Left Behind

City Cemetery was meant to be San Francisco’s solution to the problem of Yerba Buena. The old municipal cemetery was full and falling apart. It was now surrounded by the city and located right where leaders wanted to build city hall. The transition was far from seamless. Yerba Buena was at capacity by the mid-1850s, but City Cemetery didn’t open until 1868 and didn’t see its first burials until 1870. Some of Yerba Buena’s dead moved to the cemeteries on Lone Mountain, but thousands more remained in the heart of the city.

Only 267 graves from Yerba Buena were definitively moved to City Cemetery, though there could have been more that weren’t documented. And it’s entirely possible that some of these graves were on their second move—from North Beach to Yerba Buena and then to City Cemetery. If so, these two hundred acres of remote coastal land, bounded by Thirty-Third and Forty-Eighth Avenues to the east and west, the Pacific Ocean to the north and the Point Lobos Toll Road (now Geary Boulevard) to the south, became the final resting place for them.

The city made some effort to improve the look of the graveyard with plants and shrubs, but there were no trees in and around City Cemetery when it opened, nothing to protect these graves in sandy soil from being buffeted by strong winds off the Pacific Ocean.

Almost from the start, officials at City Cemetery weren’t keeping spotless records. Despite the number on the headboard that marked his grave, Wood wasn’t the 1,116th person buried in City Cemetery. When a San Francisco Call reporter asked the gravedigger how many graves there were, the gravedigger replied, “I numbered up to three thousand, and then began with ‘one’ again.” In February 1882, when the Call ran its story on the cemetery and the fate of Thomas Wood, 4,118 people were buried there or possibly more—cemetery workers said they sometimes buried two people in one plot. It was a busy place. By 1882, City Cemetery was burying 40 people a month.

At least eleven thousand of those buried at City Cemetery were indigent, and the city footed the bill to bury many penniless San Franciscans in a Potter’s Field here. For the average resident, a grave at City Cemetery cost eight dollars; far less than, for example, the Jewish Cemeteries at Dolores Park, where plots were sold for thirty to forty dollars.

Because City Cemetery basically welcomed everyone, it included dozens of smaller cemeteries. It provided plots for graves moved from the Chinese and Greco-Russian Cemeteries and sections for Jewish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Scandinavian, Slavonic-Illyric and Black Freemason burials. By 1887, there were nineteen plots associated with local societies and associations and another twenty-six connected to Chinese community groups. Historians believe more than 10,000 Chinese residents were buried in City Cemetery over its years of operation, though only 3,700 or so remain.

Many cultures around the world have beliefs and practices that revere their ancestors, both at home and in the cemetery where loved ones are buried. This is true in Chinese cultures; Qingming, for example, is a day of visiting ancestral graves to sweep them clean and bring offerings of food, tea and spirit money to burn along with fragrant joss sticks. Burial rites were and are also very important to these communities. Historian Wendy Rouse writes:

During the late 1800s, Chinese in San Francisco largely didn’t regard local cemeteries as permanent resting places. Most of the Chinese who came to San Francisco in the years after the gold rush planned to stay only long enough to make good money before returning home again. Chinese community associations took on the responsibility of burying their brethren in San Francisco if they died here and also handled the task of returning their bones to China after a period. Otherwise, if a body was “buried in a strange land, untended by his family, [the] soul would never stop wandering in the darkness of the other world.”

Although local Chinese societies built a number of monuments within City Cemetery—one of them, the Kong Chow Temple, remains there to this day—individual graves were generally marked with a simple board or brick painted with an inscription in Chinese.

Shantang (Chinese community) representatives kept track of graves and secured the necessary permits to disinter the bodies, typically a few years after burial. They paid $10 per disinterment to the city, $2.50 of which went to the cemetery itself. The bones were cleaned if needed and sealed in a tin box marked with the name of the deceased. They were stored in Chinatown before they were sent home to China.

