Salesforce Park, a lush rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows, quietly reopened this past July, after being shuttered upon the discovery of cracks in structural steel beams. Photograph by Karl Mondon / The Mercury News / Getty

Salesforce Park, in downtown San Francisco, sits atop the Salesforce Transit Center, above Salesforce Plaza, in the shadow of Salesforce Tower. It is a lush, five-and-a-half-acre rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows and meticulously landscaped, climatically harmonious, drought-tolerant flora. It contains a prehistoric garden of cycads, ferns, and Wollemi pines; plots dedicated to the plants of Chile, South Africa, and Australia; and a small wetland hydrated with gray water. It is a linear park—longer than it is wide—and is elevated about seventy feet above the sidewalk. Its lush, verdant lawns, deliberately overgrown, are two googly eyes short of a Jim Henson character. The buildings that surround it are a kaleidoscope of black and aqua glass. Millennium Tower, a ten-year-old, fifty-eight-story luxury development near the park’s eastern tip, tilts to one side, because it is sinking.

On a recent afternoon, young professionals in microclimate business-casual ambled through the park. A thousand-foot “water sculpture” by the artist Ned Kahn, titled “Bus Fountain,” runs along its northern perimeter; from time to time, streams of water shot upward, triggered by the movement of buses through the terminal below. The benches, pathways, and bathrooms were pristine. The mood was peaceful and upbeat. Light bounced off the surrounding high-rises, scrambling the shadows. In the central plaza, by a cabinet of board games and a foosball table, children paged through books from a mobile library. Strollers were pushed. Knowledge workers in sunglasses and fleeces sat at primary-colored chairs, munching on takeout from a fleet of culinarily diverse food trucks stationed below. In front of the on-site Starbucks—located inside Salesforce Tower and marked, confusingly, with Salesforce branding, as the Trailblazer Cafe—a topiary bear stood in a fixed salute. Everyone seemed to be talking about work. Snatches of conversation floated through a bamboo grove: A.P.I.s, banking, Stanford.

San Francisco is famous for its parks, and for its beaches, secret gardens, and open expanses; it is perhaps the only city in America where one can wander through a eucalyptus forest, stop for lunch on a bustling commercial strip, reënter a two-mile stretch of pine and redwood groves, emerge at the Pacific Ocean, buy a cup of coffee, and then hike along shoreline cliffs. Today, when most public parks in the Bay Area also double as dwelling places, Salesforce Park feels like a slice of another reality—the Sky Club, not the gate. (The park’s designers—and signage—insist that all are welcome.) Beneath the Salesforce Transit Center is a vast underground space. It’s currently empty—slated, in part, for California High-Speed Rail, which does not and may never exist. Taxpayer-funded, corporately branded, suspended above the homeless, the park is an irresistible metaphor for the city’s socioeconomic tensions. It also feels like a bid, or a prayer, for a certain vision of its future.

Beneath the Salesforce Transit Center is a vast underground space. It’s currently empty. Photograph by Jane Tyska / Digital First Media / The Mercury News / Getty

Salesforce Plaza is in a rapidly developing part of South of Market, in a slice of the city that real-estate agents have taken to calling the East Cut—a rebrand spearheaded by the local Community Benefit District, conceived by the branding firm behind Chobani and Mailchimp, and affirmed by Google Maps. South of Market’s stark economic disparities, which see multibillion-dollar software companies standing catercornered to homeless encampments, are largely responsible for the ascent of juxtaposition as a literary device in writing about San Francisco. In the second half of the twentieth century, the neighborhood was industrial, desolate, and considered seedy. After the Loma Prieta earthquake, in 1989, damage spurred demolitions and redevelopment, and, during the housing bubble of the early two-thousands, condominiums bloomed.

