Have you ever felt a shiver at Lincoln Park, standing on the windswept bluff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, feeling like you’re not exactly alone? There might actually tens of thousands of people paying attention to you from the other side of the veil.
Here at what was once called Outside Lands, Golden Gate Cemetery (also informally called City Cemetery) once provided a place for people to bury their dead and visit, as outlined by a wonderful article from San Francisco Heritage by Woody LaBounty. Originally, only a thin road connected mourners with their dead. Those buried here were largely immigrants and the poor.
But in 1898, the cemetery stopped accepting new burials and three years later, burials anywhere within San Francisco were banned—hence the rise of Colma, the town just to the south said to have more dead residents than living ones. The decision was made to turn Golden Gate Cemetery into a park, and in 1909 people were ordered to disinter and relocate remains of loved ones. Not surprisingly, the response was lackluster (or maybe shovels were too expensive and people had plans that weekend) and it’s estimated that around 20,000 persons still repose there with the lush greens of a golf course covering their slumber. The city of San Francisco itself declined to move its “potter’s field” of indigent dead. The beautiful sprawl of the Legion of Honor, too, was built upon these no-longer-marked graves, so if you wonder why Monet’s Water Lilies in Gallery 19 make you think of a drowned sailor, that’s why. In fact, when the Legion expanded in the 1990s, the bodies of 578 adults and 173 children were found, exhumed and reburied in Colma.
Other communities also leased parts of the cemetery for their own members, and we’ll focus on two of those since monuments attesting to their presence still remain in the park: the Kong Chow Benevolent Association, formed in 1851, and the Ladies’ Seamen’s Friend Society, which began in 1858. City Cemetery’s Chinese section provided temporary burial for Chinese people whose bones would later be disinterred by a bone collector to be transported home to China. The remains of a funerary chapel in Lincoln Park mark where burial ceremonies were held, with offerings and incense burnings. In 2022, Lincoln Park was named a San Francisco city landmark, in part because of this monument and in part because this site is one of the largest collections of 19th-century skeletal remains in the Western U.S. The Kong Chow organization’s Taoist temple stills stands on Stockton Street in Chinatown.
The 15-foot obelisk seen at the top of this story was erected by the Ladies’ Seamen’s Friend Society to mark the area where sailors were buried. A piece of broken stone near the obelisk reads Lambert, which likely refers to Rebecca H. Lambert who was a trustee of the organization. The society also founded and operated a boarding home for sailors. According to the January 7, 1890 San Francisco Examiner, the society said, “The Home is conducted in the best possible manner. It is a home for the sailor. If he be poor, we feed him; if he be sick, we care for him; if he die, we bury him with Christian rites.”
Other graveyards were dismantled around the time San Francisco decided to let them go. Many of the gravestones were used for infrastructure at various places throughout the city. KQED has a listing of where you can see them.
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