Grant County Park, Santa Clara County


Image by sfcityscape
Along Mount Hamilton Road east of San Jose is Grant County Park, at nearly 10,000 acres the largest open space in Santa Clara County. Homebuilders have long criticized the Bay Area practice of protecting vast areas of countryside from development; environmentalists, of course, are constantly advocating for more. As an urbanist, I’m firmly on the side of the environmentalists: the Bay Area may be something of a patchwork metropolis, but its green spaces help to tie it together, and while they unintentionally promote some sprawl by forcing development ever farther away, they also help funnel growth into existing urban areas. Atop the hill at right — Mount Hamilton, the Bay Area’s highest summit at 4,213 feet — is the University of California’s Lick Observatory, a pioneer in the discovery of extrasolar (outside the solar system) planets. Incidentally, when the observatory was threatened by growing light pollution from San Jose in the late-’70s, the city — to its credit — took the then-revolutionary step of replacing its streetlights with low-pressure sodium lamps.