Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park

Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park marks the site where one of the most powerful women in Gold Rush-era San Francisco once lived. The park is often cited as the smallest in the city, consisting of just six towering eucalyptus trees and a memorial plaque on the sidewalk at the corner of Octavia and Bush Streets. Mary Ellen Pleasant personally planted these trees more than a century ago, framing what was once an expansive thirty-room Italianate Victorian mansion that occupied an entire city block. While the mansion was demolished in the nineteen twenties, the trees remain as a living monument to the woman known as the Mother of Civil Rights in California.