Part 1: Legends of the Glen Park District
Part of a series entitled, Rancho San Miguel: Facts, Myths & Legends of the Glen Park District
By Evelyn Rose
This series of posts delve into the history of Rancho San Miguel as it pertains specifically to the Glen Park district, including Glen Park, Glen Canyon Park, Sunnyside, Fairmount Heights, and Diamond Heights. Throughout this series, some local myths and legends will be debunked, and new and surprising histories will be revealed. Navigation to the next post can be found at the end of the article. A more detailed Rancho San Miguel timeline will be added in the coming weeks.
In 2024, the Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project entered its 10th year of rediscovery, though I have been researching the histories of the Glen Park district for almost 20 years. Our neighborhood histories are so rich and varied, a treasure trove of true stories that in my wildest dreams I never could have imagined were waiting to once again be revealed.
With the volume of research I have pursued over the years, I am now able to take a step back to examine the depth and breadth of our histories with greater context – in essence, to take more of a bird’s eye view to connect the dots between time periods and events. With this perspective, I have been able to confirm that some of the neighborhood histories we may be more familiar with are not based on any supporting evidence. Therefore, it is time to refine, clarify, if not outright debunk these well-established myths and misstatements.
How Information Becomes Misinformation
You’ve likely heard this age-old reprise before: “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Attributed to the fictional Sgt. Joe Friday of the popular mid-20th century radio and television cop show, Dragnet, his brief admonition advises that his time cannot be wasted with irrelevant or incorrect information. When solving a police case, facts mean everything. Misinformation wastes time, takes the investigation down the wrong path, and in the end only serves to aid the perpetrator.
Yet truth be told, Sgt. Joe Friday never said the exact statement, “Just the facts, ma’am.” We have been misinformed of the attribution and exact wording of the statement. How did a fictional narrative aiming to seek the truth become a point of real-world misinformation?
According to My Name's Friday. The Unauthorized but True Story of Dragnet and the Films of Jack Webb (2001), author Michael J. Hayde claims that Sgt. Friday’s original script was, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.” The actual dialogue is certainly similar, but it lacks the snap and verve of the shorter, more direct statement we have come to know. Somehow, the inaccurate “Just the facts, ma’am” became entrenched in our popular dialogue.
After a stint on NBC radio in the late 1940s, the TV version of Dragnet rocketed to fame in the 1950s, driven by the deadpan, staccato delivery of the actors, as well as the show’s theme song that soon became a smash hit on the Billboard charts. When the TV show had reached a peak in 1953, comedian Stan Freberg released a parody of Dragnet on Columbia Records entitled St. George and the Dragonet. This release experienced a similar meteoric rise to the top of the charts.
The B (flip) side of St. George and the Dragonet included the story of Little Blue Riding Hood interacting with a Sgt. Wednesday. Little Blue proclaims, “Why Grandma! What big ears you have!” Sgt. Wednesday responds, “All the better to get the facts. I just want to get the facts.” According to Hayde, “As this exchange entered the American subconscious, it soon found itself truncated to ‘Just the facts, ma'am’ ... it so dominated media coverage of the show that finally, inevitably, the line was credited to Sgt. Friday, as if he'd been saying it all along.” A quarter-century later, the movie Dragnet (1987), starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, only served to further entrench the never-spoken statement in American dialogue.
While the character of Sgt. Joe Friday is fictional, the subtle transformation of Friday’s Dragnet script as originally delivered on the small screen is analogous to how easily real-world misinformation (and the more intentional disinformation) can become perceived and accepted as fact. It displays how misinformation and disinformation, when repeated over and over, can become the accepted truth among the masses. The true truth, forever rooted in its supporting documentation, is cast aside then altogether forgotten.
Even Wikipedia, the self-described online open-content collaborative encyclopedia that is the go-to/end-all for many who are seeking answers (including artificial intelligence platforms) expresses caution. They warn their users that they do not guarantee the validity of information found on their website. Therefore, it is left up to all of us to perform the necessary due diligence to confirm whether statements are truly factual. As U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
Glen Park history rewritten
How many times have you read a statement and automatically accepted it as fact? When we keep seeing the same or similar statements in a variety of locations, we may gradually begin to accept the statement(s) as truth.
For years, legend had it that the mother of California civil rights, Mary Ellen Pleasant, had once lived in the grand Gothic-style home on Laidley Street in Fairmount Heights and that cottages across the street provided housing for the women who worked for her. Several years ago, I was the first to debunk that myth and show that she was only loosely associated with the residence. You can read the full account here.
