On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Dmkingto
I’m not sure why, but after moving to the SF Bay Area about 8 years ago, I started paying more attention to benches (and taking photos of them) while out on walks/hikes. And since I rarely stop and sit on them, it’s not age or fitness related!
One of the impressive things about this area is the huge number of city, county, regional and state parks along with other open space preserves that have been established. The photos below are all from urban or suburban areas, but even in the larger “backcountry” parks, you’ll often come across benches in surprising spots.
These are all iPhone photos.
This bench is tucked in under the trees in Golden Gate Heights Park – a small park in the Sunset District in San Francisco. The park is at the top of a steep hill, but this bench just has a view across a small clearing with more trees obscuring the expansive views you can get from the edge of the park.
A couple of benches at the edge of the dog park in Pine Lake Park. This is in the Parkside neighborhood in the southern part of the Sunset. To the left (east) of this spot is Sigmund Stern Grove – site of the Stern Grove Festival.
A tucked away corner of the backstage area at the Stern Grove concert meadow/amphitheater. There’s a free concert series here on Sundays every summer – barring pandemics, floods, massive tree falls, etc. I wandered over last summer and caught a great Lucinda Williams show. The bench is that small boulder. It has a nicely rounded and smooth area in the middle to sit on.
One of the Brutalist benches along the levees that are part of the Sunnyvale Sanitation District. During the pandemic, I was living in Mountain View and would go walking or biking along these levees several times a week. In addition to waste water treatment ponds, there are also salt ponds and duck ponds in the area. During duck hunting season it could be a little disconcerting to have a duck hunter pop up and suddenly fire off a shotgun nearby.
Some of the levees are part of the Bay Area Trail. The Bay Area Trail is an attempt to circle the bay with publicly accessible paths around the entire bay. It currently has 350 miles completed, with an ultimate goal of around 500 miles. There’s an analogue to this trail up on the ridgelines surrounding the bay. It’s called BART – Bay Area Ridge Trail (not the transit system). It currently stands at over 400 miles of accessible trails with a planned total of 550 miles.
A view up the hill in Glen Canyon Park (San Francisco, not Utah). This a gem of a park in the Glen Park district. I visited for the first time last November, despite it only being about 3 miles from my current abode. It’s an interesting neighborhood, with a lot of winding, hilly streets. In case you’re having trouble spotting the bench, it’s just above the middle of the picture near the right edge. A woman in a pink top is sitting on it.
A couple of new benches along the recently fixed up 4.6 mile biking/walking path that circles Lake Merced. On the left across the lake is the public TPC Harding Park golf course – opened 100 years ago as Harding Park Golf Course. It was named after President Warren Harding and hosted PGA events during the 60s. Course conditions got pretty bad after that, culminating in the course being used as a parking lot for the 1998 US Open that was played at the nearby private Olympic Club. Since being renovated in the early aughts, it’s back to hosting professional events (including the PGA Championship in 2020).
If you look closely just to the right of center across the lake, you can see a ramp and dock coming into this portion of the lake. Just above that (and across Harding Road) is the Lake Merced Boathouse. It sits on the edge of the larger portion of Lake Merced. It houses the Pacific Rowing Club (a youth rowing organization – traditional sculls, etc.) and the Ripple Effect Dragon Boat Team. It’s also used by nearby SF State’s Campus Recreation. This smaller portion of the lake is also open for kayaking and canoeing.
View from the top of Grand View Park in SF. This small park is 3 blocks north of Golden Gate Heights Park, but has far less tree coverage and a clear view past the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. The big swath of greenery running across the picture is Golden Gate Park. The next patch of greenery is the Presidio of San Francisco. The hazy hills across the water on the left side of the picture are the Marin Headlands. The Headlands and the Presidio are part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a huge non-contiguous collection of parks, beaches, and historical sites running from Muir Woods in Marin County down to the southern part of SanMateo County. It includes Alcatraz and a lot of other old military sites from the Civil War through to the Nike missile sites of the Cold War.
Another of the Brutalist benches on the Sunnyvale levees.
The Windover Contemplative Center on the campus of Stanford University. A Japanese maple in its spring glory in the atrium of the building. This photo was taken in May 2020. The Center is currently closed for renovations after being damaged in some storms.
