Yerba Buena Gardens is the name for two blocks of public parks located between Third and Fourth, Mission and Folsom Streets[citation needed] in the South of Market (SoMA) neighbourhood of San Francisco, California.

Various corporate committees were founded to lobby for the redevelopment, which would also include high-rise office buildings, a vast parking garage, and a sports center.

[citation needed] However, the developers did not figure on the persistence of the local community, the vast majority of which were aged, male, ex-industrial workers who lived alone in the many cheap hotels in the area.

The Gardens was later built as part of a deal by Mayor Moscone with developers to "set aside land and funds for cultural institutions such as museums, exhibits, and theaters.

However, in his history of the development of San Francisco from the 1950s to the 1990s Chester Hartman recounts that the entire Yerba Buena project was long drawn out over 3 decades, born of a local struggle that included evictions and harassment of the previous tenants in the area, most of them old and poor, but who had joined to fight for their rights.

The entire memorial was a collaborative project between sculptor Houston Conwill, poet Estella Majoza and architect Joseph De Pace.

Conwill said Revelations is “a sacred space … meant to be experienced as a cultural pilgrimage and a journey of transformation.” The act of entering the fountain from the Gardens, reading of the text from North wall to East then, South Wall while beneath the water, then exiting back out into the garden, represents 'a cultural pilgrimage and contemplative metaphorical journey of transformation,' parallel to the Southern tradition of baptism by full immersion in water common within Old School Baptist churches like those of King's grandfather, legendary minister Adam Daniel Williams.