City of 56 Secrets

It was the third day of this brand new year when my cohorts and I set out to the ever-growing city of San Francisco and all though I had been there several times before on various occasions, I had no idea that I was going to learn a whole new side of San Francisco I never knew existed. Our docent, Rick Evans who is an architecture historian, met us in one the oldest hotels in the city. The name of the hotel escapes me but the stories that Mr. Evans told us will forever be lodged in my brain. He told us that before cigarette laws were passed, the entire ceiling was covered in smoke and that it wasn’t until recently when the ceiling had revealed the beautiful sky view windows in the hotel lobby, which was kind of gross but I guess that’s how it was in the twentieth century.

We moved upstairs to a garden on the hotel’s roof, which seemed to be just a simple regular garden. It wasn’t until Mr. Evens told us that only a few people in all of San Francisco know about this garden and immediately a red flag went up in my mind. He went on to tell us that this garden is know as a Privately Owned Public Open Space, aka POPOS and that there are 56 places just like this one. Mr. Evans told us that POPOS are created after a company expands upon their property but in order to do that they must give back to the public in some way but they don’t have to tell the public anything. So although a company makes a privately owned public open space, they can choose to keep it a secret so that they will not have to pay for maintenance from other peoples mess on the space so in order to save money they keep the POPOS a secret, so to speak. Learning of this made me think of how selfish and hypocritical big businesses can really be. Although that not all POPOS are kept secret, the idea of making one for the public and not letting the public know about it is purely conceded, and now that I know of a few secrets in San Francisco, I wonder how many their might be Rome.    

-Devin Hunter