Lincoln Park San Francisco Graveyard No. 32

In the Midst of Life

A walk through the secret graveyard of San Francisco’s Lincoln Park

In the late 1890s, San Francisco city officials realized they had a problem: too many dead bodies. During the gold rush 40 years earlier, a sprawling graveyard called City Cemetery had been dug on the west side—an area known then as the Outer Lands—but San Francisco was growing, and now the living wanted that land back. So, the authorities banned further burials and exhumed thousands of corpses for the journey to the town of Colma, a few miles south, where a giant necropolis still operates today. But they didn’t get all of them. It’s estimated that 15,000 bodies were left behind, resting today under the fairways and tee boxes that make up Lincoln Park Golf Course.

The conversion from cemetery to golf course was gradual. It’s said that a year or two after the potter’s field—the traditional name for a cemetery plot reserved for unclaimed bodies—was cleared, three rudimentary golf holes were set up. By 1918, there was a full set of 18.

Today, Lincoln is the oldest of six public courses—along with TPC Harding Park, TPC Fleming, Sharp Park, Gleneagles and Golden Gate—maintained by the city of San Francisco. As the host of several professional events, including the 2009 Presidents Cup and the 2020 PGA Championship, Harding Park may have the glittering résumé, but Lincoln is a local favorite.

It’s scruffy. The bean counters at City Hall haven’t made funding a priority, and it may take a few weeks to clean up a fallen cypress. The shadowy clubhouse, mostly closed, is home to sun-faded trophy cases and abandoned banquet rooms. But Lincoln remains beloved, built for working-class San Franciscans—stevedores at Fort Mason, orderlies at the VA hospital, ironworkers who built the Golden Gate Bridge—who once filled the tract housing of the adjoining Richmond District.

I first played Lincoln Park’s quirky, crooked, 5,416-yard layout a decade ago, shortly after moving to the area. I was jobless and restless, and golf provided order when my life felt messy. It cost only $20 to play the back nine if you got there early, so I spent mornings trudging through the heavy fog off the Pacific, watching my ball disappear like a bird into a snowstorm. I would circumvent the huge white edifice of the Legion of Honor art museum, which sits at the crest of the hill like a giant mausoleum, and watch the sun rise over the towers of St. Ignatius to the south. In those moments, San Francisco shone with beauty and potential, as it had for so many transplants before me.

Death and danger mingle on Lincoln’s opening hole. Go left and risk putting your drive through the windshield of a car; push it right and your shot might rattle around a ruined building, roofless and exposed to the weather. Plenty of crestfallen players take a drop here and move on. An early scorecard from Lincoln even addressed this with a local rule: “Ball may be lifted from Monument on 1st fairway and dropped on fairway.” But those who linger may notice the Chinese characters carved into the building’s stone gate, which translate to “Temporary Resting Place for Coffins Being Sent to Kong Chow Province.” It’s the first hint that this landscape is hiding something.

Throughout the course, observant players may spy a stray patch of calla lilies, not native to this climate but growing nevertheless, possibly the remnants of an old cemetery garden. A long line of cypress trees, now an obstacle blocking a green, might have marked out the boundary lines of a cemetery plot. Overgrown foundation stones near a cluster of trees could once have held a cemetery caretaker’s cottage.

At the short par-4 second, the course rises to a green placed under the balustrades of the Legion of Honor before falling again toward the Pacific for the awkward par-3 third. The green on the fifth hole provides a clear opening to the bay, with traffic buzzing on the Golden Gate Bridge and massive container ships making their way underneath it.

Lincoln Park San Francisco Graveyard No. 32
Lincoln Park is a window into the city, from views of San Francisco’s most iconic landmark to ever-present nods to those who helped build both infrastructure and golf course.

To reach the sixth tee, golfers walk around the back of the art museum to a shadowy glen overlooked by a row of classical statues that have grown long beards of moss in the damp sea air. The museum has its own collection of ancient funerary relics, and the building itself was dedicated as a memorial to the dead of the First World War. When the Legion of Honor was renovated in 1992, the San Francisco Planning Department reported that excavations turned up the remains of almost 750 bodies. Photos show many still clutching the pistols and liquor bottles they were buried with. In one image, builders from long ago had run a water pipe through a ribcage.

Where to lay the dead is an eternal conundrum. During the Victorian era, the traditional resting places—churchyards, catacombs and columbaria—were filling up quickly. They were also deemed a public nuisance: Residents were no longer comfortable living so close to decaying bodies.

