It is only then that I remember I am on the top of a bus depot. I look again and realize it’s a Starbucks.Īs I make my rounds, I pass a fountain system activated by the bus movements below that trigger sensors to shoot up water. And, as this is San Francisco, there’s a coffee shop on the park level-Salesforce’s Trailblazer Cafe-decorated in National Park chic. (They’ll need another hundred years to mature.) There’s the Salesforce Amphitheater, the Salesforce Gondola that transports you here, vertiginously, from the Salesforce Tower located directly across the street. There is the Chilean forest, the Australian garden, the giant redwood park whose giant redwoods are my height, if that. Lining this rooftop designed by Adam Greenspan of PWP Landscape Architecture is a network of gardens showcasing vegetation imported from places around the world whose climates are similar to San Francisco’s. It’s longer than it is wide, and it snakes through the dense high-rises of the Financial District at ankle height. Covered in a corrugated aluminum skin, the space swells and undulates in perpetual motion. It’s only until I peer off the side that I remember the city that existed before 2009.Įven soaked in rain, the park is breathtaking (Figure 1).

Familiar brands, ones usually followed by a “.com,” are the only sights I see. This is the forest floor and a canopy of steel trees fill the sky around me. Skyscrapers block every waterfront view although I am just a few blocks away from San Francisco Bay.

Suspended seventy feet above the sidewalk, I am both in the clouds and below them. Two women in identical parkas tap their key cards and disappear into 181 Fremont, the city’s third tallest tower which houses the San Francisco offices of Facebook. On a sunny day-at least before the pandemic-people would have checked out Boggle from the game cart (they are Unplugging). It’s raining today, and I’m outnumbered by security at San Francisco’s Salesforce Park.

Salesforce tower garden