Sterling Park

‘Homeward into the sunset/Still unwearied we go, /Till the northern hills are misty/With the amber of afterglow.’ Poet George Sterling’s ‘City by the Sea’ is almost maudlin – that is, until you watch the sunset over the Golden Gate from the hilltop park named in his honor. Sterling was a great romancer of all San Francisco had to offer, including nature, idealism, free love and occasionally opium, and was frequently broke. But as the toast of the secretive, elite Bohemian Club, San Francisco’s high society indulged the poet in all his eccentricities, including carrying a lethal dose of cyanide as a reminder of life’s transience. Broken by his ex-wife’s suicide and the loss of his best friend, novelist Jack London, the ‘King of Bohemia’ apparently took this bitter dose in 1926 inside his apartment in the club. Within two years his influential friends had this park – with zigzagging paths and stirring, Sterling views – named after him. If you’re not left breathless by these hilltop views, play tennis on the adjacent public court named after San Francisco’s Alice Marble, the 1930s tennis champ who recovered from tuberculosis to win Wimbledon and serve as a US secret agent among the Nazis during WWII. Sure puts a little post-tennis panting into perspective, doesn’t it?