At only $70 per year, membership in The Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums, referred to in promotional materials as a "de Young membership," is a bargain. You get to view great art for a year, receive a 10 percent discount at museum stores, and get to help back specious, racially themed political propaganda aimed at preserving public parkland for use as an automobile parking lot.
Location Info
Venue
de Young Museum
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50 Hagiwara Tea Garden (at JFK, in Golden Gate Park)
San Francisco, CA 94118
Category: Museums
Region: Richmond (Inner)
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"Help us save Chicano Visions and Gee's Bend," says a mailing sent last week to de Young museum members, signed by John Buchanan, who's director of the city's Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco as well as the private, nonprofit corporation that acts as developer, bursar, and political arm for the de Young and Legion of Honor museums. "Please call or write your Supervisor today and let them know you oppose Saturday closure of JFK Drive."
The mailer refers to Hispanic- and African American-themed exhibitions scheduled for this summer and was part of an expensive, manpower-intensive, and highly misleading campaign by The Corporation to defeat a current Board of Supervisors proposal to close John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park on Saturdays during a six-month trial period. The committee recommended, on a 3-0 vote, that the proposal be approved by the full Board of Supervisors. At press time, the measure had not been scheduled for a full board vote.
I learned about the mailing separately from two friends and one reader who were angered that their de Young membership dues were being used for politicking they disagreed with. I'm not a museum member. But as a San Francisco taxpayer I'm angry, too. The corporation's 70,000 members, after all, pay their de Young dues in order to gain access to a government-owned facility on government property to view government-owned artwork. The Corporation is turning around and using this money on a political campaign to oppose what this taxpayer views as the public good.
This eastern section of the park has been off-limits to automobile traffic on Sundays since 1967, creating a car-free skating, stroller-pushing play area. Closing it to automobiles on Saturdays, for six months at least, would double the value of one of the most popular public attractions in San Francisco. Thousands of families and individuals now flock to this area of the park on Sundays to swing dance, play street hockey, roller-dance, roller-slalom, rent bikes, stroll, or just soak in the peaceful conviviality of standing amid a crowd of happy people uninhibited by the danger and noise of cars.
Extending the closure to Saturdays on a six-month trial basis is a proposal that, ironically, is nearly identical to a failed ballot measure museum boosters backed in 2000. The Corporation's leaders were right then, and are wrong now.
The Corporation relies on thin evidence to assert an additional day of closing the 1.5 mile section of road would threaten the de Young's financial health by discouraging visitors who don't wish to park in the de Young's new, hard-won, $3 per hour (on weekends), 800-space garage. Therefore, this logic says, it's important to allow cars to park Saturdays in the 140 spaces on Kennedy Drive that lie within walking distance, a quarter mile from the museum.
There's nothing illegal about The Corporation's politicking. Federal tax law explicitly allows non-profits to spend limited amounts of money furthering their own perceived political ends.
But when one takes into account the half-billion dollars per year San Francisco pays to nonprofits for providing public services, and the hundreds of millions of additional dollars that flow through public-private partnerships, such as The Corporation's role as paymaster to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, you get a significant underground political economy where public-sphere money can be used to further narrow private aims. Judging from the exaggerations and untruths emanating from The Corporation's efforts to defeat a proposal to close Kennedy Drive on a trial basis, some of this quasi-public money is not always spent on the betterment of San Francisco.
The cause of extending the Sunday Kennedy Drive closure to Saturdays, which has been the subject of repeated ballot measures and countless civic arguments during the 39 years since the Sunday closures began, has been associated in the popular mind with bicyclists. Indeed, this time around, The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has made the Board of Supervisors proposal a cause celèbre. But for a serious cyclist, Kennedy Drive makes for a lousy Sunday ride. For one thing, there are children all over the road, darting unpredictably every which way with tunnel-vision parents in tow. Then there are the skaters, often shirtless, weaving back and forth backwards, eyes sometimes blissfully closed. There are swing dancers and their onlookers to contend with. And ordinary pedestrians seem to meander unpredictably, without car traffic to keep them turning at right angles.
So on Sunday, I don't take my bike to the park. I take my small daughters, join the melee of scooters and strollers and whatnot, and have a wonderful time.
I'll leave a fuller description of this park experience to a superior stylist. "And then to the rarest treasure, Golden Gate Park on a car-free Sunday morning, the air wet and clean, the meadows green with the promise of spring. Not a single automobile: The silence is deafening, you can actually hear the branches dripping moisture, squirrels scrambling through the underbrush — and the birds! Hundreds of red-breasted robins bobbing across the lawns, now that there are no cars to frighten them," wrote Herb Caen in 1973.
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