In the summer season of 2019, building crews working close to the northeastern nook of San Francisco’s Lincoln Park dug up one thing they weren’t anticipating: a coffin.

The employees have been creating new bioswales alongside El Camino Del Mar, designed to divert stormwater throughout heavy rains and maintain the tony Sea Cliff neighborhood from flooding. Within the course of, and below the watchful eye of an archaeologist employed by the town, they might find yourself uncovering the graves of at the least 20 individuals, relationship again to the top of the nineteenth century.

A secret lies beneath the manicured lawns of Lincoln Park Golf Course. These light slopes have been as soon as the house of one in all San Francisco’s largest graveyards. Between 1870 and about 1900, 29,000 individuals have been buried in Golden Gate Cemetery, named for its proximity to the doorway to San Francisco Bay, although most individuals referred to as it Metropolis Cemetery. The bulk have been new burials, though just a few hundred had been relocated from the town’s earlier cemeteries. And plenty of of Metropolis Cemetery’s graves stayed the place they have been when different cemeteries in San Francisco finally have been moved out of city. Someplace between 10,000 and 22,000 are nonetheless there, together with those the bioswale employees discovered. These hundreds of graves maintain the tales of San Francisco’s builders, of immigrants and low-income laborers, a lot of whom died destitute and alone. They inform a story of how San Francisco has, time and again, favored its rich and privileged residents over its poor and marginalized ones.

This text seems within the Fall 2022 subject of Alta Journal.
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At first, there was no approach of realizing whom the graves on El Camino Del Mar belonged to. Metropolis Cemetery’s grave markers have been eliminated greater than a century in the past, when the burial floor closed. Town didn’t have an in depth map of the 200-acre cemetery, which contained over two dozen plots that belonged to completely different group organizations—typically nonprofits that helped take monetary care of members and their households. A lot of them have been Chinese language and have been overseen by the Chinese language Six Firms, a bunch of benevolent associations fashioned within the nineteenth century. As archaeologists studied the stays, they reached out to historians Alex Ryder and John Martini, who have been engaged on reconstructing a Metropolis Cemetery map—partly for conditions identical to this.

Because it turned out, the realm the place employees discovered the bones had as soon as belonged to the French Mutual Benevolent Society of San Francisco. Numerous the skeletons confirmed indicators of autopsies and different postmortem medical research, which have been unlawful within the nineteenth century. And one of many skulls had apparently been pierced by a gunshot. A .44-caliber bullet from a Winchester pistol was rattling round inside it.

Ryder says the analysis group is near figuring out whose cranium it was. However native newspaper archives might maintain necessary clues: On January 15, 1896, the San Francisco Name informed the story of a French physician, E.L. Molass, who had sailed to New York on a steamer referred to as S.S. La Bretagne, then traveled overland to San Francisco, the place he arrived in late December. Molass was affected by tuberculosis and hoped the California local weather would remedy him; apparently he didn’t know in regards to the metropolis’s brutal fog and wind. He wound up within the French Hospital, however “illness and despondency” overtook him, the newspaper reported. On January 14, 1896, he “despatched a bullet into his proper ear.”

The bottom beneath Lincoln Park Golf Course comprises hundreds of such tales, typically involving San Franciscans who died penniless, buried on the metropolis’s expense.

Simply two huge cemetery markers nonetheless stand among the many golf course tees. One, erected by the Women’ Seamen’s Good friend Society of the Port of San Francisco, is a big obelisk seen from the parking zone of the Legion of Honor museum. The opposite, the gateway-like Kong Chow funerary monument, was as soon as a central a part of a Chinese language plot in Metropolis Cemetery.

Woody LaBounty, a longtime San Francisco historian, knew that Metropolis Cemetery had a singular story to inform about San Francisco’s complicated previous. When Connie Chan was elected supervisor of District 1, which incorporates Lincoln Park, in 2020, LaBounty informed her in regards to the presence of the historic cemetery and inspired her to begin the method of constructing it a metropolis landmark. Earlier than that dialog, “I’ve to be trustworthy: I by no means knew that’s what it was,” Chan says. She agreed it was value commemorating and set to work.

LaBounty says that Metropolis Cemetery’s silent residents are the individuals “who constructed San Francisco, who characterize the range—socially and ethnically—of San Francisco within the nineteenth century. They’re the forebears of the place all of us name dwelling, and so they’ve largely been forgotten.”

How and why they have been forgotten says quite a bit about San Francisco’s historical past too.