Many western Europeans, including those who settled in San Francisco, didn’t understand these customs. Western traditions hadn’t placed any importance on connecting with or tending to ancestors for hundreds of years, particularly not once Christianity spread across the world. Those who came to settle and colonize North America left the remains of their forebears behind in European churchyards, possibly to never return. And what they didn’t understand, they didn’t respect.

Chinese residents of California faced horrific racism, and their cemeteries and burial rites became targets, too. White and European San Franciscans complained about Chinese burial and exhumation practices and often used the “abatement of nuisance” euphemism as an excuse to close San Francisco’s cemeteries or limit the activities of Chinese residents.

Other times, white locals didn’t bother with euphemisms; their bigotry was stated openly. The Richmond District Improvement Club was thrilled when the city agreed to close City Cemetery in the late 1890s.

In a resolution, the club celebrated “getting rid of this pest-breeding spot and forever remov[ing] from the sight of visitors to the district the pagan rites of scraping the flesh from the bones of deceased Chinese who had been buried there, which to our people was a sickening and dreaded sight, once seen not soon to be forgotten.” Meanwhile, vandals who visited City Cemetery often picked up Chinese grave markers to play with, throw at one another or steal.

Reverence for the dead in general at City Cemetery wasn’t high on many San Franciscans’ list of priorities. Even so, City Cemetery operated in relative peace for the first ten or fifteen years of its existence—that is until a wealthy neighbor moved in and, like many of San Francisco’s other rich and powerful, saw dollar signs where others saw sacred ground.

Enter Adolph Sutro

Adolph Sutro was born in Aachen, Prussia, on April 29, 1830, and came to California with the gold rush in 1850. In the 1860s, he developed and built a massive tunnel beneath the mines in Gold Country, meant to eliminate flooding and make the mines safer and more efficient. The tunnel made Sutro very wealthy, and in the 1880s, he returned to San Francisco and began buying up land. One of his purchases was that of a cottage on a bluff overlooking the ocean, now known as Sutro Heights. Another was that of the Cliff House, which he transformed into a “fairy tale Victorian Castle.”He turned his estate into an elaborate public garden decorated with statues, gazebos, topiary and much more. And he built the Sutro Baths, an extensive complex of public swimming pools filled with ocean water and heated to different temperatures. All of this was happening right next door to City Cemetery.

Sutro thought the fee to ride the streetcar from downtown San Francisco to his seaside attractions ($0.10; about $3.07 in the 2020s) was too expensive, so he built a sightseeing railroad of his own. Work began on this new railway, or “cable road,” in August 1886. As proposed, it would run west from the corner of Geary Street and Cemetery Avenue (now Presidio Avenue), north to California Street, west along California Street to Lake Street and then around the north side of the City Cemetery, ending its journey at the Cliff House. “The Sutro road will be one of the most picturesque in the country. For two miles it will command charming views of the Golden Gate and ocean, and for more than a mile it will run along the bluffs at a height of 125 feet above the level of the sea.”

Sutro’s design involved building a section of trackway near the intersection of Thirty-Third Avenue and Clement Street—right over a grave plot owned by the Knights of Pythias. Sutro had been negotiating with the Knights of Pythias for a while, and apparently, each side thought they had an agreement. Sutro believed he had permission to build the railway through the cemetery plot once he paid to move twelve bodies buried there. The Knights of Pythias thought Sutro would pay $250 to move each body, while Sutro originally offered $150 a piece. But in later negotiations, Sutro offered $5 to move each of the bodies, and the Knights of Pythias refused.

At this point, Sutro became furious, accused the fraternal organization of trying to blackmail him and said he would build the railroad through the graves “without asking anybody’s leave.” By the time local judge issued an injunction on the work, Sutro’s workers had torn down cemetery fences and laid tracks right on top of several graves. “Considerable tilling” had been done over them, and there was “no attempt made to carry out the original arrangement to move the bodies.” The tracks also ran close to the tombstones of other graves.

