Imagine the City By The Bay in 1847 - two years before the Gold Rush transformed the backwater port of Yerba Buena into the metropolis of San Francisco. Back then California belonged to Mexico and people still considered it the end of the earth.
In that year, George Greene and his wife came to California from Maine and homesteaded land near what is now Nineteenth avenue and Sloat boulevard. The land was sand dunes all the way to the ocean, land that few locals had ever seen, land that nobody seemed to want. Still, a freshwater lake on the property provided water, so Greene and his brother Alfred began to develop it and call it their own. George had a kit shipped around the horn and put up the first house in San Francisco West of Twin Peaks.
Alfred had a son, named George after the uncle. The younger George planted "Holland Grass" on the sand dunes to keep them from shifting, and planted the newly introduced Eucalyptus trees all along the sides of the valley that the homestead sat in. In later years he planted Sutro forest, the trees of the Presidio and some of the oldest trees in Golden Gate park.
In the 1870’s the owners of the land grant of Rancho Laguna de la Merced found themselves in dispute with Green, and a feud carried on between the landowners for years. Green eventually built a fort on a portion of the land and more than a few shots were exchanged. He finally won the case when a special Act of Congress granted him the land in 1887.
In 1892 George Green built a public hotel on the homestead lands, named "The Trocadero". It had cabins around a main building, a deer park, a beer garden, a lake for boating and an open-air dancing pavilion. It was the elite retreat of it's time - gentlemen would bring ladies for the weekend, row them around the lake, twirl them around the dance floor and then raise a glass or three around a lavish Spanish barbecue.
The Trocadero flourished until the advent of prohibition in 1916. Mr. Greene was quoted as saying, “I closed because of prohibition due to the fact that I did not want a bootlegger situation there.” Even so, there were persistant reports of gangsters and drinking at the run-down inn, and there are accounts that mention bullet holes from this era can be found in the building.
In 1931, Mrs. Sigmund Stern, President of the city Recreation Commission, purchased the Trocadero and the land remaining around it. She turned the property into a city park and presented it to the city in 1932 as a memorial to her late husband.
The Trocadero is still there, over 100 years old and now used for meetings and special events. Go take a look!
Enter the park at Sloat and 19th if it's open, or Crestlake and Vale (West on Sloat to Vale, turn right) for the main parking lot and the other caches in the park.