The Greenhouse Nobody Meant to Build Here

The glass conservatory ahead of you was built for a man who never got to see it finished. In eighteen seventy six, the eccentric real estate tycoon James Lick bought enough glass and wood framing for a greenhouse modeled after the famous conservatories at Kew Gardens in London, planning to put it on his estate south of San Jose. He died before a single pane went up. His estate ended up funding the project anyway, and a group of San Francisco civic leaders had the crated materials shipped the rest of the way by boat around Cape Horn from a manufacturer in New York. Workers raised the building here in Golden Gate Park and had it standing by eighteen seventy nine, which makes it the oldest building anywhere in the park today, and the oldest surviving municipal wooden conservatory in the entire country.

It has survived more disasters than you might guess from looking at it. A furnace fire tore through the main dome in eighteen eighty three. Another fire hit in eighteen ninety five, and a third in nineteen eighteen. Then, in the winter of nineteen ninety five, a windstorm with gusts over one hundred miles an hour shattered thirty thousand panes of glass in a single night and left the building essentially gutted. The city spent twenty five million dollars putting it back together pane by pane, matching the original Victorian ironwork, and reopened it to the public in September of two thousand three.

Inside that restored glass, the air is kept warm and humid year round for orchids, water lilies, and carnivorous plants that could never survive outdoors this close to the coast. It is a strange kind of memorial: a greenhouse built for an estate that was never built, saved by a city that decided the glass deserved a home after all.