Bishop Megan Rohrer speaks about Golden Gate Park, healthy resolutions and blessing the city for 2022

January 21, 2022

Heather Knight/The Chronicle

New to podcasts? Here’s how you listen.

Total SF hosts Peter Hartlaub and Heather Knight meet with Bishop Megan Rohrer and record a podcast episode in their most unusual location yet — the Ferris wheel at the Music Hall in Golden Gate Park.

Rohrer talks about staying positive in 2022 and when resolutions can lead to unnecessary guilt and shame. They also give a blessing to San Francisco and talk about the city’s potential — even in frustrating times.

This is Rohrer’s third appearance on Total SF and the first since his confirmation as the first transgender bishop in the Lutheran Church. Hartlaub and Knight have recorded at the base of Sutro Tower, on several slow streets, and on top of a drag club, but never in a moving vehicle.

A culture podcast from San Francisco featuring celebrity guests, non-celebrity guests, personalities from the San Francisco Chronicle and a celebration of life in the Bay Area. Hosted by cultural critic Peter Hartlaub in the Chronicle basement historical photo archive, with frequent appearances by his #TotalSF partner, columnist Heather Knight. Hartlaub, who was the Chronicle’s newsboy from 1983 to 1985, began writing for the publication in 2000. Hartlaub writes stories about Bay Area culture, produces podcasts, and browses the Chronicle archives for his work as an author of the Our San Francisco history column. He lives in Alameda.

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A rider cares for his elbow and pride after a fall. Cycling was rough in the beginning – but this gentleman was lucky. He could have been at the Tour de France, where competitors broke their bikes on broken glass thrown by loud fans. Library of Congress hide caption

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Library of Congress

A rider cares for his elbow and pride after a fall. Cycling was rough in the beginning – but this gentleman was lucky. He could have been at the Tour de France, where competitors broke their bikes on broken glass thrown by loud fans.

Library of Congress

This week the Tour de France riders spent three strenuous days in the Pyrenees. Once again you have made the curious decision not to just get off your bike and get on the bus like sensible people.

Anyway, the Alps are yet to come, and there is still a lot to pedal before they sprint to Paris on July 26th.

So while fans are waiting for the triumphant return home, there’s no better time to turn to know-it-all journalist AJ Jacobs. He takes NPR’s Scott Simon on his own tour and talks about fun facts with a little bit of cycling knowledge.

Interview highlights

In the scandalous first Tour de France in 1903 and the dangerous second

The 1903 winner was a former chimney sweep named Maurice Garin. And during the race, Garin is said to have crashed a rival’s bike. And then Garin got off his own bike and stomped on the poor guy’s back wheel until it was destroyed. So not quite as subtle as Lance Armstrong. …

The next year was worse. The fans were hooligans, and they threw broken glass and nails on the street to hand out tires they didn’t like. The leader of the race was actually attacked by four masked men. There was riots, broken fingers, gunfire in the air, racing drivers secretly taking trains. …

I’m sure it was very entertaining not to get shot.

With the early bike models that were a little less comfortable

The first bicycles in the 1860s were called boneshakers. So they had an iron frame, iron tires. They weighed over 40 pounds. And you rode her over cobblestones. So it wasn’t for the faint of heart or, as they said at the time, for the faint of heart.

On the role of the bicycle in the women’s movement

Cycling was actually a big part of the women’s movement. And Susan B. Anthony said that cycling has done more to empower women than anything else in the world because it gives them freedom of movement. And it helped them get rid of those huge, flowing dresses.

But there were men who thought it was a serious threat to women’s sexual purity. And so they designed the so-called “hygienic saddle”, an uncomfortable seat that would keep women really chaste. So we can thank these guys for saving western civilization.

About Annie Londonderry, one of the first female cycling superstars

She was a Jewish mother of three from Boston. And in 1894, based on a bet, she decided to ride a bike around the world in 15 months. And she went with a pearl-handled revolver, a change of underwear.

She did it. She was thrown in the Korean prison [but] she did it. There is a wonderful book about it called Around the World on Two Wheels.

She also became a big focal point for women’s rights because she ended up wearing men’s clothes. Apparently a bystander saw her in pants and ran away screaming.

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Antoine Mabrey heard about a free Mother’s Day promotion on the radio when he was home in Hayward, but he kept it to himself as he packed up his wife Alisha and daughters Ari, 6 and Amaya, 3, and drove them to the Sunday morning Golden Gate Park.

At 9 a.m. they looked at the SkyStar observation wheel, which rose 150 feet into the sky. At this point, Alisha knew that her surprising Mother’s Day present shouldn’t be brunch. It was three trips on the ferris wheel. The tickets were free for mothers, which meant a saving of US $ 18 – “definitely a plus,” said Antoine, not wanting to sound financially motivated on Mother’s Day.

But there were a lot of people because at 9:30 a.m., half an hour before the opening, the line stretched from the ticket office to past the California Academy of Sciences. “I love this thing,” said Erica Spartos, who was there with her daughter Eula, 8.

