Hardly Strictly
Bluegrass, previously Strictly
Bluegrass, or HSB for short, is an
annual free music festival held the
first weekend of October in San
Francisco's Golden Gate Park. From
its outset, the festival has been
subsidized by San Francisco venture
capitalist Warren Hellman. The first
festival was held in 2001,
originally only inviting bluegrass
musicians. By 2004 artists from
other genres were invited and the
"Hardly" was added to reflect the
expanded scope.
Golden Gate Park, located in San
Francisco, California, is a large
urban park consisting of 1,017 acres
(412 ha) of public grounds.
Configured as a rectangle, it is
similar in shape but 20% larger than
Central Park in New York, to which
it is often compared. It is over
three miles (5 km) long east to
west, and about half a mile north to
south. With 13 million visitors
annually, Golden Gate is the third
most visited city park in the United
States after Central Park in New
York City and Lincoln Park in
Chicago.
In the 1860s, San
Franciscans began to feel the need
for a spacious public park similar
to Central Park that was taking
shape in New York. Golden Gate Park
was carved out of unpromising sand
and shore dunes that were known as
the "outside lands" in an
unincorporated area west of then-San
Francisco's borders. Although the
park was conceived under the guise
of recreation, the underlying
justification was to attract housing
development and provide for the
westward expansion of The City. The
tireless field engineer William
Hammond Hall prepared a survey and
topographic map of the park site in
1870 and became commissioner in
1871. He was later named
California's first State Engineer
and developed an integrated flood
control system for the Sacramento
Valley when he was not working on
Golden Gate Park.
The actual plan
and planting were developed by Hall
and his assistant, John McLaren, who
had apprenticed in Scotland, the
homeland of many of the nineteenth
century's best professional
gardeners. The initial plan called
for grade separations of transverse
roadways through the park, as
Frederick Law Olmsted had provided
for Central Park, but budget
constraints and the positioning of
the Arboretum and the Concourse
ended the plan. In 1876, the plan
was almost exchanged for a racetrack
favored by "the Big Four"
millionaires, Leland Stanford, Mark
Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington, and
Charles Crocker. Hall resigned and
the remaining park commissioners
followed him. The original plan,
however, was back on track by 1886,
when streetcars delivered over
47,000 people to Golden Gate Park on
one weekend afternoon (the city's
population at the time was about
250,000). Hall selected McLaren as
his successor in 1887.