Sutro’s engineers claimed that there were no graves under the railway and that the land in question had been “allowed to fall into decay.” He accused the Knights of Pythias again of trying to “scotch the old man for a few dollars.” He told the San Francisco Call, “The work is done and the restraining order is of no effect. There will be no trouble, as the whole thing is over.” A Call reporter noted that defacing, breaking or removing tombs was a violation of the penal code, but Sutro wasn’t prosecuted for it.

It wasn’t Sutro’s only run-in with the law. On a late September morning in 1889, two members of San Francisco’s Health and Police Committee visited City Cemetery and discovered that Sutro had inexplicably enclosed 160 acres of the cemetery with a fence. He had rented the land for several years for use as a pasture for his animals, but the fence was built without permission, and the board of supervisors ordered him to remove it. A few days later, the city sent a surveyor to establish the correct boundary lines.

Sutro tried to put his own spin on the situation, sending his agent, Alexander Watson, to tell officials that “there are but 200 acres of land in the cemetery, and that if Mr. Sutro had taken up 160 acres only forty would be left, which is absurd,” the Call summarized. Watson said Sutro had had his land surveyed and was well aware of where the boundaries were, insisting that the city was the confused party. “The charge of the Superintendent of the cemetery that Mr. Sutro has absorbed any of the city’s land, Mr. Watson claims, was caused by that official’s ignorance of where the lines really run.”

Despite his claims that he meant the cemetery no harm, Sutro’s actions tell a different story. In February 1891, he invited a number of local and federal dignitaries for a visit. His guests that day included San Francisco mayor George Henry Sanderson, several members of the city’s board of supervisors, two park commissioners, U.S. Army major general John Gibbon and Colonel George Mendell, chief of the Engineering Corps of the Division of the Pacific. He wanted to show them a two-hundred-acre area of San Francisco, some of which belonged to City Cemetery, because the military hoped to build defensive fortifications along the San Francisco coastline.

“The Government is anxious to secure as much of the tract as possible, but will not pay a fancy price. It has been suggested that the Government give the city a part of the Presidio Reservation in exchange for the cemetery tract,” the Daily Alta California reported.

But that wasn’t the only reason Sutro invited everyone out to the cemetery. He urged his guests from the federal government, Mendell in particular, to begin the process of condemning the entire cemetery. Mendell said he had the authority to condemn fifty-five acres of it but wanted to see how San Francisco residents felt before exercising that authority.

“Nearly all present expressed an opinion in regard to the matter, and the general impression seemed to be that it would be to the best interests of the city to permit the Government to condemn the cemetery. Then the city would be rid of an eye-sore, adequate protection would be obtained for the harbor of San Francisco, and with the money the city could purchase a cemetery outside of the city and pay for the removal of the bodies now in the City Cemetery,” the Alta reported. It’s no surprise that Sutro’s elite and powerful guests felt this way. None of them represented the indigent, Chinese or other local societies whose people were buried there. They didn’t see it as sacred ground, just an “eye-sore.”

The same day all those dignitaries visited Sutro, a San Francisco Examiner reporter trekked out to the cemetery to describe its current state. The article depicted the sharp divide between those with resources and those without—“Desolate and Forsaken,” the headline read. While some areas were evidently well tended, including the Jewish and Chinese sections, others appeared “uncared for and seemingly forgotten,” the reporter wrote.

It was written as if to support Sutro’s proposal to condemn the cemetery. And once Sutro had Mendell’s commitment, he didn’t waste any time. By mid-February 1891, he was before the board of directors of the Real Estate Exchange, telling them that the U.S. government should condemn City Cemetery and pay the city for the fifty-five acres needed to build harbor defenses; he suggested the rest of the land should be turned into a city park.

That’s essentially what happened. The U.S. government bought fifty-four acres in 1891 and turned them into Fort Miley, a coastal fortification that included a battery for rifled guns and another for twelve-inch mortars, as well as barracks and other buildings.229 Sutro became San Francisco’s mayor in 1895, and in January 1896, he signed an order barring San Francisco’s cemeteries, including City Cemetery, from selling any more lots for future burials. Property owners in the Richmond District—the same ones who were behind efforts to oust the cemeteries on Lone Mountain—helped get the ordinance introduced and passed.

