The median on one side of the east vehicle entrance to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park sports a clean brick surface. Its mate on the other side of the drive sprouts an unruly patch of weeds. The difference between the two sides might go unnoticed by most people, but on a recent morning it was bugging the heck out of David Iribarne. As superintendent of the park, Iribarne is tasked with noticing when something is amiss and being bothered enough to fix it.

Iribarne has worked for the city’s Recreation and Park Department for a decade. Overseeing Golden Gate Park is a mammoth undertaking. Its 1,017 acres contain a forest of Monterey pines, cypresses, and eucalyptuses; an Eden of flowering plants; and a zoo’s worth of wildlife including coyotes, red-tailed hawks, great blue herons, and a world-famous herd of bison. There are 10 lakes, two waterfalls, several sweeping meadows, four playgrounds, two museums, a pair of windmills, a band shell, a senior center, a stadium, and playing fields for almost every sport. There are 15 miles of roadways, nearly 30 bathrooms and service buildings, a plant nursery, and an underground city of pipes and wiring. And Iribarne plays a part in it all, from consulting on $10 million projects like the restoration of Middle Lake to ensuring that the Polo Fields are ready for Outside Lands or that the weeds are under control on both sides of the medians.

“If you let it overwhelm you, you can get totally stressed, but I’m honestly never stressed,” he says. “I have the best job in the world.”

david iribarne, san francisco, golden gate park, superintendent, recreation and park department
San Francisco Recreation and Park Department
David Iribarne, superintendent of Golden Gate Park.

In the early years of Golden Gate Park, being superintendent was all about creating the park. Unlike New York’s Central Park, which was developed atop existing green space (as well as a Black settlement, Seneca Village, which was destroyed), Golden Gate Park was conjured from barren sand dunes, an improbable origin for such a verdant urban oasis. William Hammond Hall, appointed to the job in 1870, figured out how to tame the dunes so they could be planted. He laid out the woodland park that stands, more or less, to this day. Hall’s successor, John McLaren, a skilled horticulturist, spent an astounding 53 years filling in his predecessor’s design to his own exacting specifications. “[He] reigned over the park as if it were his own back yard,” a San Francisco Chronicle reporter wrote in a 1997 tribute. Essentially, it was, as he lived, worked, and died in the stone building that has long served as the park department headquarters and is now called McLaren Lodge.

Golden Gate Park is a living space that’s constantly being shaped by natural forces like weather and entropy and by the changing needs of the city.

Both men held a vision of the park as a refuge from the press of urban life. For decades, they fought off efforts by politicians and power brokers to use the space for their own purposes.

Part of Iribarne’s job is to safeguard that legacy—as well as the park. Golden Gate Park is a living space that’s constantly being shaped by natural forces like weather and entropy and by the changing needs of the city and the desires of its inhabitants and visitors, all 24 million who come through in a given year. Iribarne’s is a daily balancing act between preserving the park for those who love it and protecting it from being loved to death.

Iribarne, who’s 55, first fell in love with Golden Gate Park as a kid. His family lived in San Rafael but visited the park, where, at around the age of 8, Iribarne discovered you could rent roller skates. For years thereafter, he insisted on spending every birthday zooming around the Music Concourse. “It was my favorite place,” he says.

His résumé reads like he was plotting a way back to his favorite place. He worked in a nursery in high school (his mother and grandfather were both avid gardeners), studied horticulture in college, did landscape contracting, and then spent over 16 years managing water conservation for Petaluma, where he lives. In 2014, he got a job as a park manager overseeing San Francisco’s Park Service Area Four, a zone that includes Stern Grove and Lake Merced. A year later, the Golden Gate Park superintendent position opened up.

Iribarne radiates an upbeat, high-energy vibe. He talks fast, and his conversation is peppered with “Awesome!” and “Amazing!” and “I love it.” His days start at 7 a.m., answering emails and texts. Most of the time, he’s in his office in the former Park Emergency Aid Station building, wading through spreadsheets and meetings, but you can’t keep him out of the park for long. Every day, Iribarne pushes back from his desk and ventures out. I recently joined him for this daily walk, which can be anywhere from three to five miles. Along the way, he pointed out things he noticed, like that unkempt median. “I’m a Virgo,” he told me. “I need to see the straight lines walking or driving.”

As we walked, he scanned plants for signs of disease and trees for dangling branches that could break free and injure someone. Nothing escaped his view: a messy pattern of mowing, an off-leash dog scampering toward a flower bed. While some of these issues seemed small, others were serious. Last winter, a storm-damaged limb fell and killed a woman at the west end of the park.

What Iribarne’s Virgo eye misses others are bound to point out. Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the Recreation and Park Department and also a stickler for detail, regularly sends him texts about wayward things. Iribarne also receives any Golden Gate Park–related complaints sent to the city’s 311 system, including pictures of overflowing trash cans, broken fences, and piles of dog poo or (this being a city) human feces. He’ll tell the sender, “Please don’t send me a picture—you can just explain it.”

Then there’s the man who files daily complaints, often many a day, about graffiti and the little stickers people affix to posts and signs. Iribarne tried channeling the man’s passion by suggesting that he form a group devoted to fighting graffiti. But, he says, “he was really mean to our volunteer [manager], who’s, like, the nicest guy in the world, so I had to kick him out.” The graffiti warrior hasn’t let up, though. He recently dropped off a garbage bag full of stickers he’d collected at the Rec and Park headquarters.

