One of the nice things about the San Francisco Bay Area is its vast array of gorgeous open space. Yesterday, a few friends and I literally stopped to smell the flowers out at Mount Diablo State Park.

The amount of colorful life in this area is really something. In addition to wildflowers in the east bay, there are mushrooms down low in the north bay, eagles up high in the south bay.

But what of the city itself?

(cc) patrick boury

Today I explored a whole different side to open space in the bay area: public urban green-space. Spots such as the Yerba Buena Gardens and Golden Gate Park are well known, but there are many hidden green gems in even the densest urban areas of San Francisco. By city ordinance, newly built or renovated buildings must dedicate a portion of their square footage to open space that is publicly accessible. Rick Evans of SFCityGuides.com writes that while developers will fulfill their legal responsibility in creating these spaces, they often keep these small gardens and parks unadvertised. Evans maintains that in order to find these quiet gems, you have to poke around, ask questions and overcome the “I don’t belong here” feeling.

Knowing (the location of the park) is often half the battle. And there are a variety of ways to find them, from browsing online satellite images to observing the high perimeters from the sidewalks. But sometimes you have to push open an unmarked door, wander to the end of a hallway or go to an odd floor in a tall building to find these secret patches of green.

A sample:
The sun terrace at the famous Crown Zellerbach building features a peaceful tree-lined seating area, a stunning view of the cityscape (including a full-length look at the iconic Transamerica tower), a small monument to our first president — all on the 15th floor.

Also, there’s a small rooftop cafe at a SF art school that features a Diego Rivera fresco and cheap bites to eat.

But I’m not going to be that guy that spills the beans. The value of these places is in the secrecy.

Many of you will be pleased just to know that these emerald patches exist. For those that must explore, I’ve compiled a map (using this handy mapping tool) of some of the hidden urban parks and rooftop gardens. If you’d like to browse the compilation, or add your own secret spots, please leave a comment here, or drop us a line: localoaf at free-google-email-domain dot com.

Last night my cousin and I were stuck in Grand Central Station waiting for our 1:08 AM train to leave. To pass the time we wandered around and noticed two people standing in opposite corners of the room pictured here, which is right next to the Grand Central Station oyster bar.

They were facing the corners as if they were being punished, and were whispering to the wall. I guessed that perhaps the acoustics of the room allowed them to hear each other, although I sort of suspected we were being had.

Being one who is always up for a fun experiment, my cousin and I put ourselves in the same place as the two we had seen and began talking to the wall.

I was absolutely astonished. You can hear even a soft spoken person as if they are right beside you. If you are ever in Grand Central and have five minutes, I highly recommend this. We were lucky that almost all of Grand Central is empty at 1 AM, but I would be curious to find out if it works during normal hours.

I’m pretty certain that this has to do with the vaulted ceiling and stone materials in the room, reflecting the sound waves back into the opposite corner, but if anyone has a more technical explanation, do post.

I am not sure how interesting this would for this audience, but there is a cool map included anyways.

Gmail had this web clip for me:

One of my friends gmailed me that he was going to India next week. The email was not in English but was transliterated in English (like this Telugu sentence ‘nenu india veluthunnanu‘ means ‘i am going to India’). The email doesn’t have the word ‘Bangalore’ in it and I never google searched for cheap tickets. There is no translation engine yet for any of the Indian languages. All that said, Google could still ‘make sense’ of what was going on in the email. But whats a little disappointing is…it didn’t zero-in on the right destination. Bangalore is located in the medium slate blue area in this map, while Telugu is spoken in the region adjacent to it. Both languages have a common ancestor, but Google probably doesn’t use linguistics anyways. Google obviously has a huge corpus of email and web searches to mine things, but as this example shows, thats still not enough statistically. As the corpus grows, one could basically have cheap tickets to anywhere.