San Fran's Floating Utopia Reflects Big Tech's Influence

Salesforce Park, in downtown San Francisco, sits atop the Salesforce Transit Center, above Salesforce Plaza, in the shadow of Salesforce Tower. It is a lush, five-and-a-half-acre rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows and meticulously landscaped, climatically harmonious, drought-tolerant flora. 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 linear park—longer than it is wide—and is elevated about seventy feet above the sidewalk. Its lush, verdant lawns, deliberately overgrown, are two googly eyes short of a Jim Henson character. The buildings that surround it are a kaleidoscope of black and aqua glass. 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.