Spartos admitted that the reason she hadn’t been there was the price. “I think it’s too expensive,” she said, even considering a 15% discount for locals and $ 12 for kids. The trip consists of three full rotations in a closed gondola, which takes about 10 minutes, and that after half an hour of waiting. “It’s starting to spin,” Spartos said as the attraction came to life.

Until then, patience waned. Zion Burdick, 4, had his little brother Maverick, 3, by the hood of his sweatshirt and made a ride of his own by spinning him around in circles. “They’re just alive,” said their mother, Shellie, who shut down the Windsor boys while they left their toddler home with Dad, an extra gift.

The SkyStar, owned by an entertainment company in St. Louis, first arrived in March 2020 as the main attraction for the 150th anniversary of Golden Gate Park on April 4, 2020. The day the wheel joined the skyline was the day the pandemic struck – home-order passed. The 36 gondolas didn’t make it out of their shipping container until October 21 after the order was canceled, only to close again on November 28 when the virus got caught in a winter flood.

The subsequent reopening on March 4 became controversial when it became known that the Department of Recreation and Parks was looking to extend the original one-year contract by four years. Park purists opposed it, but the expansion was approved after a campaign highlighting the ferris wheel as the engine of economic recovery that could attract tourists and help Richmond District merchants survive the financial struggle of the pandemic.

“It’s ridiculous to fight for a ferris wheel,” said Shellie Burdick. “If we care about things, why don’t we care about climate change?”

The SkyStar spins under the lights day and night, which was another point of criticism. But it was an average of 30,000 passengers a month.

It can run with just six gondolas if there isn’t much demand, with the weather being a deciding factor. On a Sunday, a rainstorm caused an LED light on top of the bike to short-circuit and set off a spark. The people who drove in the six cars were evacuated. Half an hour later, according to the manager, the journey continued without any problems.

Under the sunny Mother’s Day skies, all 36 cars were in operation and the line was moving faster after San Francisco made enough progress against the coronavirus that the ride doesn’t capture the temperatures of all passengers before boarding. They were allowed to go straight to the photo booth, which shows the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Grant Haggerty, 7, who lives in the Sunset District, was scared to ride it, but once on board with his parents Tom and Alayne Haggerty he was able to enjoy his mother pointing out UCSF Parnassus, where Grant was born. His father pointed to his own birthplace, St. Mary’s Hospital, though that was of limited interest to Grant.

Erica Spartos described the ride as “a complete thrill”. The living green roof of the Academy of Sciences had given her hope against climate change. “It gives you a perspective that you don’t get every day.”

Zion and Maverick Burdick went out in search of hot dogs, and Alisha Mabrey left with a cardboard frame that contained photos of her with her husband and daughters, including one that appeared to have been taken on a skycam while they were there were in the air.

The framed photos were $ 36.95, which was double the savings on Mother’s Day, but Antoine didn’t want to argue with that. “It was definitely the best Mother’s Day,” said Alisha, “because it was a surprise.”

Sam Whiting is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF

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So the ferris wheel. The Golden Gate Park Ferris Wheel. The goddamn ferris wheel, Golden Gate Park.

A city where so much time and energy is expended in the midst of a human and fiscal calamity and the backdrop for a ride in a park is chewed on seems to have exceeded the limits of self-parody.

That sounds normal to San Francisco.

But then Drew Becher wrote a letter to Supervisor Connie Chan on Thursday. And just like that, we crossed the boundaries of boundaries.

Punishing voters to seek political vengeance or to seek allegiance from a political leader is nothing new. But you shouldn’t do it in writing. Or confirm to the newspaper when prompted.

But that’s exactly what happened.

“We have always enjoyed the district manager’s partnership in investing in playgrounds and open spaces in our city and, above all, have relied on it. Without this guidance and support, our endeavors would be far more challenging, ”wrote Becher, executive director of the San Francisco Parks Alliance, a non-profit organization that raises funds for projects in the leisure and parks department, among other things.

Chan, who represents the Richmond borough, has called for a review and investigation of the nonprofit organization – and, controversial, given an extension of – after the (sighing) ferris wheel of l’affaire, a 150-foot diesel-powered concession in the middle of Golden Gate Park four years earlier this month as a result of Covid inactivity.

Regardless of what you think of the $ 18 per capita price of a private company on public property or its gas combustion generator, or the aesthetic desires of confused white men who have been dead for nearly a century, there are good reasons to put this ferris wheel in to see a moody, starved city as something more than a little moody.

And that’s because the Parks Alliance – and interestingly not the city – draws money from the “SkyStar” deal. Yes, the same Parks Alliance that served as the repository for nearly $ 1 million in Mohammed Nuru Recology Slush fund money.

So there are relevant questions about this setup, which should now run in the middle of the decade.

But not if you want a children’s playground in your district to be renovated.

“Please confirm in writing whether we should continue to support the Richmond Playground,” wrote Becher to Chan. “If we don’t hear from you, we will assume that we no longer have your support and will stop working until your concerns are completely resolved.”

You have a nice playground here. It’s a shame if something happened.

