shook the young hands of all those in a long receiving line and signed hundreds of autographs.
The trained bears did their share of tricks but were still wild enough to entertain the crowds. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
The death of Robert Woodward in late 1879 sounded the death knell for Woodward’s Gardens. Wood-ward’s sons took over its management but the Gardens slowly declined, lacking Woodward’s enthusiasm and showmanship, and finally closed in 1894. Auctions liquidated all the artifacts and animals with much of the statuary, taxidermy, and oddities going to Adolph Sutro’s Baths and Museum. Developers graded the land flat and sold it in tracts to provide homes for the working class of San Francisco. It punctuated the end of the century and signaled the end of an era for San Francisco.
Rear view of Robert B. Woodward’s Gardens. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
All that remains as a reminder that Woodward’s Gardens existed is a recently opened bistro on the corner of Mission and Thirteenth streets called Woodward’s Gardens and a small brass commemoration plaque mounted on side of the old state armory at the corner of Mission and Fourteenth streets facing the site where Woodward’s towering gates once stood.
THE CHUTES ON HAIGHT STREET
Captain Paul Boyton created his Shoot-the-Chutes water ride for the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition (World’s Fair). Proving a major success in Chicago, Boyton decided to capitalize on it but didn’t want to build or manage rides all over the country. Instead, he sold nonexclusive rights to the name and the ride’s design.
Charles Ackerman, a San Francisco railway lawyer, purchased the rights to build the ride in a park on Haight Street between Cole and Clayton streets near the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. The Chutes opened in San Francisco on November 2, 1895 with a single food concession stand and the namesake Shoot-the-Chutes ride. Flat-bottomed boats charged uncontrollably down a 350-foot water flume that rose seventy feet above the water. They hit the pond at speeds up to sixty miles per hour and shot to the end where they were collected back at the platform. Loading up with new passengers, they again began the ride up the inclined track to the platform at top of the ride. There was the occasional mishap when a gondola flipped and deposited the riders in the pond—but then, that was all a part of the fun.
Entry cost a dime for adults; a nickel for kids. The park, located on the city’s transit line near Golden Gate Park, “just a short walk from the Children’s Playground,” offered easy access as well as a replacement for the Midway of the 1894 California Midwinter Exposition at the park. The Chutes began adding more rides and attractions by the following summer. Tintypes pictorializing a visit using a Chutes backdrop & gondola were offered by Jones & Kennett who also worked two locations near Ocean Beach.
The Camera Obscura stood at the top of the ride, housed in a Japanese-style structure. The device used a giant convex lens focused on a mirror to provide a telescopic panoramic view of the area around the Chutes reflected in the mirror. Just as the boat passengers reached the top, they entered the dark building and were mesmerized by the view reflected on the mirror. With their attention fixed on the mirror, they plunged without notice to the pond below. The Camera Obscura at the Cliff House is a good example of this ancient technology that dates back to 5th century China.
Chutes on Haight Street looking east, ca. 1895. —Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
The Scenic Railway, evidently drawing a separate charge from the Shoot-the-Chutes ride, offered a comparably adventuresome attraction. A roller coaster in all but name, it made dips and climbs that surpassed anything in the East, per the park’s brochure. The ride circled the perimeter of the grounds, nearly a mile in length. It included an upper and lower track, with only one train allowed on that track at any one time, and a system of lights, signals, and brakes prevented any chance of collision when traversing between the two tracks. Six riders per car made the journey, terminating in an 800-foot tunnel, featuring an electrically lighted scenic diorama of foreign lands on its walls. The brochure stressed the safety of the ride and that set the theme for the park.
Many amusement parks and midways were thinly disguised operations intended to titillate and fleece the public. Not so at the Chutes—it focused on clean family fun to the point of segregating any alcohol served, so women and children could take refreshment without being exposed to drinking. Adjoining the Refreshment Pavilion, the Chutes Café offered ice cream sodas and other refreshments, with no liquor served. The Chutes and its owners maintained a positive moral image during their entire history in the city.
The park also added a miniature railway with a track gauge of only nine inches. Built for the park at half the scale of eastern parks, the six-foot locomotive and tender pulled ten cars, each seating two people. The locomotive was named “Little Hercules,” due to its pulling strength.
Chutes also included an English-built merry-go-round, “The Galloping Horses” and a classic American merry-go-round completed the additions for that summer. A building called “The Bewildering London Door Maze” challenged visitors to find their way from entrance to exit, no easy task. If one became hopelessly lost, there were attendants available to guide the lost one out. The shooting gallery offered the opportunity to display one’s skills with a .22 rifle. Reports from the rifle shots sounded throughout the park and beyond.
The Chutes Zoo opened in 1896 and included animals from all climes, claiming more than its fair share of carnivores. The zoo’s top-liner, Wallace the Lion, drew the crowds. Wallace was touted as the largest, fiercest lion in America. Other zoos offered as high as $5,000 to purchase him. Part of his attraction came from the fact that he had proved untamable, though many a lion-tamer had tried. Other animals available for viewing included a South American jaguar, the Black Bear Brigade, a pair of Indian leopards, kangaroos, wallabies, a brigade of cinnamon bears, and a small pride of lions. The hyena proved a major disappointment; the melancholy beast never laughed. The Congo family, three orangutans, Joe, Sally, and Baby Johanna Congo, joined the fray late, around 1900. The trio aped a human family when seated at the table, with Joe smoking his pipe and Sally sipping tea while Baby Johanna tossed the dishes or played with her doll.
The Darwinian Temple housed a great array of monkeys including Capuchin, Rhesus, Saponins, Spider, Pigtail, and Dog-face, many available to touch and feed by hand. Glass cases encircling the interior of the structure contained reptiles from around the world.
The Chutes Museum displayed a sad lot. It included all of the zoo animals that died in captivity—stuffed! Rajah, the Bengal tiger, largest of his species, constituted one of the feature attractions of the museum. The brochure, Chutes and Its Myriad Attractions, 1901, stated:
“Here may be seen the three-thousand dollar, long-tailed and longmaned horse, “Beauty.” This animal, in life, was one of the chief attractions of the zoo; in death, he is a permanent object of interest, not alone to those who knew him in the zoo, but to those who now see him for the first time. A more beautiful animal never lived.… Also the immense alligator “Jess,” over fourteen feet in length, can here be seen, along with numerous other animals of all descriptions
