The Conservatory of Flowers is one of San Francisco’s crown jewels. The oldest structure in Golden Gate Park and the oldest public greenhouse in California, this 12,000-square-foot masterpiece is a glorious confection of intricate woodwork and 8,000 panes (weighing 33 tons) of flat and curved glass. Its fragile framework has suffered major damage on more than one occasion, most notably in 1995, when it was devastated by a monster storm, but it endures today — a link with the Victorian era and the earliest days of the park.
The San Francisco conservatory came to be thanks to a whim of the extremely wealthy and deeply eccentric James Lick. Lick had acquired two conservatories in kit form, both modeled after the famous 1848 Palm House in London’s Kew Gardens. He intended to leave one of them to the city of San Jose. But when he read an article in a local paper criticizing his shabby dress, he changed his mind and left the conservatory crated up. (San Jose got off easy compared to Lick’s son. According to The Generous Miser, a biography by Lick’s great-grandniece, Rosemary Lick, Lick cut his son, John Lick, almost entirely out of his will because the younger Lick had failed to look after his father’s parrot, Lennie.)
After James Lick died in 1876, 27 prominent San Francisco citizens — including William Alvord, Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker — bought the crated-up conservatory and offered it as a gift to the park. A site was chosen on a gentle slope overlooking Conservatory Valley, the state legislature appropriated funds to erect the structure, and the construction work was carried out in 1878 by the New York greenhouse firm of Lord & Burnham.
Certain buildings are so unexpected, so out of place with their surroundings, that they bring to mind the weird spires known as “fairy chimneys.” Like those uncanny rock formations, such buildings are emissaries from another age — time capsules that have miraculously survived.
The San Francisco conservatory opened in 1879 to glowing press coverage and quickly became the leading attraction in the park. But a string of mishaps plagued it. In 1883, a fire started by a malfunctioning heater caused major damage to the conservatory’s dome, and it also killed a number of exotic plants and a large Brazilian parrot (unrelated to the one supposedly neglected by James Lick’s son). As Christopher Pollock notes in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park: A Thousand and Seventeen Acres of Stories, Crocker paid $10,000 of the $12,000 cost to replace the dome with a larger one. Another fire in 1918 damaged the roof. During the Depression, budget cuts resulted in deferred maintenance; the building became so dilapidated that it was closed in 1933, not to reopen until 1946.
While the conservatory survived the 1906 earthquake and fire with little damage, it was not so fortunate on December 12, 1995, when the most powerful windstorm to hit the Bay Area in 70 years smashed into the venerable greenhouse. Gusts that reached 103 miles an hour in San Francisco and 130 miles an hour atop Mount Diablo devastated the building, sending trees crashing on top of it, shattering 40 percent of its glass and destroying many of its rare plants. The conservatory was closed, and the cost of rebuilding it was so great that there were fears it would never open again. In 1996, it received the dubious distinction of being placed on the World Monuments Fund’s list of 100 Most Endangered Buildings.
However, aggressive publicity and fundraising campaigns, including a 1998 visit by first lady Hillary Clinton, raised the $25 million needed to rehabilitate the building. The painstaking restoration required taking the entire structure apart and replacing glasswork and woodwork as needed. In 2003, the Conservatory of Flowers reopened with a grand public celebration, ensuring that future generations will be able to enjoy this international treasure.