San Francisco is again an unsubtle and often parodic place. But Becher seems to be setting new standards here: In paragraph two of his letter to Chan, he complains of allegations of the “pay-to-play policy”; In paragraph 4, he informs the elected supervisor that the Richmond District children will not be allowed a playground without their written request.

This is a SkyStar-sized chutzpah level.

The Firth Wheel at the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Let’s say that driving Ferris wheels is fun.

The popular formulation of arguments regarding the ferris wheel in the park has been a simple battle between “fun” and “not fun” – a reductive construction similar to claiming that Animal Farm is a treatise on animals and agriculture.

There are of course people who have visceral reactions to “funny” installations in the faux-pastoral surroundings of Golden Gate Park. While the master plan for Golden Gate Park is reportedly still in line with William Hammond Hall’s vision, the first strict adherence to his wishes by the park’s first superintendent would shut off the activities that draw about 19 out of 20 visitors to the park.

Hall would not have loved a Ferris wheel. But he wouldn’t have been enthusiastic about ball fields or music festivals either. Former Park Board President William Stow once argued that a museum “doesn’t belong in a park”. Millions of subsequent park visitors would tell him he was wrong, as would the man he argued with at the time – MH de Young.

The Golden Gate Park is a completely artificial creation. It is a replacement landscape on the east coast that has been carefully grafted onto a series of sand dunes on the west coast. And in the past there were many wild attractions here: a racetrack, a hall with taxidermied former park creatures and even a casino.

So it’s easy not to care what Hall or Stow or John McLaren or anyone else would have wanted for Golden Gate Park and still have concerns about this Ferris wheel.

And that’s because of the aforementioned deal that underpins this agreement.

Wealthy people have long donated money to parks as long as there are wealthy people and parks.

Doug Goldman’s family has run the Stern Grove Festival for generations and was the primary beneficiary of the recently completed tennis center with his family name in Golden Gate Park. However, this is a very traditional form of philanthropy. Goldman doesn’t make money for every concert goer standing under a tree or a tennis game.

But that’s the setup with the Parks Alliance and the Ferris wheel. And the bigger problem here is: money that could have flowed into the city is now flowing into this private entity.

It is unusual for a city council to enter into a contract where a for-profit corporation sets up a for-profit business on city land and the money goes to a third party rather than the city council that issues the permits. And this raises interesting questions about control and cash flow: As the controller’s office put it in an audit by the Parks Alliance in September after the Nuru scandal, funds in non-profit “friends of” organizations work like a city account without a city watchdog. ”

As such, by contracting a nonprofit organization in lieu of the city itself, a city government can bypass all sorts of oversight and restrictions that the city imposes on itself – such as paying current wages or not doing business with restricted entities.

A private outfit can also spend money in a way that a public outfit cannot. For example, if the Parks Alliance wanted to have a party for large private donors for Rec and Park, that wouldn’t be a problem. The alliance’s 2018 tax forms indicate that approximately $ 263,000 was spent on “food and drink.” Well this is a party that rivals Nuru’s best!

And if, for example, the Parks Alliance previously made non-refundable deposits or other costs were incurred due to the failed celebrations for the great 1-5-0 of Golden Gate Park: Well, now it has a year-long source of income.

After all, the notion that the Parks Alliance can do business and spend money like the city can’t is especially troublesome when you consider that, as Rec and Park Department business partners told us, they were unsubstitutedly encouraged by Rec to to donate to the Parks Alliance and park staff up to and including director Phil Ginsburg.

Our direct question to the department was answered indirectly: “We encourage the collection of donations for our projects such as the playground campaign.”

Without doubt. But that’s not the nature of what we’ve been told: the prospective business partners said they would rely on making large donations to the Parks Alliance – donations that are not included in any contract.

Asking companies in front of you to donate to your nonprofit sounds a bit like what Nuru has been accused of.

It also sounds a bit like an offer that cannot be refused.

“What should I do?” asked an injured potential partner. “My sphincter was tight.”

The offer was not refused.

The attempt by Supervisor Connie Chan and Aaron Peskin to break the wheel at the Board of Supervisors level involved a rather Talmudic analysis of what constitutes “temporary”, “structure” and “temporary structure”.

This attempt was unsuccessful. And, you know, not every solution to every problem should involve the board of directors voting on more things – nor thinking about the catacombs of the City Charter to uncover semantic relics.

But it is also hardly a solution to reductively break down every urban dispute into Manichean extremes (“fun!” “Not fun!”). After years of burgeoning corruption scandal, it is hardly a solution to shake off so many red flags and simply notice that Ferris wheels are fun.

Five San Francisco division chiefs were evicted during the year and have been changing since Nuru’s arrest. The revelations have exposed this city’s club culture of occasional corruption – and it has not been lost on anyone that it was the government that got the ball rolling.

Are the Franciscans exposed to corruption? Maybe. But maybe we were just distracted by another shiny object.

And perhaps those who chose to view the Ferris wheel only as an object of culture war did not experience the consequences of corruption in the city.

Certainly not the bad consequences.

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