Salesforce Park’s Sleight of Hand
It’s raining today, and I’m outnumbered by security at San Francisco’s Salesforce Park. On a sunny day—at least before the pandemic—people would have checked out Boggle from the game cart (they are Unplugging). But right now, it’s a ghost town. Two women in identical parkas tap their key cards and disappear into 181 Fremont, the city’s third tallest tower which houses the San Francisco offices of Facebook.
Suspended seventy feet above the sidewalk, I am both in the clouds and below them. Skyscrapers block every waterfront view although I am just a few blocks away from San Francisco Bay. This is the forest floor and a canopy of steel trees fill the sky around me. Familiar brands, ones usually followed by a “.com,” are the only sights I see. From here San Francisco is glass. It’s only until I peer off the side that I remember the city that existed before 2009.
Even soaked in rain, the park is breathtaking (Figure 1). Covered in a corrugated aluminum skin, the space swells and undulates in perpetual motion. It’s longer than it is wide, and it snakes through the dense high-rises of the Financial District at ankle height. Lining this rooftop designed by Adam Greenspan of PWP Landscape Architecture is a network of gardens showcasing vegetation imported from places around the world whose climates are similar to San Francisco’s. There is the Chilean forest, the Australian garden, the giant redwood park whose giant redwoods are my height, if that. (They’ll need another hundred years to mature.) There’s the Salesforce Amphitheater, the Salesforce Gondola that transports you here, vertiginously, from the Salesforce Tower located directly across the street. And, as this is San Francisco, there’s a coffee shop on the park level—Salesforce’s Trailblazer Cafe—decorated in National Park chic. I look again and realize it’s a Starbucks.
Figure 1. Salesforce Park, San Francisco, 2018. Courtesy of Tim Griffith, @timgriffithphoto.
As I make my rounds, I pass a fountain system activated by the bus movements below that trigger sensors to shoot up water. It is only then that I remember I am on the top of a bus depot. This is the Salesforce Transit Center, a nexus of private industry and public utility set on transforming the urban fabric of downtown San Francisco.
In its flashy appearance, the Salesforce Transit Center represents the great hypocrisy of booster logic: as growing tech companies like Salesforce remake the city with new headquarters (and parks and transit hubs), and their employees upend the housing market, more and more people are pushed east and south, and thus depend on the very services this bus depot provides. As such, the Salesforce Transit Center is both the engine of and corporate solution to displacement. The transit and park complex, then, push forward a vision of the city, one that quite literally sifts out old from new.
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Despite its name, the Salesforce Transit Center—the final destination for public buses from across the megaregion and beyond—remains, nominally, a public project, one clocking in at $2.2 billion (Salesforce won the naming rights for twenty-five years for $110 million.) The complex, with the park on top, opened in 2018, closed later that year when cracks appeared in two steel beams, and reopened again in July of 2019. It is part of a project to reshape a third of a square a mile into residential, office, and the perennial buzzword mixed-use space to form an “urban campus”—itself but one piece of an ongoing, $16 billion plan to rejigger the area into what real estate agents (and few others) call “East Cut.” I can see much of it being built from my view here (Figure 2). Below, a dizzying escalator deposits you on Mission Street (the familiar path for those using the transit hub is down, not up). Below me, a concrete basement remains empty, the end-point for Peninsula-bound Caltrain locomotives and a devised bullet train connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles, the supposed harbinger of the “Grand Central Terminal of the West.”
Figure 2. Map of the proposed development in the “East Cut.” Courtesy of San Francisco Planning.
Salesforce Transit Center is not the first transit hub to sit in this very spot. The original Transbay Terminal (1939), the functionalist marble edifice designed by perhaps the definitive early twentieth-century Bay Area architect, Timothy L. Pflueger, was damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and destroyed, in 2010, to make way for the new (Figure 3). It was at this moment the plot was transferred from Caltrain to the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA), a joint venture of Bay Area governmental agencies designed to oversee the construction. In 2013, more than $250 million worth of public land was sold off by the agency to fund the rebuilding. Since its inception, the authority has routinely been plagued by scandals, not least the mismanagement that led to the year-long closure of the park.
Figure 3. The original Transbay Terminal in 1978. Courtesy of SFMTA Photography Department & Archive.
Salesforce is a name many in the Bay Area recognize. Everyone has an opinion on the Salesforce Tower, Cesar Pelli’s phallic cathedral to technology—the tallest building in the region (Figure 4). Its sixty-one floors have, for good reason, become a metonym for San Francisco’s gleaming new identity. The bulk of what Salesforce does is in customer-relationship management (CRM), which gives a company the infrastructure to collect customer data and track their online patterns through website portals and plug-ins. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Salesforce’s revenue was $13 billion in 2019. But I’d be hard pressed to find someone outside of “the industry” to tell you what this company actually does. Salesforce, despite its footprint on the physical city, exists in stealth: it’s strange, I think, that this huge skyscraper is the only material artefact for a company that transacts almost entirely virtually.
