Park
Washington Square
Filbert St & Stockton Street, San Francisco, CA 94133, USA
City-block lawn ringed by cafes, with a Gold Rush-era statue hiding a century-old time capsule.
This guide to Washington Square in San Francisco opens in April 1979, when Mayor Dianne Feinstein knelt in the rain to pry open a lead box sealed for a century inside the base of the square's bronze Benjamin Franklin statue. You'll hear why dentist Henry Cogswell erected the statue in 1879 as a temperance fountain rather than a tribute to Franklin, and what the crowd of roughly a thousand people gathered to see when the box finally came out. Listen for what went back inside, sealed for the year 2079.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.