
Yerba Buena Gardens
Landscaped urban park with a granite waterfall memorial, gardens, and public art over a former convention district.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco follows an 80-year-old longshoreman named George Woolf and the retired laborers and cannery workers around him, who in 1969 were told to leave the cheap hotels planners wanted flattened for a shiny convention district. It traces how they organized as Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment and filed a federal lawsuit that stopped the bulldozers for four years, refusing to move. One eighty-seven-year-old resident told a reporter simply that he would like to die here.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Patricia’s Green In Hayes Valley Park
Sloped green wedge born from a demolished freeway, now home to rotating outdoor sculpture.
Japantown Peace Plaza
Public square anchored by a five-tiered peace pagoda gifted by a sister city, with an eternal flame carried from an ancient shrine.
Mission Dolores Park
Sloped, sunny hillside park with sweeping skyline views, once a cemetery and an earthquake refugee camp.
SoMa
Working-class district once split from the rest of the city by a cable-car slot down Market Street.
Tenderloin Museum
Neighborhood history museum spotlighting overlooked riots, refugees, and reinvention.
Japanese Tea Garden
Historic Japanese-style garden with koi ponds, a pagoda, arched drum bridge and tea house amid manicured paths.