Photos by David Bacon
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2025/05/photos-from-edge-13-washington-square.html
Before Washington Square was a park, the Yelamu tribe of the Ramaytush Ohlone people lived along the Bay, and traveled up into what was then dunes and grassland, studded with oak trees. After the San Francisco peninsula was taken from them by the first Mexican settlers arriving from the south, cattle rancher Juana Briones grew potatoes on this small patch. Those who came after her used it as a dump and a cemetery.
When the Italians and Chinese came, the city created a park that marked the border of their neighborhoods in North Beach and Chinatown. Today, a century and more later, you can still hear breakneck conversations in those languages at the tables in front of Victoria Pastry, across Filbert Street.
The park was a home for immigrants and artists. As a teenager fresh from Udine in north Italy, Tina Modotti must have wandered through the trees intoxicated by dreams of becoming an actress. She starred in North Beach’s Italian dramas, before heading first to Hollywood, and then to Mexico where she transformed herself into a Communist photographer. Finally she gave up her art to guide refugees from Spain after its Civil War. Even though the U.S. government never let her return to North Beach and her family there, I imagine Washington Square Park still filtered into her sleep once in a while, to remind her of those first dreams.
I came to Washington Square Park as a teenager, cutting high school and walking down Grant Street, looking for the beatniks. I was a little late. The Coffee Gallery, where Alan Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti recited poetry to jazz, was closed and gone. Sometime during the years when I wandered through, seeking a way out of Cold War conformity, Erik Weber must have taken his famous photograph of Richard Brautigan, standing in the park next to his muse, Michaela Le Grand. I never saw them, but the photograph was the cover for Trout Fishing in America. The sardonic grace of Brautigan’s nonconformity suited my own. It made his book a treasured item in the small collection I hauled with me from one apartment to the next, in those wandering years of my own youth.
The other day I went back to Washington Square Park with my camera. I had no great ambition. I just took photographs of the people I found.
