Public Comment

Thank you, Mayor Jesse Arreguin. Nothing makes the case that the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group and many others propose for respecting our parks, our history, our landmarks so well as learning that the mayor who promised on his way into office that "of course he would protect People’s Park"reverse course so thoroughly that he now supports obstructing the mural on Haste Street depicting History of People’s Park with a public toilet.

It is the most perfect parallel to the University of California’s insistence that despite being California’s largest land owner and having a bucketload of alternative sites, it is somehow obligated to destroy a public park and the sightlines to over a dozen of our town’s most revered architectural jewels.

Here’s to public toilets. May a thousand public toilets bloom. But it would be difficult to find a more ridiculous place to situate a public toilet than directly in front of a mural which then could only be seen in pieces, if at all.

Those of us who successfully fought to protect the George Washington High School’s famous New Deal era Arnautoff mural can only imagine that Jesse craves the international ridicule garnered by the San Francisco school board that tried so hard to destroy that mural while ignoring the pandemic crisis for teachers and students. Our mayor may get Reaganesque political rewards for this bonehead move, but those of us who know him will all see this commode caper as a defining moment.

Thank you, Jesse, for clarifying even more succinctly than the plans to destroy an internationally renowned symbol of peace, cultural transformation, free speech, user development, and the end to all wars that the University of California’s true agenda is to re-write history in its own favor and make sure that People’s Park is just something in a book or on a plaque. Among other comic atrocities which characterize your time as mayor, the toilet caper will go down as…number one- and number two.