San Francisco's Golden Gate Park: A Thousand and Seventeen Acres of Stories

In 2016 Chris was tapped by the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department to be
their first Historian-in-Residence for all of the city’s parks. With this, Chris brings a layer
of history to the department. His initial project was to research and record the history of
the department’s some 225 holdings.
With the 150th anniversary of Golden Gate Park in 2020, he launched the latest version
of his book. This was preceded by another publication, Reel San Francisco Stories: An
Annotated Filmography of the Bay Area, published in 2013, which is about the some
650 movies filmed in the Bay Area since the beginning of talkies. Most recently he
authored San Francisco’s Parks, a photo album of the city’s parks between 1890 and
the 1980s.
Chris started his career as a designer specializing in interior architecture. With this
experience he changed gears to focus on historic preservation, specializing in historic
research. A native of Connecticut, Chris has resided in San Francisco since 1979.