Figure 4. Salesforce Tower, San Francisco, under construction, 2017. Photograph by “law_dang,” courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.
While singularly monumental, the shadow (actual and proverbial) that Salesforce casts on the city is not exactly unique. We see the specter of tech “benevolence” across the urban landscape. In the gap left by slashed social services budgets, the familiar names of tech entrepreneurs plastered on grand sites become a measure of power. There’s the Bezos Family Foundation, which has given millions to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Then there’s the Zuckerberg General Hospital right near where I’m standing in San Francisco.
But Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s founder, has distinguished himself from other tech giants and is lauded as a champion of “compassionate capitalism,” the title of his 2004 book. In it, he sets forth a philosophy of integrating “technological business and philanthropic models;” a capitalism decoupled, in his own words, from a Friedman school of free market economics. In the years since, he has helped overhaul several Bay Area children’s hospitals, now renamed for him. But he has also gone outside the realm of the politically safe: in 2019, he donated $1 million to the March for Our Lives, the student-led demonstration in support of gun control legislation. He has vocally criticized other tech executives for hoarding their money and refusing to help homeless people in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has supported higher taxes on the city’s most valuable businesses. But where is the fracture between word and action?
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I spot a sign that tells me the rules of Salesforce Park. Less so do I spot it than realize it’s been shoved in my face, at every entrance to the park, plastered on metal plaques (Figure 5). There are the standard no-nos: No smoking. No alcohol. No feeding the birds. Others I have never seen before in a park: No lying down or sleeping on chairs and benches. No “wheeled conveyances.” No disturbing the “park experience” for other visitors in any way.
Figure 5. Rules of the park, 2020. Photograph by Isaac Engelberg.
I walk through the park and think about exactly that: the experience. Not all parks use that rhetoric. It is reminiscent of tech’s much-memed jargon: optimization, streamlining, disruption. This park is active in its voice: it is precariously, anxiously, “curated.” Through its zigzagging path, it choreographs its own perspective, its own venture capitalist history of San Francisco. It is from this view that I forget about the other realities of the city: the uncloaked poverty in the Tenderloin, the gentrification of the Mission, the fact that it now consistently ranks as the most expensive city in the nation. But it begs the question, what does it mean to “disturb” this experience? The logic behind “no sleeping” is the reason why spikes jut out from city skyscrapers; why classical musical blares outside many of the city’s 7-Elevens; why some neighborhoods have plopped boulders on their sidewalks. While San Francisco’s municipal parks remain a home for many, this one gets locked up at nine o’clock every night. It is much less porous than it would have you believe. Certainly, the long escalator ride acts as de facto security measure filtering out a part of the city it sees as a “disturbance.”
What does the park represent more broadly? No matter that it is governed by public enterprise: with its branding it exists as an arm of Salesforce, a reflection not of the goals of the city but of the highest valued corporations. And this vision is of the city luxurious: a site of pleasure for those who can afford to pay.
“Salesforce Transit Center is both the engine of and corporate solution to displacement.”
It borrows heavily, of course, from the much-editorialized High Line, the park repurposed with lot of private help from a decrepit freight railroad on the West Side of Manhattan. As Kathlyn Kao writes in Public Journal, “urban setting + renovation + landscape = instant success!” With its rigorous landscaping and chic vendors, that park now sees eight million visitors annually, transfiguring the one and a half mile course it snakes through, leading Jeremiah Moss to wonder, “was this a park or a museum?”
Like the High Line, Salesforce Park has a characteristic spectacle (not least because of the company’s theme-park-like cast of characters who show up in plush-form in the gift shop). I am suffocated, bear-hugged, by the Bacchanalian pleasure of this park. The buildings in front of me fit together in geometric harmony, like bodies contorting in steel love-making. On the window of the Slack building, an arrangement of post-its spelled out “you look nice today.” It is nice.
But what can’t I see? Seventy feet in the air, it is impossible to view the disassembly of the low-rise city below. Up here, in this new city, San Francisco itself bends to the logics of capital-minded technocracy, reveling in its pleasure while pushing out its past. The park communicates in the language of a new urban vernacular, a new context to public life. From Anna Weiner’s profile of the park in The New Yorker: “This could be anywhere.”
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Suddenly, I am back at the entrance to the park. It feels purposeful, like I’ve been choreographed, perhaps programmed, back here, having had nowhere to cut through earlier. I leave the park, dump my cappuccino, and ride the escalator down. On the bus again on my way home to the East Bay, I exit through the mouth of the terminal and can’t help feeling like I’ve been tricked.
