Unfenced last week after nearly a year of anticipation, a new pathway cuts a corner from Market Street through tall slabs of granite to 10th Street. It is already a favorite in Twittertown, and pedestrians who bother to look down past their phones will see a map of San Francisco etched in stone.
Look up and they will see that there are granite monoliths with ledges to sit on. One ledge has the word “Promised” etched into it in gold, the other has the word “Land,” and the person who put those words there is sitting against the “Land,” facing west toward “Promised.”
“I’m not so much about the promise, I’m more about the land,” says artist Topher Delaney, whose public installation “Promised Land” will have its grand opening Sunday. A free festival, with taiko drumming and a klezmer quintet, will start at noon and run for four hours, which is about as long as it takes to figure out all the elements at work here.
“It’s a very complex space with layers of maps,” says Delaney, who works in diverse media and notched this plaza out of the footprint of an apartment tower called NEMA. “There are multiple framings.”