Located just east of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Crissy Field is a beautiful 100-acre national park that attracts more than one million visitors every year. However, it wasn’t long ago that the area where the park sits was nothing more than an abandoned dump.
When the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, visitors stood on Crissy Field to watch the opening. At the time, the field was an army airfield but years later it simply became a fenced-off eyesore.
Roughly 15 years ago, a campaign was started to help clean up the area and turn it into a valuable community resource. The restoration was completed in 2001 and the change is dramatic. Thanks to the incredible 3D buildings and trees in San Franciso, the park looks excellent in Google Earth.
The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has put together a very impressive tour that shows the changes to Crissy Park over the last century. The tour includes a full narration from Doug McConnell, along with photos, 3D buildings, and even some animations like the planes shown here:
To see the tour for yourself, you can view it in Google Earth with this KMZ file
or simply watch the video below.For more, read the full blog entry on the Google Lat Long Blog.
About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
Wow, the developer has many more tours with animations, etc on his site:
http://earth.tryse.net/
Even some nice gui tools for managing KML..
That has to be the lamest national park I’ve ever seen. I’m glad there are green spaces in the city, and those people obviously did a lot of work to rehabilitate the area, but national park status is a bit much I say.