Washington Square Park opens in front of you, an urban park in Rochester, New York. Once known as Johnson's Square, this ground was donated to the public by Elisha Johnson in 1817, and it has long held gatherings that shaped the city's story. On 1 August 1848 Frederick Douglass addressed a public meeting here, and he spoke here again in 1852.
Austin Steward later wrote in Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman that numerous Black Americans celebrated the end of slavery in New York in Johnson's Square on July 5. The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument you see was erected in 1892; U.S. President Benjamin Harrison spoke at its dedication that year, and history records that he did so without mentioning slavery despite Frederick Douglass's presence next to the podium. A reminder of later world events stands here, too: an Austrian cannon captured by the Italian army during the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in World War I was given to Rochester in 1921 by the Italian government as a gift symbolizing the patriotism of the large Italian immigrant population.
In 2017 the Washington Square Park Neighborhood Association received a $15,000 grant to develop a new Master Plan. Frederick Douglass addressed a public meeting here on 1 August 1848, steps from where the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument now stands for you.