How San Francisco Evicted Its Dead Residents
By: Jackie Thornhill
Tags: Politics, History, Death, San Francisco

Laurel Hill Cemetery stretching around Lone Mountain in the 1890s.

San Francisco’s first official burial site, Yerba Buena Cemetery, opened in 1850 on the land now occupied by the Asian Art Museum, Public Library, and U.N. Plaza. This location soon proved unsuitable as the City expanded Westward at an unexpected rate, and the cemetery was removed in 1871.

As the need for burial sites further away from the City center became apparent, a group of cemeteries cropped up on the outskirts of the Richmond District with Lone Mountain Cemetery separating the Inner Richmond from the rest of the City and Golden Gate Cemetery occupying the land that is now the Lincoln Park Golf Course, Legion of Honor, and VA Medical Center. Lone Mountain Cemetery was eventually subdivided into the Calvary, Odd Fellow’s, Masonic, and Laurel Hill cemeteries.

The original boundaries of Lone Mountain Cemetery layered over a Google Earth satellite view of the area. Calvary was bordered by Geary and Turk Streets, and Parker & St. Joseph’s Avenues, Odd Fellow’s by Geary, Turk, Parker and Arguello, Masonic by Turk, Fulton, Masonic, and Parker, and Laurel Hill by California, Geary, Presidio, and Arguello.

These “Big Four” cemeteries were mostly filled up by the end of the century, and neighboring property owners had already begun demanding their removal “as early as 1880,” according to a 1950 city planner report authored on the location, regulation, and removal of cemeteries in the City and County of San Francisco.

These early calls for removal came shortly after the Jewish Cemetery across town, on the land that is now Dolores Park, was shut down.

The City report details the unfortunate state of disrepair the cemeteries fell into as the cries for removal intensified, and the action the City’s elected officials eventually took in response.

“Many of the cemetery lots were sold with no perpetual-care arrangements, and graves, markers, picket-fences, monuments and cemetery grounds deteriorated, became weed-filled and, despite efforts to establish adequate police and watchman guard, became havens for pranksters, juvenile delinquents, and ghouls. Some were anxious to subdivide and develop the 160 or so acres of land involved.” “By 1900, most of the existing graveyards in San Francisco were nearly filled up, and rather than dedicate further cemetery land within the City and County, the Board of Supervisors decided in 1902 (Ordinance Number 8108) to prohibit burials within the city, and to forbid the sale of cemetery lots in Odd Fellows, Masonic, Laurel Hill, and Calvary cemeteries.”

The 1902 decision by the Board of Supervisors was just the beginning of a quest to remove the cemeteries that evolved into an epic legal and political war, winding its way through the State Legislature, Federal Courts, and eventually back to the Board.

The planner report on cemeteries describes the small portion of Odd Fellow’s that was preserved “as a memorial park containing a mausoleum in which vaults were established for the retention of remains of many of the bodies contained in the cemetery.” Awkwardly situated as it may be, the Columbarium still stands where it did over 100 years ago, when it was surrounded by desolate rows of gravestones.

The report also explains that “when Masonic Cemetery was removed, it was purchased by the University of San Francisco (formerly St. Ignatius College) and used for an expansion of the campus.” The notion that the cemetery was quickly removed in the early 20s is called into question by a news clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle’s December 22, 1931 edition that reports there were “about 14,300” bodies still yet to be removed from Masonic Cemetery.

This photo from UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library shows the remainder of Masonic Cemetery behind the recently constructed Kalmanovitz Hall.

USF’s Kalmanovitz Hall was built in 1927, a full four years before the Chronicle reported the same plot of land was still home to over 14,000 bodies. Some students who attended class there while the cemetery was still being excavated were likely treated to views of bodies being dug up out their classroom windows.

While the records I found claimed all bodies from the “Big Four” cemeteries were reinterred in Colma and other locations by 1941, a number of incidents in the years since have made it clear that many bodies remain buried under USF and the residential neighborhoods that surround it.

When Gleeson Library was built in 1950, a backhoe churned up an entire mausoleum containing at least 200 bodies.

The contractor building Hayes-Healy residence hall in 1966 “came upon so many bones and skulls that they refused to continue working until the human remains were moved from the site,” according to USF historian Alan Ziajka.

In 2011, “a construction worker at the new science center at USF got quite a shock when a skull came tumbling out of the shovel of the backhoe he was operating.”

In 2016 a family living on the site of the former Odd Fellow’s Cemetery uncovered a 2-year-old girl’s coffin and remains while remodeling their home.

Golden Gate Cemetery has an even messier history — by 1893 over 18,000 people were buried there, then in 1908 “City Supervisors asked the different organizations who had plots there to remove them in order for a new City Park.” The next year the land was turned over to the Park Commission and by 1912 the first nine holes of the Lincoln Park Golf Course were completed.

Remains from Golden Gate Cemetery uncovered in 1993. Photo by Richard Barnes

So it was no surprise when, less than a decade later, construction crews breaking ground for the Legion of Honor Museum came across “about 1,500” bodies and coffins. When the museum was renovated in 1993, another few hundred corpses turned up and this time the City decided to rebury the remains at Skylawn Cemetery in San Mateo.

At one point following the discovery of more bodies during the Legion of Honor’s renovation, “an early resident, recalling the construction of the museum, mentioned that remains were found and put into a pit in one of the corners of the building, although she couldn’t recall which corner.”