It was the beginning of the end for San Francisco’s burial grounds. The move blocked local cemeteries from earning revenues, and the San Francisco Call predicted that the cemetery associations would sue. They did.

Cemetery associations argued that the ordinance didn’t do anything to prevent burials, since there was room for eighty thousand more graves in lots that were already sold. On top of that, they said it wouldn’t affect City Cemetery at all, because the lots there weren’t for sale.

After signing the ordinance, Sutro said it was only a matter of time before the cemeteries were removed, given how densely populated the western neighborhoods of San Francisco had become. And he agreed with locals who said the cemeteries were bad for people’s health.

Sutro served a two-year term as San Francisco’s mayor, from 1895 to 1897. He died of unknown causes in August 1898, although his family said he’d been in mental decline for almost a year before his death. He didn’t live to see the removal of the cemeteries he hated so much. In one final irony, Sutro’s body was cremated, and his ashes were buried on his Sutro Heights estate next door to City Cemetery.

The End of the Cemetery

By 1893, 18,000 people were buried in City Cemetery, and when San Francisco ultimately banned burials in the early 1900s, the cemetery held about 20,000 graves. Through its years as a cemetery, though, City Cemetery welcomed as many as 28,000 to 29,000 burials, including the graves of more than 6,300 Chinese residents whose bones were eventually returned to China.

A decade after Sutro’s death, in December 1908, the city’s health committee asked the board of supervisors to order removal of the graves at City Cemetery. The city sent notices to fraternal and other organizations that held plots to let them know eviction was on the horizon. However, city officials didn’t bother to disinter and relocate the indigent dead who’d been buried there on the city’s dime, and many of the other remains buried at City Cemetery had nobody to claim them. While San Francisco’s other cemeteries at least made an effort to move their graves to new burial grounds in Colma, City Cemetery made little effort on behalf of its dead.

Also in December 1908, San Francisco coroner Thomas Leland and Supervisor Henry Payot visited City Cemetery to investigate reports that many of the graves had become exposed and desecrated. A massive slab covering the tomb of a Russian woman named Mary Gribbish had been broken and pried away, leaving her expensive clothes and jewelry vulnerable to robbery. Vandals had dumped rubbish on other exposed graves.

A year later, in December 1909, the city officially dedicated City Cemetery lands for “the most picturesque park in the world.” The new park would rest on two hundred acres of coastal land, including the City Cemetery and adjacent property, bounded by Thirty-Third Avenue, Clement Street, Baker Beach and the line of West Clay Street, if it had continued through the park. The San Francisco Call claimed that the cemetery had been closed for twenty years (it had only been eight), and yet the burials still needed to be moved. Once that happened, “the improvement of the park with drives, walks, benches and other conveniences, including lawns and flower beds, can easily be accomplished.” Instead, those improvements went forward on top of thousands of now-unmarked graves.

City leaders named the new park after President Abraham Lincoln, partly because it was near the western end of the Lincoln Highway, the first highway that ran all the way across the United States. But plans to turn the land into a public park quickly changed direction. As early as 1902, golfers had established a small golf course on the site, which was expanded to have fourteen holes by 1914 and a full eighteen holes by 1917, sprawling across the graveyard. Lincoln Park Golf Course was the first public golf course in San Francisco and one of the first in the western United States, meaning it’s open to the public without requiring membership to a country club or other private organization. It’s also open to park goers and hikers, but they’re warned to stay off the course and to watch out for flying golf balls.

Historians aren’t certain how many graves remain at City Cemetery. Researcher Alex Ryder, who conducted an extensive tally of the cemetery’s burials and disinterments, believes it’s at least ten thousand but is probably closer to twenty thousand or more.

