Free Republic

Protesters in Golden Gate Park toppled statues of Fr. Junipero Serra, Francis Scott Key and President Ulysses S. Grant on Friday night, spurring a national debate over the complex legacies of those historical figures amid a broader movement to remove what critics say are monuments to white supremacy. A group of roughly 100 people pulled down the monuments displayed in the park’s Music Concourse near the de Young Museum and California Academy of Sciences, an eyewitness said. Police were called to the area just after 8 p.m., and said people in the group threw objects at the officers. The crowd...

San Francisco park workers and volunteers spent much of Sunday picking up and hauling away 10,000 pounds of garbage strewn all over the eastern part of Golden Gate Park known as Hippie Hill, the remnants of Saturday's annual yet unofficial pot-smoking bacchanalia. But this year's annual celebration - which falls each year on April 20 and is known as "420" - drew a larger-than-average crowd of between 10,000 and 15,000 revelers on the warm weekend day. They proceeded to smoke, drink, eat and rack up more than $10,000 in costs for city crews to clean up the mess, ironically just...

The family that has run a beloved old-style diner on the western edge of San Francisco for seven decades will get to keep the restaurant, but will have to jettison many of its old ways. The Hontalas family, whose sweat over 73 years made Louis' Restaurant a city landmark, beat out three other bidders for a new 10-year lease on the property, according to the National Park Service, which owns the land.

Steve Williams returned to his Golden Gate Park campsite just in time Saturday morning to retrieve all his belongings from the back of a Department of Public Works pickup truck. New to San Francisco, he hadn't heard about the push to clear the park of homeless encampments until someone at the Haight Street McDonald's advised him to check on his stuff. "I only slept there one night," said Williams, 33, who arrived last week in San Francisco from Baltimore by bus. "This wasn't what I was expecting." Within minutes, workers from the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team had made arrangements...