Miss Jo's San Francisco

THE CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES NEXT WEEK CELEBRATES ITS FIRST ANNIVERSARY in a green building in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and Miss Jo wondered whether all the initial hoopla the museum received still holds up.

Friday was a free day for her zip code, so waving the steep admission– $25 adults, $15-$20 kids— was a big incentive to go and encouraged Jeff to come along. (There’s also no admission every third Wednesday of the month.)

Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano to house one of San Francisco’s oldest institutions– it was founded in 1853– the Academy is part ecology museum and global environmental research station.
The building’s made from recycled glass and steel, insulated with denim scraps, covered with a 2.5-acre roof of native California plants and illuminated mostly by daylight. Encircled by a canopy of solar panels, the museum is an amazing study in green architecture.

The exhibits teach conservation, like a 4-story rain forest with flirtatious butterflies and tiny red, blue-footed Bromeliad frogs; Philippine coral reefs with brightly colored starfish and tropical fish; an aquarium of northern California sea life with hands-on exhibits and a digital planetarium that gives spectacular virtual tours of the universe.

An alligator swamp that first opened in 1923 in the Academy’s earlier building, was fascinating and eccentric, as was its star resident, an albino alligator and the original brass seahorse railing around the top of the pit.

The only part of the museum that left Miss Jo and Jeff puzzled, and feeling a bit creepy, was the African Hall, housing 16 dioramas of stuffed wild animals— lions, baboons, zebras, etc— posed in fake natural settings behind glass.

Holdovers from early 20th-century exhibits and explorations to unknown lands, the Academy’s continued need to display exotic taxidermy seemed not only unnecessary in the Internet information age but disrespectful of wildlife, which the museum is committed to protect.
As if to make up for its fealty to its natural history past, five dioramas were added in the new building that contain live specimens, like a pancake tortoise and a colony of charming African penguins. Still, the two Js had to give thumbs down for the African wing being such a throwback in an otherwise progressive museum.

Dioramas aside, in terms of a worthwhile visit, the two Js give thumbs up to a visit to the California Academy of Sciences.

Photos by Miss Jo (except of museum exterior and dioramas.)