San Francisco's Oldest Park Is Paved With Graveyards

The steep, forested hill rising on your left is Buena Vista Park, San Francisco's oldest official park, set aside back in eighteen sixty seven under the plainer name Hill Park. It climbs to about five hundred seventy five feet across thirty eight acres of cypress and eucalyptus. Underfoot, though, the park is built partly out of the dead.

In the early twentieth century, San Francisco decided its crowded downtown cemeteries were taking up land the growing city wanted back, and after years of legal fights, the city began relocating tens of thousands of graves south to Colma starting in the late nineteen twenties, with most of the work finished by the mid nineteen forties. Families were supposed to pay to move their own relatives' headstones. Many simply could not, or did not bother, and the abandoned stones became scrap for public works projects around the city. Some were used to line the seawall at Aquatic Park. Some reinforced the breakwater at the Saint Francis Yacht Club. Some went into erosion control out at Ocean Beach, where storms still occasionally wash a broken gravestone back up onto the sand.

A share of them ended up right here, repurposed by Depression era relief workers as curbing and drainage gutters along Buena Vista Park's western trails. Walk those paths today and you can still find fragments of names and dates worked into the stone beneath your feet, the last visible trace of San Franciscans whose graves were broken up and recycled into infrastructure rather than preserved. The hillside above them is one of the loveliest parks in the city. The ground itself is a quiet, unmarked cemetery of leftovers.