Golf courses aren't open in the San Francisco area right now, the product of shelter-in-place orders in the city and the six surrounding counties. Even PGA Championship host TPC Harding Park isn't able to welcome golfers.
So, these spaces, with hundreds of open acres in a crowded city, look like a paradise in a time when people are clamoring to get outside but do so in a responsible way. One golf course in particular, Presidio Golf Course, has decided to allow the public to use a space typically reserved for its players, creating a huge picnic space in the fairways.
Zach Klein, who owns an architecture and design website called Dwell, shared these images over the weekend.
SF’s Presidio golf course is open as a park during the crisis. It was surreal to spend the day there. 150 acres of some of most gorgeous land on the peninsula: cypress groves, rolling hills and patches of nasturtium ... all usually too dangerous to walk through as a pedestrian. pic.twitter.com/VDERHLrowD
— Zach Klein (@zachklein) April 26, 2020
The golf course has previously allowed the public to spend time on the course before Klein's post, but his tweet garnered attention from people in the Bay Area and around the world. Author Malcolm Gladwell, who has a bias against golf and thinks it should be banned because he believes the sport to be elitist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, tweeted that he hopes the course, which is located in a national park named the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, would become a park.
If there is ONE good thing that could come from all this.... https://t.co/2GS7z0lNm8
— Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell) April 26, 2020
Klein suggested the same thing in a narrow-minded tweet as part of a thread.
Also wondering what other institutions could just go away because the crisis has illuminated their thin justification for existing?
— Zach Klein (@zachklein) April 26, 2020
Ultimately, Klein, whose business sells overpriced furniture, received a variety of replies from golfers and golf supporters critical of his messaging, suggesting a well-taken-care-of golf course could suddenly become a public park despite more than 1,000 acres in Golden Gate Park, just a six-minute drive from Presidio.
Klein didn't seem to have considered that the space looked so great because public golfers pay for it to be maintained through green fees paid to the course. Despite his coarse response toward golf, we actually agree that it would be great for more people to enjoy open spaces that operate as golf courses. Government-run golf courses, in particular, would do well to create spaces and opportunities to bring in non-golfers to have picnics, enjoy concerts and host other events without having to give up the use of the golf facilities. It could be a win-win, and it would help golf's perception among the uninitiated.
