Washington Square

The block — where Juana Briones had grown vegetables before the Gold Rush, marked as a public square in the surveys of Jasper O'Farrell and William Eddy — was deeded to the Town of San Francisco as a public square by the alcalde John W. Geary, before the city was incorporated or California admitted to the Union. It was named Washington Square in the patriotic years before the Civil War.

George Davidson of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey set a granite block in the square as an astronomical and telegraphic longitude station; its latitude and longitude were carved on it in 1937.

The Benjamin Franklin statue — a temperance drinking fountain the dentist Henry Cogswell had put up at Market and Kearny in 1879, with a time capsule inside — was moved to the square; earthquake refugees drank from it.

The park commissioner and sculptor M. Earl Cummings gave the city his bronze Drinking Man, crouched on granite boulders beside a pond in the triangle cut off from the square when Columbus Avenue was put through in the 1870s.

Six hundred earthquake refugees were sheltered in the square.

Haig Patigian's fourteen-foot Volunteer Firemen Memorial, to the city's volunteer fire department of the Gold Rush years, was set up in the northwest of the square rather than by Coit Tower as first intended, in the part of the city "so frequently ravaged by fire."

The triangle at Columbus, Union and Filbert was dedicated as Marini Plaza, with a sculpture of the North Beach benefactor Frank Marini and a birdbath fountain given by the sister city of Assisi.

At the request of a coalition of neighbourhood groups, Lawrence Halprin and Douglas Baylis replaced the square's symmetrical path grid with a free-form plan of a winding walk, a large lawn, tree clusters and playgrounds, and a paved plaza facing Saints Peter and Paul Church.

Designated San Francisco Landmark No. 226, Washington Square.