Washington Square

Washington Square is about 2.15 acres of North Beach, and the city's records show it working mostly as a stage. The Art Commission resolved in 1957 to hold its Eleventh Annual Art Festival here across four days that September, and minuted the Recreation and Park Commission's letter granting permission to use the square. Three decades later the department's events bulletins still list the Artists Guild of San Francisco and the San Francisco Society of Fine Arts mounting shows on the same grass, and the commission was still passing resolutions reserving the square — along with Union Square and a redwood grove in Golden Gate Park — for them. Improvements have come partly from outside the city's own budget: in 1989 the commission approved a renovation plan for Marini Plaza beside the square, sponsored by Friends of Recreation and Parks, not to exceed $50,000. The square's role in the neighbourhood is older than the department that runs it — a Federal Theatre Project history of the Italian theatre in San Francisco describes crowds gathering here and at Fisherman's Wharf in April 1905 over the arrival of a new company. And it came close to becoming a construction site: the Central Subway's environmental reports considered extending a tunnel under Columbus Avenue to the north end of the project near Washington Square, in order to extract the tunnel boring machine.