Hidden Garden Steps: Community, Collaboration, Geocaching, and Muggles

I’m officially a muggle. At least that’s what “Team512”—known more colloquially as Margo Peterson among her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, where she works—playfully confirmed earlier today when I found her on the Hidden Garden Steps here in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.

Muggles, as readers of the J.K. Rowling Harry Potter series (or the Wikipedia “Muggle” article) know, are those lacking magical powers and magical blood. They are also, under the rules of the Geocaching game that brought Peterson to the Steps this morning, those not yet initiated into the pleasures of geocaching—whimsical searches that incorporate GPS technology into excursions introducing residents and visitors to places they might otherwise not be inclined to explore throughout the world. Geocachers who are successful at onsite and online searches find a variety of objects—the one on the Steps is a small ceramic turtle containing a metal cylinder with a piece of paper that geocachers use to document that they were there before also documenting their success online at Geocaching.com.

Margo Peterson

Peterson says she has more than 6,000 finds to her credit, including objects found in a cave outside of Livermore (here in the San Francisco Bay Area) and at the end of a “Vampire Empire” search that led her through part of the Chicago subway system. And although geocaching is, in her words, “a little nerdy,” it also offers the same sort of enticements that involvement in the Hidden Garden Steps project itself offers: an opportunity to be part of a playfully engaging—and engaged—community. Peterson says she knows of barbecues, coffee-house gatherings, and many other social events that have drawn geocachers together when they were not actively engaged in their onsite and online searches.

Encountering Peterson and learning about this generally muggle-free endeavor that has led to the creation of more than 2 million caches available to the more than 6 million geocachers who have registered since 2000 is, for me, just the latest unexpected benefit to having been involved in the Hidden Garden Steps project since early 2010. The Steps effort has two explicit goals: to create a second set of ceramic-tile steps, murals, and gardens here in the Inner Sunset District, and to create a community-meeting space that fosters a greater sense of community and collaboration than already exists in one of San Francisco’s great neighborhoods.

Mosaic in progress, at preview (7/20/13)

Discovering that the Steps—“Stairway to Heaven #3”—has become one of the “premium” (available only to paying members of Geocaching.com) searches even before the mosaic that is nearing completion in the studios of project artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher is formally installed onsite on 16^th Avenue between Kirkham and Lawton streets is a great sign that the Steps effort continues to attract a community extending far beyond the Inner Sunset District itself. Our fundraising campaign to raise approximately $300,000 in cash and in-kind services successfully concluded in July 2013 with nearly $10,000 in additional individual gifts in 10-day period and a $32,500 grant from the City and County of San Francisco Community Challenge Grant program. Extensive onsite preparation work by City and County of San Francisco Department of Public Works employees is keeping us on track for installation of the mosaic sometime between October 2013 and spring 2014. Visitors drawn to the original tiled steps, on Moraga Street between 15^th and 16^th avenues, are increasingly finding their way to the new site, where long-hidden views continue to be revealed through the work of volunteers and other supporters. And recent conversations with visitors from other parts of the United States as well as from China, France, and many other countries show that there is a great deal of enthusiasm and excitement about how the project has developed with partnerships and collaborations that include neighborhood associations, the San Francisco Parks Alliance and the San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) Street Parks Program, local government representatives, businesses, and more than 500 individuals who purchased tiles that have been incorporated into the mosaic and whose names are still being added to the project website as a sort of snapshot of the levels of support that volunteer-based community-driven efforts can still attract. All of which might have combined to transform me into a muggle-in-transition since I am, through my encounter with Peterson on the Steps, beginning to suspect that the geocache there may not be the last one I encounter.

N.B.: This is the eighteenth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.