THE FORSAKEN DEAD

Thomas W. Wooden, born in Fairfax, Virginia, was 22 when he enlisted within the U.S. army on June 3, 1847, to struggle within the Mexican-American Battle. He reenlisted quite a few instances, till he couldn’t anymore. He obtained his closing honorable discharge on November 27, 1881, when a medical board deemed him too worn-out to proceed serving. Wooden determined to go to San Francisco, despite the fact that he didn’t have a house, a job, or any buddies lined up. When his $25 ran out, he poisoned himself, the San Francisco Name reported on February 18, 1882. He was 57.

When Wooden’s physique was discovered, his pockets contained a “bundle of honorable discharges, properly tied with crimson tape, and numerous affectionate letters from a married daughter dwelling close to the outdated dwelling, again in outdated Virginia.”

Wooden’s physique remained on the metropolis morgue as of us with the San Francisco coroner’s workplace tried to rearrange an honorable burial, however many cemeteries wouldn’t take him, possible as a result of he had died by suicide. In the end, he was interred in Metropolis Cemetery “with nobody by to say even the poor phrases ‘mud to mud, ashes to ashes!’ ” Wooden’s grave, simply off the shores of the Golden Gate, was marked with a white plank bearing solely a quantity—1,116—partially lined in drifting sand.

Metropolis Cemetery was the final public burial floor established in San Francisco, which famously shut down and evicted a lot of its graveyards within the early twentieth century. Not counting Indigenous burial grounds, San Francisco noticed roughly 30 cemeteries, giant and small, official and unofficial, come and go between Spanish colonizers’ arrival within the 1760s and the cemeteries’ ouster to Colma, a dozen miles away, all through the primary half of the twentieth century. At first, the town’s burial grounds have been compact, spanning a single block at most, however then the gold rush occurred. In 1846, two years earlier than San Francisco formally got here below U.S. management, about 200 individuals lived within the small city. However by 1852, its inhabitants had exploded to 36,000. Extra residents meant extra loss of life, together with from waves of illness like smallpox and typhoid fever, and the town’s current cemeteries shortly stuffed up.

However with every new cemetery, poor planning prevailed. Again and again, metropolis officers discovered new locations to bury the useless, considering they’d recognized a spot up to now out within the sticks that no person would ever need to stay subsequent door. Again and again, they have been fallacious. It occurred with Yerba Buena Cemetery, a 13-acre public burial floor situated the place San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza, Asian Artwork Museum, and Most important Library stand immediately. It occurred with the large Masonic, Odd Fellows, and Calvary cemeteries on and round Lone Mountain, which have been surrounded by Richmond district NIMBYs inside a long time. And it occurred with Metropolis Cemetery.

Metropolis Cemetery was meant to be San Francisco’s answer to the issue of Yerba Buena. That outdated municipal burial floor, which opened in 1850, was full by the mid-1850s, with 7,000 to 9,000 graves, largely of working-class and Chinese language residents. By 1870, the graveyard was falling aside—and situated proper within the coronary heart of the town, the place leaders wished to construct a brand new metropolis corridor. In principle, most of Yerba Buena’s burials could be disinterred and moved to Metropolis Cemetery. However in apply, solely 267 unidentified graves have been documented as being relocated to Metropolis Cemetery. Untold hundreds possible relaxation within the outdated Yerba Buena Cemetery soil, and employees continued to seek out them anytime they excavated, whether or not they have been constructing Metropolis Corridor at Larkin and McAllister Streets within the Eighties or renovating the outdated Most important Library to turn into the brand new Asian Artwork Museum in 2003.

For the brand new Metropolis Cemetery, San Francisco leaders appeared for a far-flung spot to bury the useless. Once they started contemplating a plot within the desolate northwestern nook of the town, close to Lands Finish, the property was barren, treeless, and buffeted by sturdy winds off the Pacific Ocean. Nonetheless, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Outdoors Lands Committee acknowledged that “a public burial place is a necessity, and…the tract designated was one of the best for the aim, and least objectionable of any at our disposal. It’s sheltered from the wind to some extent; has a good looking view; is prone of cultivation, and has a agency clayey soil, which is a lot better in a sanitary standpoint than a lightweight or sandy soil.”

As a public burial floor, Metropolis Cemetery included important area to bury San Francisco’s indigent useless. The massive Potter’s Area, now beneath and surrounding the Legion of Honor constructing, took in an estimated 11,000 burials, which the town paid for. These graves have been distinguished with not more than a plank painted white, like Thomas W. Wooden’s, every marked with a quantity that indicated the deceased’s place within the burial register.

