The Garden as Inspiration

Children’s Fairyland was proud to once again participate in this year’s Autumn Lights Festival at the Gardens at Lake Merritt across the street – we think it was the best ever! We wanted to share a column written by Tora Rocha, the festival’s overall director and the woman who inspired and continues to oversee this incredible fundraiser for the Gardens. We also wanted to let folks know about the generous support provided by Niantic, the San Francisco–based software company best known for developing the augmented-reality mobile games Ingress, Pokémon GO, and the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. 

The Friends of the Gardens at Lake Merritt is a nonprofit organization set up to maintain and support the Gardens at Lake Merritt, and the Autumn Lights Festival helps raise funds for the ongoing support of the Gardens. 
– C.J. Hirschfield, executive director, Children’s Fairyland

By Tora Rocha 

For the past seven years we’ve hosted the Autumn Lights Festival at the Gardens at Lake Merritt in Oakland. The purpose is to showcase the amazing array of light artists in the Bay Area, as well as to raise funds for the ongoing maintenance and beautification of the Gardens themselves. As the City of Oakland’s park supervisor of the Gardens at Lake Merritt, I had decided I needed to find a way to raise money and awareness of the Gardens, since it was a little-known secret in the community. I came up with the idea of a nighttime event to light up the Gardens with local artists. 

Tora Rocha at the 2018 Autumn Lights Festival. Photo by John Kirkmire

In the years that we’ve hosted the Autumn Lights Festival, we have met more and more amazing community members who see the Gardens in a new light.

I began to notice a new group of people showing up around the Gardens – a younger, more diverse group of people attending not only during the Autumn Lights Festival, but also on a regular basis. They seemed to take a particular interest in the art around the garden, as well as in its major structures. I eventually began approaching them to ask them what they were doing. They told me that they were playing something called Ingress, a game created by Niantic that required them to explore places like the Gardens to level up and earn items. This surprised me, and I wanted to learn more.

A young visitor enjoys an Autumn Lights Festival installation. Photo by John Kirkmire

Over time, I got to know these Ingress players, or “Agents,” as they refer to themselves. They always had a keen sense of mission and identity, and I really enjoyed meeting people I wouldn’t have otherwise met at the Gardens. I also ended up meeting John Hanke, the founder and CEO of Niantic, who frequented the Gardens with his family and friends, testing Niantic games as they went. It turned out that John was especially interested in using games like Ingress to encourage people to discover and visit unique “special places” tucked away in their city neighborhoods that they might not know about. Now I understood what had led those Ingress players to our special little garden.

An Autumn Lights Festival installation. Photo by John Kirkmire

Fast forward a couple years. Niantic launched Pokémon GO, and as most people know, everyone took to it. We had a great uplift in visitors, and the Niantic employees began scheduling company-wide volunteer days at the Gardens. As they saw it, they wanted to give back to the place where Ingress really grew and came to fruition, all those years earlier with John Hanke.

For the last two years, Niantic has sponsored the Autumn Lights Festival, incorporating an interactive art piece into the scene by senior engineer Chris Collins. In addition, they have invited their players to come explore and enjoy the lights and the Gardens, creating a fabulous mix of people over all three nights of the event.

Fairyland's installation at the 2018 Autumn Lights Festival. Photo by John Kirkmire

At the American Public Gardens conference held in June, 900 folks from around the country discussed how to keep public gardens thriving. The biggest question across the seminars was “How do we get Millennials interested in public gardens?” I spoke about my experience with Ingress and Pokémon GO players, and about how embracing games and technology has helped keep us afloat and blossoming, with a new look into how we can work across industries to help keep our communities and public spaces growing.

For more information about the Gardens, and about how to volunteer or donate, go to Gardensatlakemerritt.org. To see more photos of this year’s event, go to John Kirkmire’s website, Now and Lens.