The Golden Gate Cemetery was bounded roughly by Clement Street, 33rd Avenue, and 48th Avenue, on the dramatic headlands above the Pacific Ocean. As the city's potter's field, it received the remains of those who could not afford private burial -- the indigent, the unclaimed, the people who built San Francisco without accumulating enough wealth to secure a marked grave. Graves had been transferred here from the earlier Yerba Buena Cemetery as the city expanded, concentrating the city's dead on this remote western promontory. The location was beautiful and deliberately marginal: far from the city center, overlooking the ocean, a place where the living could forget the dead.

San Francisco's systematic campaign to remove its cemeteries began in the early 1900s, driven by public health concerns and the desire to reclaim valuable land. The Golden Gate Cemetery's conversion to Lincoln Park was part of this citywide effort. Most remains were disinterred and relocated to cemeteries in Colma. The 200-acre site was transformed into a public park, with a golf course occupying much of the former burial ground and the Legion of Honor museum built on the highest point. The transformation was thorough but incomplete -- not every grave was found, and the sandy soil yielded surprises for decades.

Today Lincoln Park is one of San Francisco's most scenic public spaces, offering panoramic views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, and the Pacific. The Legion of Honor houses European art in a building inspired by the French pavilion from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Golfers play their rounds above a potter's field. Visitors admire Rodin sculptures above unmarked graves. The juxtaposition is characteristically San Franciscan: beauty built on top of the forgotten, pleasure layered over the graves of people who died with nothing. The park does not acknowledge its cemetery past with signage or memorials. The 29,000 who were buried here exist only in city records and in the earth itself.