However these data weren’t excellent. When a San Francisco Name reporter visited the cemetery in February 1882, he requested a gravedigger what number of graves there have been. The gravedigger replied, “I numbered as much as three thousand, after which started with ‘one’ once more.” By that point, 4,118 burials had been recorded, nevertheless it might have been extra; cemetery employees mentioned they generally buried two individuals in a single gap.

Not lengthy after Metropolis Cemetery opened, native benevolent associations started claiming plots. Amongst them have been the Knights of Pythias, the Grand Military of the Republic, and the Women’ Seamen’s Good friend Society, a female-run charitable group that sorted destitute sailors. By 1887, there have been 45 sub-cemeteries linked to native societies and associations, together with 26 linked to Chinese language group teams. Greater than 10,000 Chinese language residents have been buried in Metropolis Cemetery over its years of operation, making it the most important and most important burial floor for San Francisco’s Chinese language communities, say historians LaBounty and Ryder.

Throughout the mid- to late 1800s, many Chinese language residents in San Francisco didn’t regard native cemeteries as everlasting resting locations. Most who got here to the town deliberate to remain solely lengthy sufficient to make some cash earlier than returning dwelling. Chinese language group associations took on the accountability of burying their brethren in San Francisco in the event that they died there and likewise dealt with the duty of returning their bones to China. If a physique was “buried in a wierd land, untended by his household, [the] soul would by no means cease wandering within the darkness of the opposite world,” Shih-shan Henry Tsai wrote in The Chinese language Expertise in America.

Shantang (benevolent society) representatives stored observe of graves and organized for permits to disinter the our bodies 4 years or extra after burial. They paid the town $10 per disinterment, $2.50 of which went to the cemetery. Bones have been cleaned, if mandatory, and sealed in a tin field marked with the identify of the deceased. They have been saved in Chinatown earlier than crusing to the deceased’s hometown in China. About 6,300 Chinese language burials have been disinterred and despatched dwelling; the remainder stay within the earth close to the Kong Chow monument, Ryder says.

San Francisco’s Chinese language immigrants started arriving in a lot larger numbers through the gold rush and instantly confronted horrific racism. They have been wrongly blamed for a lot of illness epidemics, and their cemeteries grew to become targets too. White San Franciscans complained to the town about Chinese language burial and exhumation practices and sometimes used the euphemism “abatement of nuisance” as an argument for closing San Francisco’s cemeteries or limiting the actions of Chinese language residents. Different instances, they didn’t trouble with euphemisms; their bigotry was acknowledged overtly. The Richmond District Enchancment Membership was thrilled when the town agreed to shut Metropolis Cemetery within the late Eighteen Nineties. In a decision, the membership celebrated “eliminating this pest-breeding spot and without end remov[ing] from the sight of holiday makers to the district the pagan rites of scraping the flesh from the bones of deceased Chinese language who had been buried there, which to our individuals was a sickening and dreaded sight, as soon as seen not quickly to be forgotten.”

Racism wasn’t the one motive many San Franciscans wished the cemeteries gone. On the time, it was generally believed that graveyards unfold illness by means of the air and groundwater, and most of the metropolis’s older burial grounds, which lacked the cash for maintenance, had turn into derelict. Greater than something, although, prospectors wished to money in on surging property values.

Richard Barnes

A DUTY TO THE LIVING

The struggle to finish San Francisco’s cemeteries was so long as it was messy—and it began earlier than the primary graves in Metropolis Cemetery have been dug. Richmond district residents had begun agitating for the elimination of their sepulchral neighbors on Lone Mountain by the top of the 1860s, and by 1901 they’d persuaded municipal leaders to ban additional burials anyplace within the metropolis.

“No feeling is extra honorable or creditable than respect for the useless,” James “Sunny Jim” Rolph Jr., San Francisco’s mayor from 1911 to 1932, proclaimed in 1914. Nonetheless, “the responsibility of presidency is extra to the dwelling than to the useless. We should present for the growth of our metropolis.” Finally, a majority of voters agreed with him. In 1937, they overwhelmingly permitted a measure forcing the Lone Mountain cemeteries to relocate their useless elsewhere. An estimated 150,000 graves have been moved south, reworking the tiny city of Colma into San Francisco’s private necropolis.

