Pink Triangle Park - A Memorial in Granite

Pink Triangle Park - A Memorial in Granite

Photo: Another Believer, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)

A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.

Just west of Harvey Milk Plaza, on the little triangle where 17th Street meets Market, a small park holds a set of granite pillars, each topped with a pink triangle. In Nazi concentration camps, men imprisoned for homosexuality were forced to wear a pink triangle on their uniforms, and thousands of them died.

In the 1970s and 1980s activists reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of pride and resistance, and it became an emblem of the fight against AIDS. This park, dedicated in 2001, is often described as the first permanent memorial in the United States to the gay victims of the Nazis.

The pillars stand for the many thousands who were persecuted. Take a quiet moment here before heading down Castro Street.

More on Wikipedia: Pink triangle · Persecution of homosexual men in Nazi Germany

Stops on this tour

  1. Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
  2. Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
  3. Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
  4. North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
  5. Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
  6. Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
  7. The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
  8. Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
  9. Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
  10. Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
  11. The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
  12. The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
  13. Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
  14. South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom