Yerba Buena Gardens

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.