In December 1921, as crews began excavating to build the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the forgotten dead began to make themselves known. The museum was funded by Alma de Bretteville Spreckels and her husband, Adolph, who made his money through sugar plantations and breeding racehorses, and it was intended as a memorial to California soldiers killed in World War I. When workers broke ground on the new project, they tore open 1,500 graves in the indigent section.

“The site of the $250,000 memorial to the dead was once a cemetery. It still is, but the bones are now scattered. In the excavation work for the memorial workmen have uncovered about 1500 skeleton-filled coffins,” reporter Vid Larsen wrote for the Daily News. “No provision was made for the reburying of the bodies. Workmen have cut down about nine or 10 feet in their work. Sometimes as many as four or five bodies have been pulled out in an hour.”

Larsen and a colleague visited the site and reported seeing “piles of bones not completely covered by the dirt,” many coffins cut in half by the teeth of excavating machines and more coffins poking out from the soil along the bluff. Someone made off with thirty-five dollars from one coffin, and someone else found an expensive ring in another. Local colleges bought some of the skulls. The foreman told the reporters that his crews refused to touch the bones, saying, “The only thing we can do is to scrape them over and cover them up again.”

C.W. Eastin, an attorney representing the plot holders, told the Daily News the next day that the actions of Legion of Honor crews were a violation of the same laws Adolph Sutro flouted decades earlier. “Section 290 of the penal code says: Every person who mutilates, disinters or removes from the place of sepulchre the dead body of a human being without authority of the law, is guilty of a felony,” Eastin told the newspaper. He added that “there is grave doubt that building a war memorial or even the public golf links at Lincoln park is legal.” But his protests failed to stop the construction.

The Palace of the Legion of Honor was opened to the public on Armistice Day, November 11, 1924. The graves beneath it remained relatively undisturbed until 1993, when a new round of excavations at the museum uncovered what archaeologist Miley Holman called a “charnel heap,” a mass grave likely left over from the 1921 reburials. The remains belonged mostly to working-class white people who were buried in redwood coffins. Their bones showed fractures, skeletal trauma, arthritis and other signs of the heavy labor they’d performed in life. Some of the bones bore signs of medical experimentation after death. Even in 1993, the museumʼs officials and builders didn’t want to deal with the work of processing the remains; Museum Director Harry Parker complained to the San Francisco Chronicle that the delays associated with the discovery would cost $50,000 a month. Ultimately, the Legion of Honor Museum turned the remains of about 900 early San Franciscans over to the medical examiner’s office, and they were reinterred in Skylawn Memorial Park in Colma. The rest, however, are still beneath and around the museum, where more than 170,000 patrons visited in 2021.

“These are already the bodies that no one wants; immigrants, poor people, religious minorities. It gets clearer by the minute that the city still doesn’t fucking want them. To this day, the bodies of the men and women who built this city lie anonymously under a golf course and museum,” writes Courtney Minick, the creator of Here Lies a Story. She argues that City Cemetery isn’t a former cemetery—it’s a current one.

In recent years, City Cemetery’s legacy has attracted the attention of historians and city leaders, particularly those in Chinese communities around San Francisco. After urging from those leaders, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors granted the site landmark status in October 2022, recognizing the site’s history as a graveyard for the city’s immigrant and indigent dead.

Chinese community members gathered at the Kong Chow monument for the autumn festival of Chung Yeung in 2021 and 2022, bringing offerings of incense, paper money and food for the ancestors. It was probably the first time in more than a century that Chinese locals commemorated the dead at City Cemetery. “Li Dianbang, director of the Historical and Cultural Relics Committee of the CCBA, remarked that commemorating the Kong Chow structure could help with the current prevalence of hate crimes against Asian communities because ‘[a]ll ethnic groups must know each other’s history and respect each other’s contributions to this land,’” city archaeologist Kari Hervey-Lentz wrote. Those who visit the site now may discover fresh flowers on the altar and a broom for sweeping out the Kong Chow structure, acts meant to honor the dead.

“This place has been a resting place for our earlier immigrants.…Many of them did not go home, and they made America their home,” said Larry Yee, president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. “And they buried their bones here, in America. “