Iribarne also has to worry about the things no one can see, the most important of which have to do with water. It takes 1.2 million gallons a day to keep Golden Gate Park’s lakes filled, lawns and meadows green, and flowering plants blooming. Currently, irrigation is done with potable water from underground wells. But Iribarne’s been overseeing a massive project to retool the park’s water supply to use recycled water from city residences, which will be cheaper and more environmentally sustainable.

Drought and sustainability weren’t major concerns for most of Iribarne’s early predecessors. They filled the park with thirsty plants, often from far-off places, and had no qualms about spraying chemicals to fight pests and weeds. There’s almost no spraying done anymore, says Iribarne. Nor does his staff try to sustain perfectly luscious turf; most of the lawns are treated as meadows, where dandelions are tolerated. And in place of exotic plants, the gardeners use native plants whenever possible. The latter typically require less water, and they’re better for maintaining wildlife and encouraging pollinators.

Golden Gate Park was recently named the second-best city park in the country by USA Today.

Now 154 years old, the park is in much better shape than it was when it turned 100. In 1979, a San Francisco Examiner headline declared, “Golden Gate Park Is Dying of Neglect.” The article listed a host of ills: dying trees; trampled lawns; reed-choked, leaking lakes; broken equipment and decrepit infrastructure; a staff stretched too thin by budget cuts and hiring freezes. The problems mounted over the next two decades. By 1997, for instance, more than three-quarters of the park’s forest was in poor shape on account of old age and disease, and reports screamed about a new threat: homeless encampments.

In 1998, the department formulated a master plan to pull the park back from the brink. It contains a mix of major capital-improvement projects, such as renovating the soccer fields, restoring Murphy Windmill, building a new tennis center, and committing to a schedule of routine maintenance. A reforestation plan ensures that two trees are planted for every one that dies or is downed by a storm. Such work is funded through the cultivation of new revenue sources, including bond measures, ballot initiatives, philanthropy, and public-private partnerships with groups such as San Francisco Parks Alliance.

One measure of the renewed investment: Golden Gate Park was recently named the second-best city park in the country by USA Today. “It should have been number one,” Iribarne grumbles. The winner, Gathering Place, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, “is like an amusement park,” he says. “It’s totally different.”

Hey, Luis,” Iribarne called out as we walked by the wide sweep of lawn and flower beds in front of the Conservatory of Flowers. He knows the names of virtually all the 100 or so gardeners on his staff, a hundred more details of thousands he keeps in his head.

The conservatory is one of the park’s most historic spots, and little has changed there since the white gingerbread confection of a greenhouse was built in 1878. Take away the bowler hats and long dresses of old photos and you have the same scenes today of people strolling the long walks, admiring the flowers, and lounging on the grass. For Iribarne, “it’s a high-visibility area, and it needs to be pristine.”

Unfortunately, Conservatory Valley was always a weed-prone area, in part because the beds were replanted in spring and fall with flowering annuals, and in the process, weeds took root. The gardeners tried heating the soil to kill off unwelcome seeds. No luck. But they finally cracked the problem, as Iribarne was proud to show me: They dug down more than a foot with a tractor to root out the last bulbs of oxalis, an invasive plant that can take over a garden in no time. And they filled the beds with perennials like palms, grasses, salvias, and boxwoods. Flowers are now planted only around the borders and in one center bed, leaving a much smaller space where weeds can sprout.

From one of the oldest parts of the park, we strolled to the newest, the John F. Kennedy Promenade. After years of fractious debate, the 1.5-mile roadway was closed to cars in 2022. Since then, Iribarne and other park administrators have been trying to figure out how to make it less road and more park. They meet every two weeks with staff from Illuminate, the arts nonprofit that has been filling the space with art installations and musical events.

“There’s so many possibilities of what it could be like. It’s really in its infancy,” Iribarne said. He was vague on the vision for the area, beyond saying that it should be “filled with cool things” but remain functional for events like Bay to Breakers.

As we made our way down JFK through a steady stream of walkers, runners, and cyclists, I asked him what was the most challenging thing about his job. His first answer was “HR,” quickly followed by graffiti. Case in point, someone has been defacing the four bronze Rabbitwoman and Dogman statues by artists Gillie and Marc most recently parked along the promenade. The vandal has repeatedly spray-painted white stripes on the figures. Ben Davis, head of Illuminate, tried to clean off the paint as well as cover it up with brown paint. But flecks of white remain stubbornly visible.

As frustrating as the vandalism is, Iribarne focuses on the good. He nodded toward the otherworldly, Jurassic Park–esque plants of the Australian Tree Fern Dell, which, according to park lore, began with stalks that someone had sent to McLaren from New Zealand in a cigar box. The dell “was really overgrown and neglected for a while,” Iribarne said. Now, with the help of volunteers, including members of the Friends of the Tree Fern Garden group, it’s thriving.

We headed into the Rhododendron Dell, planted in McLaren’s honor, passing a statue of the park’s patron saint that’s tucked between some of his favorite varieties of the plant. McLaren hated putting up statues—or, as he called them, “stookies”—in the park and would hide them behind foliage. Legend has it that he stored this statue in the stables so it couldn’t be displayed in his lifetime. It’s small (as McLaren apparently was) and surprisingly modest, given the scale of his achievements and legacy. Its bald head is shiny from decades of affectionate pats by visitors.

Sometimes, Iribarne confessed, he stops by the statue and talks to it. “I’ll ask him how I’m doing,” he said. “I want to make him proud.”•

Headshot of Susan Freinkel

Susan Freinkel is an award-winning journalist and the author of American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree and Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. Her latest obsession is Golden Gate Park, which she writes about in her Substack newsletter, 1017 Acres: Life in the Park.