A place of renewal: Crissy Field

Crissy Field was designated a National Historic Landmark in the early 1960s, along with the entire Presideo of San Francisco. An information board at the Warming Hut Park Store & Cafe informs that Crissy Field was a rich salt marsh and homeland of Ohlone people before it became a landing site for Spanish and Russian explorers. Later it was turned into a venue for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and a pioneering United States military airfield.

Today it is a spectacular 100-acre shoreline park at the center of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area—a place from where to look underneath the Golden Gate Bridge or across San Francisco Bay or to watch nearby kitesurfers. And birdwatchers may want to scan the beach, small sand dunes or water surface as well as the partially restored tidal marsh and lagoon, which once was a fishing, hunting and gathering place of native people, before the U. S. military started dumping Presidio's trash here. Now, native plant species such as yerba buena, bracken fern and soap root have been reintroduced to the area. A place of renewal, indeed.