Karl Linn was a landscape architect, educator, and community activist. Born in 1923 in Dessow, a small village 57 miles northwest of Berlin, Linn was forced to flee to Palestine at the age of 11 as his family was the only Jewish household in their village. In 1948 Linn immigrated to New York and gradually developed a landscape contracting business. In 1959 he became a professor in the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania and later at MIT. Linn often voiced the need to reclaim the commons and counter the privatization of public lands. His works inspired the creation of neighborhood commons on vacant lots in East Coast inner cities during the 1960s through the 1980s. In this interview, Linn discusses his family’s Nazi persecution and escape, private practice as a landscape architect, teaching, and experience as a community resource consultant. This interview is part of a group of interviews documenting the architecture and landscape architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area.