Below are some verbatim examples of published statements, some of which you may already be familiar with. Divided by topic, they are directly or indirectly related to the Glen Park district.
Which of the following statements do you accept as the truth?
Adolph Sutro
“The park's history commences with Adolph Sutro's purchase in the 1850s of 76 acres of the canyon, which he named ‘Gum Tree Ranch’ after the blue gum eucalyptus trees he had planted.” [Glen Canyon Park, History, Wikipedia, last updated 2024]
“It [Rancho San Miguel] passed through several other owners until it was bought by Adolph Sutro in 1880. This former mayor, who once owned one-twelfth of the city, left a legacy in the form of the eucalyptus trees that cover Mount Sutro and Glen Canyon.” [From San Francisco's Glen Park and Diamond Heights. Acadia Publishing, 2007]
“Many of the park’s eucalyptus trees were planted more than 100 years ago by Adolph Sutro and have lived past their healthy lifespan.” [San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Administrator, in reference to Glen Canyon Park, 2024]
Fairmount Heights [a comparison of the history of urban development in Fairmount Heights and Corbett Heights will be explained in a future post]
“The Pioche & Robinson Subdivision of 1867, appears to be among the earliest curvilinear street plans in the United States, designed two years before the 1869 General Plan for Riverside, a suburb of Chicago... Previous efforts to lay out streets over hills in San Francisco and elsewhere simply extended existing grids regardless of steep slopes, resulting in street rights-of-way on Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill, for example, that were too steep for streets.” [Corbett Heights, San Francisco (Western Part of Eureka Valley) Historic Context Statement, San Francisco Planning Department, 2017]
Pioche and Robinson
“F.L.A. Pioche and L.L. Robinson were business partners, but they were also personal partners. Unmarried and living together until Pioche's untimely death, they were possibly a gay couple. That relationship and their secrecy about it, possibly contributed to their obscurity in San Francisco history.” [Mae Silver in Silver M. Rancho San Miguel, A San Francisco Neighborhood History. Ord Street Press, 2001. Available at Archive.org.]
Glen Canyon Park
“In 1889 Adolph Sutro, who had owned a large portion of the former San Miguel Rancho land since 1880, sold much of what would become Glen Park to the Crocker Estate.” [Historic Resources Evaluation, Glen Park Community Plan, San Francisco Planning Department, 2010]
“Glen Canyon Park has seen a myriad of uses ranging from Adolph Sutro's personal ‘Gum Tree Ranch,’ to the Crocker Real Estate Company's mini-amusement park and picnic site; to an earthquake refugee camp.” [San Francisco Recreation and Parks, 2025]
“… the building of a low-rent housing project would destroy the scenic beauty of the area and interfere with plans of the Recreation department to construct a city-wide day camp in Glen Canyon.” [San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Clayton W. Horn, San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 1950]
In response to the Google search query, “Who named San Francisco’s Glen Park?”: “San Francisco's Glen Park is named after former Mayor George Christopher.” [Google Generative AI, 2025]
While some of the above statements have become the stuff of neighborhood legend, nearly all of them contain at least some level of misinformation.
For example, Statement 3 under Glen Canyon Park is pure gibberish. Glen Park was not named for former Mayor George Christopher – that honor was saved for Christopher Park in Diamond Heights. Somehow, Google AI misinterpreted a post by the Glen Park Association about my research into whether Mayor George Christopher was a “rabid homophobe,” as had been claimed in 2023. Why Google AI came to that illogical assessment is not clear.
However, when the query is rephrased as, “Who gave Glen Park its name?” then the correct answer, Archibald S. Baldwin, is presented in the Google AI overview. Clearly, AI results can be fickle depending on what and how we ask it for information. Since the use of artificial intelligence is running headlong into our very existence, our interactions with AI should always incorporate the caution and factual due diligence it requires, especially as it vacuums up a growing abundance of misinformation and disinformation.
As long as misinformation and disinformation continue to be distributed along communication channels – whether it be due to Wikipedia information that has not been fact-checked, factual statements posted online or in other media that have been conflated with nonfactual information, or simply by unintentional human error – then the output produced by humans and artificial intelligence will continue to be based on that misinformation. The true truth, based on factual evidence, is slowly pushed aside and becomes lost in the cacophony of information transfer. Misinformation emerges as the new truth.
As we enter what appears to be a new political era, I think it is safe to say that, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.”
My next post will examine the connection between Adolph Sutro and the Glen Park district. Click the link below to learn more.
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