Photograph. http://foundsf.org/images/b/b3/Panhandle-1882.jpg.
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Talbot, David. Season of the Witch. New York, NY: Free Press, 2012.
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Young, Terrence. Building San Francisco's Parks, 1850-1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
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