How San Francisco evicted thousands of dead people

The last Portals described how, starting in 1854, four cemeteries were installed in the then-desolate Lone Mountain area of the Inner Richmond District. Neighborhood boosters began a campaign at the turn of the century to clear this 320-acre city of the dead.

They enjoyed some early success: In 1901, the city banned burials and cremations. But 13 years later, voters rejected a proposal to relocate the graveyards.

The city’s rapid westward expansion kept the issue alive. By 1920, the population of the Richmond District, just 3,000 in 1895, had soared to 66,000. In 1923, cemetery foes won a victory when the state passed a law allowing local governments to remove bodies from areas where new burials had been banned.

Seeing the writing on the crypt wall, the smaller two cemeteries in the Richmond, Odd Fellows and Masonic, began soliciting money from their members to buy land in San Mateo County where bodies could be reinterred. That left Laurel Hill and Calvary, a Roman Catholic cemetery.

Laurel Hill, located where Trader Joe’s and the former Fireman’s Fund Building are today, was in a difficult position. As Tamara Venit Shelton writes in “Unmaking Historic Spaces: Urban Progress and the San Francisco Cemetery Debate,” a 2008 article that appeared in the journal California History, Laurel Hill was an independent business with shrinking revenue, and it “also occupied prime real estate in between the major commercial arteries of Clement and Sutter streets.”

Mayor James Rolph supported relocating the cemeteries, but the subject was sensitive enough that, as in 1914, he refused to approve removal without a general vote. In 1924, the issue was once again presented to the city’s voters. Business and real estate interests strongly supported removal and quoted Rolph, who said, “Sentiment must yield to progress.”

The Cemetery Defense League, led by lawyers for Laurel Hill, pointed east to make a preservationist argument. “In Eastern cities like New York, Boston and New Orleans, the old cemeteries lie in the very heart of the business districts, and are never disturbed by ruthless greed, but are the treasured landmarks of cities,” the league wrote. “Are we San Franciscans more deficient in sentiment and honor for our forefathers than our Eastern brethren?”

Supporters of removal flipped this argument on its head, saying the cemeteries had become so dilapidated that respect for the dead required their removal.

The Richmond Banner, a neighborhood newspaper, ran pictures showing fallen gravestones and weed-covered tombs. Cemetery opponents also noted that the city had built Lincoln Park over the old City Cemetery without removing the bodies. “Today, players of golf make merry over the remains of the dead, unhonored and unsung,” opponents wrote, warning that this could be the fate of the four Lone Mountain cemeteries if the city did not remove the graveyards in an orderly fashion.

On election day, the defenders of the cemeteries once again prevailed, but this time by a narrow margin. The vote was followed by a court ruling that upheld the city’s right to remove the cemeteries as public nuisances. That was enough for the Masonic and Odd Fellows graveyards, which moved their dead to Colma. Calvary soon followed.

Laurel Hill, the oldest of the four cemeteries and the largest at 54 acres, was where many of the city’s elite were buried. It was the last holdout.

As another vote loomed in 1937, supporters of keeping the cemetery in place tried to arouse reverence for the site. They held a memorial day for pioneers at its most famous and imposing landmark, the tomb of Sen. David Broderick, and proposed that the cemetery be turned into a park whose historic tombstones would attract tourists.

But in November, San Franciscans voted 65,725 to 32,449 to remove Laurel Hill. The great cemetery war that had started more than four decades earlier was finally over, and the dead had lost. In the end, the remains of nearly 150,000 people were removed and reburied in Colma. A handful of veterans were moved from Laurel Hill to the Presidio cemetery.

The number of people who were connected to the dead had dwindled, and only a fraction of the remains were claimed by relatives and given individual plots. Thousands of bodies were buried in a mass grave. According to Woody LaBounty and David Gallagher’s Outside Lands podcast No. 43, that grave is being encroached upon by two temples to modern progress, a Home Depot and a Best Buy.

In a strange and somehow fitting denouement, Laurel Hill’s tombstones, grave markers and other monuments ended up being scattered all across the city. Because few were claimed by descendants, the Department of Public Works appropriated them and used them for a variety of utilitarian functions.

Some of the headstones became part of the seawalls at Aquatic Park and the municipal yacht harbor. The wave organ, near the St. Francis Yacht Club, is composed of old cemetery monuments. Other markers were used to build the seawall off the Great Highway at Ocean Beach, where they occasionally are revealed when tide and wind conditions are right. The place where the writing on the tombstones is most legible is in Buena Vista Park, where they were used to make rain gutters.

As for the vast city of the dead that once spread out across the Inner Richmond, just one small part remains: the Columbarium, located near Geary and Stanyan, on what was once part of the Odd Fellows Cemetery. With Mission Dolores and the Presidio, it is one of three remaining cemeteries in San Francisco, and the only place where a nonmilitary resident can still be interred — a link with the city’s dead that goes back to the Gold Rush.


Trivia time

The previous trivia question: What was the largest recorded snowfall in San Francisco history?

Answer: 3.7 inches fell downtown on Feb. 5, 1887.

This week’s trivia question: What was San Francisco’s first drive-in restaurant?

Editor’s note
