

Light bounced off the surrounding high-rises, scrambling the shadows. The benches, pathways, and bathrooms were pristine. A thousand-foot “water sculpture” by the artist Ned Kahn, titled “Bus Fountain,” runs along its northern perimeter from time to time, streams of water shot upward, triggered by the movement of buses through the terminal below. On a recent afternoon, young professionals in microclimate business-casual ambled through the park. Millennium Tower, a ten-year-old, fifty-eight-story luxury development near the park’s eastern tip, tilts to one side, because it is sinking. The buildings that surround it are a kaleidoscope of black and aqua glass. Its lush, verdant lawns, deliberately overgrown, are two googly eyes short of a Jim Henson character.

It is a linear park-longer than it is wide-and is elevated about seventy feet above the sidewalk.

It contains a prehistoric garden of cycads, ferns, and Wollemi pines plots dedicated to the plants of Chile, South Africa, and Australia and a small wetland hydrated with gray water. It is a lush, five-and-a-half-acre rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows and meticulously landscaped, climatically harmonious, drought-tolerant flora. Salesforce Park, in downtown San Francisco, sits atop the Salesforce Transit Center, above Salesforce Plaza, in the shadow of Salesforce Tower. Photograph by Karl Mondon / The Mercury News / Getty Salesforce Park, a lush rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows, quietly reopened this past July, after being shuttered upon the discovery of cracks in structural steel beams.