Metropolis Cemetery was completely different. Whereas Richmond residents have been desirous to take away the graves and switch the property right into a public park, few burials have been in the end moved. Lengthy earlier than voters went to the polls, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors despatched notices to each group with members buried in Metropolis Cemetery and set a elimination deadline of July 1, 1909. However virtually none of those associations had the mandatory funds. Likewise, San Francisco didn’t need to pay to dig up the large Potter’s Area. Other than the sooner Chinese language disinterments, solely about 2,300 graves went elsewhere, Ryder estimates. On prime of that, brush fires in 1891 and 1903 destroyed numerous the wood grave markers, making it simpler to overlook who was buried there. As quickly because the deadline handed, the town ordered that the remaining graves be “leveled over and the tombs destroyed.”

Virtually instantly, native golfers started agitating for the town to open a public course, so gamers didn’t should belong to a stuffy nation membership, says Richard Harris, cofounder and president of the San Francisco Public Golf Alliance. In August 1909, only a month after the deadline to take away the graves from Metropolis Cemetery, the S.F. Board of Park Commissioners voted to put in a golf course atop the graveyard. Golfers had already constructed a 3-hole course on the location in 1902, which had expanded to 9 holes by 1909 and 18 holes by 1918. The positioning was renamed Lincoln Park, to indicate the truth that it was on the western finish of the cross-country Lincoln Freeway. The golf course was the primary public one in San Francisco and one of many first within the western United States, Harris says.

Harris started enjoying golf at Lincoln Park a long time in the past, on the age of 12. Even then, he was effectively conscious that he was {golfing} in a graveyard. “If you’re enjoying golf there, you possibly can’t not know that. On the first gap, you stroll previous the Chinese language burial web site. You already know a cemetery marker if you see it.”

Lincoln Park guests might have at all times acknowledged these graveyard monuments, nevertheless it’s not clear they knew what number of hundreds of graves remained within the floor. The useless began to make themselves recognized once more in February 1921, as crews broke floor on the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, because it was initially referred to as. The museum, funded by Alma de Bretteville Spreckels and her husband, Adolph, who made his cash by means of sugar plantations and breeding racehorses, was constructed as a memorial to California troopers killed in World Battle I. As employees dug into the earth, they tore open 1,500 graves.

“The positioning of the $250,000 memorial to the useless was as soon as a cemetery. It nonetheless is, however the bones are actually scattered. Within the excavation work for the memorial workmen have uncovered about 1500 skeleton-filled coffins,” reporter Vid Larsen wrote for the Day by day Information in 1921. Larsen and a colleague visited the location throughout building and reported “piles of bones not fully lined by the dust,” many coffins lower in half by the tooth of excavating machines, and extra coffins poking out from the soil. Native school college students purchased among the skulls. The foreman informed the reporters that his crews refused to the touch the bones. “The one factor we are able to do,” he mentioned, “is to scrape them over and canopy them up once more.”

The Legion of Honor opened on Armistice Day, November 11, 1924, atop hundreds of graves. The burials remained comparatively undisturbed till 1993, when a brand new spherical of excavations on the museum uncovered what archaeologist Miley Holman described as a “charnel heap,” a mass grave possible left over from the 1921 building. The stays, archaeologists discovered, belonged largely to aged white individuals buried in redwood coffins. Their bones confirmed indicators of age and heavy labor: fractures, skeletal trauma, arthritis.

Museum officers and builders didn’t need to take care of the work of processing the stays; Harry Parker, the director of the Nice Arts Museums of San Francisco, complained to the San Francisco Chronicle that the delays related to the invention would value $50,000 a month. In the end, the Legion of Honor turned the stays of about 900 early San Franciscans over to the medical expert’s workplace, and so they have been reinterred in Skylawn Memorial Park in Colma. The remaining, nevertheless, are nonetheless there. Of the remaining graves, a spokesperson for the Legion of Honor says, “We’re monitoring the town course of and can decide how the designation of Lincoln Park will impression the museum operations as we be taught extra.”

Metropolis Cemetery’s historical past speaks to San Francisco’s profound disrespect for the useless, LaBounty says, including, “It factors towards how we deal with completely different socioeconomic ranges. That’s the explanation it was so simply reworked right into a park, and there wasn’t extra outcry about not disinterring the useless. It largely consisted of teams outdoors the facility construction.”

Now that S.F. leaders might make Metropolis Cemetery an area landmark, a few of these teams are starting to reclaim it.

