50 years and growing

No garden is an accident. In the 1970s, Telegraph Hill neighbors transformed a concrete slab into a lavish terraced garden. Securing grants, working with city agencies, and contributing countless hours of volunteer labor, they build a landscaped hillside park for the ages. More than fifty years later, it remains sustained by ongoing community stewardship.

A Hillside Saved, Time and Again

Telegraph Hill has long been contested ground, and it’s a miracle that this hill stands today. For decades in the late 19th Century, the Gray Brothers quarry stood at the eastern foot of the hill, along Sansome Street. The operation cut deeply into the hillside, removing rock for private sale as roadway surfacing or ship ballast. (Much of this rock now sits beneath the asphalt of streets as far away as New York City and Hong Kong.) As the operation advanced steadily westward, the entire hill was threatened with leveling. Homes were rattled by dynamite and entire houses tumbled down the cliff face until residents pushed back once and for all.

In the 1970s, Telegraph Hill neighbors transformed a concrete slab into a lavish terraced garden. Securing grants, working with city agencies, and contributing countless hours of volunteer labor, they build a landscaped hillside park for the ages. More than fifty years later, it remains sustained by ongoing community stewardship.

In the early 1970s, the block of Vallejo Street west of Montgomery was little more than a steep slab of concrete, poured in the 1930s to cap what had long been a steep and impassible dirt roadway.