Amy W. Meyer
Parks Advocate • Artist​

 

I was a lucky child whose family owned lakeside property near Peekskill, N.Y., so I spent my summers in the country. I saw magazine articles about the spectacular national parks of The West and yearned to see them some day. When my husband and I came to California, we got a tent and sleeping bags as soon as we could and went to Yosemite. We were smitten. Over the years we visited many more national parks.

 

In 1970, people in my neighborhood learned of a plan to build a branch of the National Archives on a small piece of federal land that was supposed to be part of San Francisco's greenbelt. Then we heard that East Fort Miley was also within a competing federal plan to have a national park of 8,000 acres at the Golden Gate. This park plan evidently needed articulate citizen support and advocacy. Edgar Wayburn of the Sierra Club, John Jacobs of SPUR (San Francisco Planning & Urban Research) and I organized People For a Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Ed was the Chairman, I the Co-Chair, and John a principal advisor of our group of advocates.

   

The Army was giving up its forts at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, and the park would save the headlands of the Golden Gate for public use in perpetuity. The GGNRA would be "A park for the people where the people are," said Interior Secretary Walter Hickel–– a national park in an urban area. On October 27, 1972 after an exuberant, park-enlarging campaign with outstandingly effective legislative maneuvers by our elected representatives at every level of government, a 34,000 acre park was signed into law by President Richard Nixon.

 

Today the Golden Gate National Parks include Muir Woods National Monument and Fort Point National Historic Site, encompass 80,000 acres in three counties, and share a long boundary with Point Reyes National Seashore. With adjacent public park and watershed land the parks join together over 200,000 acres of contiguous habitat –– the only break is at the Golden Gate. These parks are the centerpiece of the UNESCO-designated 524,000-acre Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve. Seventeen million people visit the parks annually.

This was -- and still is -- a very collaborative enterprise with scores of people involved for over 43 years. I did my best to capture our efforts in my book, New Guardians for the Golden Gate (with Randolph Delehanty), published by the University of California Press.