Jason Henry

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UNDERGROUND TALES

In October 2021, dozens of Chinese language American San Franciscans gathered at Metropolis Cemetery’s Kong Chow monument for Chung Yeung, an autumn pageant that always consists of paying homage to the useless. Golfers’ video games have been paused as locals introduced in alcohol and meals, together with an entire roast pig, in addition to paper cash and incense to burn as choices, says Supervisor Chan. “A lot of our Chinese language elders have been there, and a few bought teary-eyed. It was a second to consider their mother and father, and grandparents, and great-grandparents.” It was the primary such ceremony in a long time, presumably because the 1907 memorial for Hew Kong, president of the Yung Wo Affiliation, who died out of the blue on November 27, 1901, after a struggle with the Chinese language consul, Solar Sze Yee.

As quickly as Chan proposed making Metropolis Cemetery a landmark, in April 2021, golfers started to fret. The course’s lawns and tees had grown shabby, and the clubhouse was in poor form, Harris says. Many have been involved that landmarking the cemetery would make it harder, or maybe unimaginable, for the town to maintain the golf course in playable situation. Chan says there’s no motive that making the cemetery a landmark ought to intervene with sustaining the golf course: “We’re all looking for methods to share the area and be inclusive and respectful to one another.”

In a letter on behalf of the general public golf affiliation, Harris urged the town to think about landmarking the entire, multilayered historical past of the location, together with the golf course, the Legion of Honor, and the Holocaust Memorial close to the museum, designed by artist George Segal and put in in 1984.

However solely Metropolis Cemetery is being thought-about for landmark standing below Article 10 of San Francisco’s planning code, says Allison Vanderslice, principal environmental planner for the town. The positioning “is important for its skill so as to add to our understanding of historical past and likewise its cultural associations and its funerary buildings.” It captures the cultural variety of early San Francisco, too, she says.

If the S.F. Board of Supervisors approves landmark standing for Metropolis Cemetery, the designation is not going to entail new signage for the location. However, individually, the San Francisco Public Utilities Fee plans to put in an informational panel that briefly discusses the historical past of Metropolis Cemetery and the stays discovered alongside El Camino Del Mar, says Kari Hervey-Lentz, an archaeologist within the metropolis’s planning division. Hervey-Lentz and Ryder are reluctant to disclose particular locations the place stays might be discovered; they don’t need to make it simple for relic hunters to dig up bones or different grave items. It’s uncommon, nevertheless it occurs: within the Nineteen Sixties, native children digging for enjoyable within the park close to Clement Avenue and thirty ninth Avenue unearthed a Jewish gravestone that dates again to 1858. It could have been moved from an earlier Jewish cemetery at Gough and Inexperienced Streets, Ryder says.

The poet Kenneth Rexroth as soon as argued that there’s “nothing underground about” San Francisco. Quite the opposite, it’s a metropolis with historical past as layered and wealthy because the Franciscan Complicated stone that underlies it. The unique dwelling of the Ohlone individuals is famed for the Spanish colonizers, the gold rush, the Beats and the Summer season of Love, queer and trans rights actions, and the tech growth. It’s additionally famed for having no cemeteries inside metropolis limits, despite the fact that it nonetheless has just a few: the historic graveyard at Mission Dolores de Asís, the Nationwide Cemetery within the Presidio, the Columbarium with its hundreds of niches for cremated stays. And Metropolis Cemetery; most of its useless are nonetheless there too.

And but, as a result of San Francisco outsourced its burials within the twentieth century, it’s a metropolis the place native victims of the 1906 earthquake and fireplace (3,000), the AIDS disaster (20,000), the Jonestown bloodbath (909), and the COVID-19 pandemic (946 and counting) couldn’t be buried within the place they referred to as dwelling. In San Francisco, do the useless matter? Time and time once more, by means of a mix of poor planning, lack of foresight, and human greed, metropolis officers have demonstrated that the useless don’t matter.

Landmarking Metropolis Cemetery might start to alter that. For the reason that Chung Yeung ceremony final October, there are already indicators of it taking place, notably on the Kong Chow monument. Somebody has been preserving recent flowers, incense, and a brush on the web site to pay respect to the useless buried there, says Hervey-Lentz. “It’s rewarding to see this work contributing to the heritage of those teams” and the significance of this web site acknowledged.

Chan hopes that native Chinese language American elders and group organizations will return to the monument annually to have a good time Chung Yeung and related ceremonies. And she or he hopes that landmarking the cemetery will create extra respect for San Francisco’s historic useless general. “Not only for [residents] who’re right here now however for generations to return and for immigrants.… It would remind folks that San Francisco has at all times been a metropolis of immigrants, a refuge for individuals who need to come right here and thrive right here.”•