Sutro Heights Park Marker to Honor Sutro’s Jewish Heritage

SAN FRANCISCO (SDJW) — The National Park Service has agreed to a request from the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation (JASHP) to include mention of Adolph Sutro’s Jewish heritage on a marker at Sutro Heights Park in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, JASHP announced on Wednesday, Nov. 17.

The marker, accompanied by photos as seen above, reads:

Although the arched gateway is long gone, the two lions remain.  This was the estate of Adolph Sutro–a Jewish-American immigrant, mining engineer and Mayor of San Francisco.  After transforming the windswept sand dunes into a Victorian estate with formal gardens, groves of exotic trees and European statues, he opened the ground to the public in 1885. After Sutro’s death in 1898, the grounds slowly declined. Trees began to die and statues toppled or were vandalized.  The buildings were demolished in 1939. Today, Sutro’s vision of a park for city residents continues.  Sutro Heights Park is now part of Golden Gate Recreation Area.  The pastoral setting of the Heights and the Pacific Coast scenery that inspired Adolph Sutro is preserved for everyone’s enjoyment.

Initially, the marker had not included Sutro’s Jewish heritage but after Golden Gate Park staff was approached by Jerry Klinger, JASHP’s founding president, he received a letter from Will Elder, the park’s visual information specialist, saying the marker’s wording could be modified as seen above if JASHP would be willing to pay the costs.  Klinger, who has personally paid for markers across the country detailing the contributions of Jews to American history, promptly agreed.

Klinger commented to San Diego Jewish World that the park’s willingness to recognize Sutro’s ethnicity is “a significant service for the entire country” at a time when “the American Jewish community is very disturbingly experiencing rising antisemitism.”  He added that the action stood in sharp contrast to a decision by the San Francisco School Board to strip an elementary school of Sutro’s name because of an incident when  an African-American man, John Harris, was refused entry to the Sutro Baths. Had school board members taken the time to study the issue, said Klinger, “they would have known that at the time of the incident, near the end of his life, Sutro was no longer involved with administration of the Baths because he was under medical care while suffering from dementia.”  Klinger urged the school board to “rescind its hasty decision and follow the good example of the National Park Service.”

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Preceding based on information provided by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation