Washington Square
City-block lawn ringed by cafes, with a Gold Rush-era statue hiding a century-old time capsule.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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