FoundSF

Historical Essay

by David D. Schmidt, 2026

An excerpt from the book, San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History, by David D. Schmidt (Backcountry Press, 2025).

Dozens of seagulls flock while a lone heron sits in the restored Crissy Field lagoon, 2022.

Photo: Chris Carlsson

In 1994, when the National Park Service took command of San Francisco's Presidio after more than 200 years of military use, Sharon Farrell began organizing the park's habitat restoration efforts. She quickly established a native plant nursery, and put hundreds of volunteers to work growing, planting, removing invasive weeds, and monitoring native species, including such endangered plants as San Francisco Lessingia and Raven's Manzanita—the lone individual of its subspecies, discovered by famed botanist Peter Raven when he was a St. Ignatius High School student in the 1950s.

Under Farrell's management, the number of tiny Lessingia plants in the Presidio soared from about 300 to tens of thousands. Key to this success was a bizarre windfall: In December 1995, a severe rainstorm blew open an old brick sewage conduit, causing a house to collapse at the Presidio’s western boundary and spilling raw sewage into the Presidio's Lobos Creek. The city of San Francisco paid a substantial penalty for polluting the creek, and the Presidio got a big chunk of the money. Farrell put it toward restoration of sand dune habitat bordering the creek. Bulldozers removed acres of invasive ice plant and recreated dunes. The nursery grew thousands of native dune plant seedlings; volunteers and work crews planted them.

The Park Service’s non-profit partner, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, secured $34.4 million (including $18 million from the Haas family) for a bigger project: The transformation of Crissy Field, a half-mile-long expanse of windswept pavement from an old military airfield on the Presidio's northeast shoreline, into a restored wetland and dune ecosystem, plus a grassy recreation area. In 1999, excavators broke up the pavement, and contractors removed 87,000 tons of soil and sand contaminated by fuel leaks and spills from the airfield. They scooped out a 20-acre basin to recreate a tidal lagoon, and restored dunes along the shore. Asphalt and concrete were recycled as material for new pathways.

Part of the original lagoon had been used as the Presidio’s trash dump in the late 1800s. Archeologists carefully sifted the debris, removing thousands of artifacts. The nursery expanded to produce more than 100,000 seedlings planted around the lagoon by 3,000 volunteers in the winters of 2000 and 2001. The 29-acre recreation field was seeded with native grasses.

Hundreds of Elegant Terns gather on mud island in restored Crissy Field lagoon, 2022.

Photo: Chris Carlsson

By 2000, bird-watchers had spotted 120 bird species, many of them stopping at the new lagoon in their migrations. When the new Crissy Field was dedicated in May 2001, it was already popular with city residents and tourists walking to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Over the next 20 years, park managers expanded the habitat restoration effort south from the lagoon into the Tennessee Hollow watershed, removing 77,000 tons of trash from another old landfill in 2006 to daylight Petlenuc Creek, named after an Ohlone village dating back to Presidio’s founding in 1776.(1) By 2012, they had taken out a paved road at El Polin Spring, source of the creek, and park crews joined volunteers restoring the surrounding valley with thousands of native plant seedlings.

In 2019, park managers took stock of 25 years of restoration. Thousands of volunteers had worked more than 263,000 hours removing more than 4 million gallons of invasive weeds and planting 799,000 native seedlings.(2) One star volunteer alone, cheerful retired tax attorney Charlie Starbuck, put in 10,000 hours over 3,000 days. “He was our Beatles,” said Lewis Stringer, associate director of natural resources for the Presidio Trust, when Starbuck died in 2021. “He had screaming fans.”(3)

MacArthur Meadow, a restored wetland that is part of the Tennessee Hollow watershed, 2026.

Photo: Chris Carlsson

During that time, eight completed projects had restored the entire 270-acre Tennessee Hollow watershed to native vegetation, from serpentine grasslands with rare native plants like Presidio Clarkia and Franciscan manzanita, to creekside wetlands and meadows, to Crissy Field Lagoon. It was the nation’s first urban watershed to be entirely restored. Elsewhere in the Presidio, 12 additional projects removed old trash landfills, deepened Mountain Lake (a misnomer; its original name, Laguna de Loma Alta, meant “Lake of the High Hill”) and restored its native three-spined stickleback fish, Pacific chorus frogs,(4) Western pond turtles, rare forktail damselflies,(5) and adjacent wetlands; daylighted Dragonfly Creek; restored oak woodlands and dunes, and re-introduced checkerspot butterflies, which had vanished by the 1980s.(6) Rare, sand-loving silver digger bees, which pollinate many native plants, moved in on their own in 2019, nearly a century after the species disappeared from San Francisco.(7)

Fort Funston, a former coastal defense base on the ocean shoreline south of the San Francisco zoo, is also part of the Golden Gate National Parks. The fort occupied 250 acres of sand dunes once covered with dozens of species of native dune plants, but starting in the 1930s much of it was bulldozed during construction of gun emplacements and roads. The Army then planted South African ice plant to stabilize the dunes. Over the next 50 years, the ice plant expanded in all directions, smothering most of the native plants.

The Park Service built a small nursery in 1980 to raise native plant seedlings, and begin restoring the dunes. The nursery, run by volunteers, was producing more than 6,000 seedlings annually in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In 1992, volunteers began removing ice plant from seven acres of dunes adjacent to sandy cliffs overlooking Ocean Beach. The goal was not just to restore native plants, but to help bank swallows, a threatened bird that nests in the cliffs. The plants attract insects, providing food for the birds. Between 1992 and 1995, volunteers planted 35,000 seedlings. Each year since then, volunteers and park staff have rolled back acres of ice plant, replacing it with more than a dozen species of native dune plants.

Still lots of ice plant to remove in 2021 at Fort Funston!

Photo: Chris Carlsson

Questions? Email the author: davidnaturesf@gmail.com

Notes

1. Fimrite, Peter, “Presidio creek restoration reaches crucial final stage,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 8, 2015.

2. Fimrite, Peter, “Turning back time to renew old habitat,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 2, 2019.

3. Whiting, Sam, “Prolific volunteer for urban forest,” S.F. Chronicle, Sep. 26, 2021.

4. Perlman, David, “Plants long unseen pop up at Presidio,” S.F. Chronicle, July 16, 2016.

5. Perlman, David, “Rare flies introduced at Presidio’s waters,” S.F. Chronicle, Oct. 16, 2016.

6. Rubenstein, Steve, “Emerging plan: 300 caterpillars’ big move,” S.F. Chronicle, Mar. 14, 2017.

7. Fimrite, Peter, “Return of bees creating buzz after Presidio’s habitat work,” S.F. Chronicle, Mar. 29, 2019.

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Excerpted from David D. Schmidt's San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History. Available from Backcountry Press.