Looking north along Ocean Beach in SF. I was about to call this a boardwalk, but there is a distinct lack of any boards. Anyway, this concrete walkway is tucked into the dunes below the upper Great Highway and runs for 5 blocks from Noriega St. south to Santiago St. The upper Great Highway is scheduled to be closed to cars permanently this April and become SF’s newest park. Prior to the pandemic, it was only closed to traffic for special events or (more often) due to large amounts of sand being blown onto it. During the pandemic, it started being closed to cars on weekends & holidays and turned into a pedestrian/bicycle promenade. That has continued since.
GB in the HC
You’ve got a great eye. Beautiful pictures. I love and miss the Bay area. Thanks for the visit.
Jeffg166
I am always looking for a place to sit down.
pb3550
Love the variety of benches and the fabulous views from each. Thanks!
stinger
Great idea for an OTR, because sometimes when you’re on the road you need to stop and rest! Wonderful photos, including the ones with humans in them.
frosty
I second that. What a neat idea for an OTR!
DFH
Excellent theme and pics, thanks. Good to see parts of the Bay Area I didn’t see.
Betsy
I really like these photos. What a great theme! The variety of design styles is interesting all by itself. Brutalist benches, how funny.
You really hit on a great theme for your photo series. Benches make a place much more accessible by inviting us to stay and observe, enriching the experience of place. Not to mention sometimes you just need a little rest.
They can be a spot to make music or do art. Or sit with one’s thoughts, or share time with a companion.
Benches are good.
Mike in Oly
A fun and beautiful set. Thanks for sharing.
MCat
Thanks for the great photos! I live in the Bay Area and love it. I love the beauty and the people. The idea of benches is wonderful.
Anyway
This is a wonderful set – theme and photos both! Lovely pics. Thank you.
cope
What a neat set of pictures and descriptions of surprisingly tranquil places amidst an urban setting. Thank you.
Dmkingto
Thanks for the kind words folks!
pieceofpeace
I also live in Bay Area and now have some new areas to explore. The hills and valleys, and many parks of SF make for beautiful scenery, and benches are always found, sometimes alongside steep hill steps within the city. Featuring these benches is a great idea! Thanks!
MobiusKlein
We took a drive on The Great Highway the last night it was open for car traffic, and there were a surprising number of other cars at 11 pm
Dmkingto
It looks like I may have submitted lower resolution versions than I had intended. For instance, the “Authorized Vehicles” sign in the first levee picture is sharp enough in the original that it doesn’t get pixelated until I’ve enlarged it enough that only a third of it fits on my 11in iPad screen. I’ll have to be more careful with any future submissions.
munira
I love this post. You’re making me think about all my bench photos and the haiku that go with them – some day maybe. Thanks
Comrade Colette
Hello neighbor! Thanks for the lovely and evocative set of pix. I’ve walked by and even sat on nearly all of those benches. We are lucky to have so many beautiful parks and open spaces in this densely populated area.
TEL
Love this! I’m also a long-time Bay Area resident and love all the local parks and trails.
Jacel
I grew up in San Francisco across the street from the hill with Grand View Park at the top. No houses were built on that hill yet. Many of the streets in the area were still dirt roads at the time.
In later decades my father fed and encouraged the wild parrots when they started to show up in the area. Did you see any while you were there? And I know you were focused on benches, but just to the West of that hill is the first of the city’s decorative tiled steps that was created.
Dmkingto
@Jacel: I didn’t see any of the parrots. I didn’t realize that was one of their spots! I did check out the tiled steps – I climbed them on my way up to the park. That can be a challenging part of the city to stroll around!
Ronno2018
Great post! Memorial benches are at OpenBenches “Smell The Sea And Feel The Sky. Let Your Soul An
And open street map has a dataset too — https://mapcomplete.org/benches
Mike Mundy
At the Woodacre Post Office in Marin County, there’s a nice bench, and, even better, a poem to go with it.
Dmkingto
@Ronno2018: I didn’t know about either of those sites. Nice resources.
WaterGirl
@Dmkingto: This was a charming set!
Dmkingto
Here’s a link to some higher resolution versions (definitely not Albatrossity levels – these are just iPhone photos):
https://share.icloud.com/photos/03aK78S4Gau3eFKAH0h_kdYLg
And thanks again for all the nice comments!
Dmkingto
@Betsy: Glad you liked the theme! And that’s a nice meditation on benches you wrote. I’m happy you were amused by the “Brutalist” tag. I know next to nothing about architecture but that was the word that immediately popped into my head the first time I saw one of them. I thought I might get scolded if I was using the term incorrectly!
WaterGirl
@Dmkingto: No, it’s not you. The form does that.
That’s why Albatrossity includes links to his high resolution photos.