Construction on the Transit Center began in 2010, with the demolition of the original Transbay Terminal, a hulking slab of a building constructed in the nineteen-thirties. The terminal had been damaged in the earthquake, and the seismic plan for its replacement was so comprehensive that the project’s lead architect, Fred Clarke, predicted that it would be “probably one of the safest buildings in the world.” The new Transbay Terminal is a bulbous, four-level structure, fourteen hundred feet long, wrapped in airy, rippling, perforated white metal, resembling, from a distance, a slightly flattened Noguchi lamp. It took about a decade to design and build, at a cost of more than two billion dollars, and required an intervention from the city, in the form of a quarter-billion-dollar municipal loan. It opened as Salesforce Transit Center in the summer of 2018. (Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, has a twenty-five-year, hundred-and-ten-million-dollar naming-rights contract, and occupies three buildings along the transit center’s perimeter, including its eponymous tower.) Six weeks after an exuberant, heavily attended opening ceremony, workers discovered cracks in two structural steel beams. The center was immediately shuttered, and underwent nine months of halting repair work. This past July, it quietly reopened to little fanfare. It is slowly returning to its role as a hub for regional and intercity bus lines.

Earlier this fall, Adam Greenspan, a landscape architect and one of the lead designers of Salesforce Park, stood at the edge of the central plaza, taking in the patterns of refracted sunlight. Greenspan is in his mid-forties, with tattooed biceps and spiky, salt-and-pepper hair; he wore a Patagonia vest, desert boots, and a small hoop in one ear. As we walked through the park, he rattled off species names enthusiastically, offering backstories for incense cedars and Gunnera—clusters of gigantic, sandpaper-like leaves often referred to as “dinosaur food.” (Salesforce Park has nearly five hundred trees and pines; a local tree expert, Mike Sullivan, has created a thirty-minute walking tour.) “One of the concerns, early, was, are people going to go up?” Greenspan said. “Are people going to know that it’s public space? Are there going to be people around here?” In fact, the thousands of office workers in the surrounding buildings are easily enticed down to the park for lunch, a meeting, or a jog. Salesforce Tower and 181 Fremont, a luxury mixed-use building with commercial space leased by Facebook, have their own designated entrances; on the street level, in Salesforce Square, large granite boulders studded with wayfinding plaques—some carrying an image of Astro, a trademarked Salesforce “Trailhead” cartoon character, clothed in an ersatz National Park Service uniform—point the way up. Pedestrians can ascend by taking elevators, escalators, and a single-cabin, single-purpose gondola. (The journey takes forty seconds.)

“People really relax here, I’ve noticed,” Greenspan said, taking a photograph with his phone of shadows in the prehistoric garden. “But they also do a lot of work. People are working a lot, both having little walking meetings, but also sitting down by themselves and just typing.” I told him that every conversation on which I’d eavesdropped had been about work of some kind. “A lot of people talk about plants,” he proposed, cheerfully. “That’s a part I’m really happy with. The botanical life here, and the bird life, are two things that really have caught people’s attention, and their conversation.” He noted that many of the plants in the park were selected based on their capacity to handle dramatic shifts in climate, which helped explain their variety.

As we walked, Greenspan pointed out that some tenants had affixed large, three-dimensional signage to windows at the park level. Colorful logos for Slack, BlackRock iShares, Trulia, I.B.M., and Deloitte floated behind monkey-puzzle trees and redwood groves. On the windows of the Slack office, an arrangement of Post-it notes spelled out “You look nice today”—a default loading message for the company’s chat software. “At this point, certain tech companies and members of that community are becoming long-term makers of the city, and the region, and are committed to long-term relationships,” he said. “Salesforce, Facebook, Google—all of these places are, I think, working to have more long-term physical impact that’s looked at in a beneficial way. It’s nice to see these groups as they have matured, and are thinking in a more established way, rather than just a startup, non-centered, digital kind of attitude toward places.” We passed a playground, and Greenspan bent down to squeeze a leaf of mint geranium, encouraging me to do the same: it released a toothpaste scent. At the western end of the park, a yoga class performed synchronized contortions on a large lawn facing an amphitheatre. Against the backdrop of the corporate logos, the scene felt like sponsored content.