In response, early landscape architects developed the “garden cemetery,” a scenic plot of land placed well outside the city and designed for contemplative strolls and quiet reflection. The first of these, Père Lachaise, was established by Napoleon in 1804 in Paris, and the following decades would see the founding of Highgate in London and Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first garden cemetery in the U.S.

In 1871, city surveyors began construction of a municipal garden cemetery on the west side of San Francisco, near Lands End. Dubbed “City Cemetery,” its first burials were unclaimed bodies and those too poor to afford their own burial—people with nowhere else to go.

As it filled up, municipal supervisors decided to offer plots to the city’s benevolent societies, organizations that supported the needs of immigrants. Soon after City Cemetery opened, more than 24 societies—the Greek Russian Slavonian Benevolent Society, the Japanese Colony, the Grand Army of the Republic, and the St. Andrews and Caledonian Club among them—established their presence, erecting makeshift chapels and caretakers houses.

This land wasn’t just for the dead; those living in the crowded slums downtown now had access to green spaces for picnicking and taking in views of the ocean. Working-class families made a day of their visits, taking advantage of spaces that no one else wanted, acres too rugged to turn much of a profit.

The most common societies in City Cemetery were Chinese. Confucian practice emphasized the importance of being buried in one’s home village, and many Chinese immigrants were disinterred after their flesh had decayed, their bones scraped and the remains placed on ships back to China. It was such a common practice that nearby neighbors complained bitterly about the constant digging.

The Kong Chow temple at City Cemetery—which can still be seen from Lincoln Park’s fairways—had a small altar for burning incense, space for offerings of roast pig and fowl, and means to burn symbolic paper money and clothes. This continues today, with local groups performing ceremonies there during the annual Cheung Yung festival.

By the early 1900s, city officials had made it illegal to bury any bodies in San Francisco, and in 1909, the area was formally reclassified as Lincoln Park. Families were granted the opportunity to move their loved ones but few actually did. The city refused to move the potter’s field, and the benevolent societies found it too expensive. Soon, wooden markers were taken for firewood, weeds grew high and stray cattle meandered through its broken fence. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted in 1910, it was now “a gloomy waste, giving stronger evidence of cruel indifference to the dead than of tender remembrance.”

Yet, even as it faded, City Cemetery reflected an abiding truth of San Francisco: Its foundations were built on the bodies of working people from around the globe.

Lincoln Park San Francisco Graveyard No. 32
San Francisco’s working class has been congregating at Lincoln Park for more than a century, whether the grounds have served as a golf course or as the cemetery that preceded it.

Lincoln’s roller coaster continues on the seventh. The tee shot on this short par 4 is uphill and blind, with a massive fence running all the way up the right side. Hit a good one, and your ball will tumble down the hill near the mouth of the green. The eighth hole continues the descent, diving down a rocky hill and providing distant views of the city.

The ninth lifts you back up toward the top of the hill on No. 10 tee, where you’re rewarded with a long view of Ocean Beach on the western edge of the city. They can’t be seen from this height, but a visitor at low tide may find piles of abandoned grave markers buried in the sand there. Some were likely first placed on this hill before being dumped. Other markers were put to more useful purpose: The gutters in Buena Vista Park are paved with broken tombstones.

The base of the museum presides over the 10th green, which is also shaded by a tree with a small plaque marking the spot where it was planted in 1922 during a visit to the city by Joseph Joffre, who commanded the French forces in World War I. No. 13, where you pass the Kong Chow temple again before moving on to the uphill dogleg on the 14th, is the only par 5 on the course.

The historical record is sketchy, but it would make sense if Lincoln’s first three holes, laid out on the potter’s field in 1902, were the work of men stationed at the adjoining Fort Miley. It’s not hard to imagine a few soldiers, bored behind the massive gun emplacements that would never see action, knocking together holes out of land that no one else wanted. When the chilly Bay Area winds blow through Lincoln, it’s easier to understand the early origins of golf, when a few lonely Scotsmen, cold and isolated and far from the action in Edinburgh, decided to fill the empty hours with idle sport.

It’s a potential origin story that only emphasizes the undisputed fact that Lincoln Park has always been a golf course for the city’s common people. It also marks the stark contrast between Lincoln and San Francisco Golf Club. SFGC opened in 1895—a few years before the ban on burials in the city—eventually settling in its current location on Lake Merced. It is still considered one of the greatest golf courses in the country, and one of its most fiercely private. (Death is also integral to its history: SFGC’s fabled seventh hole overlooks the site of the last legal duel in California, during which a state senator was shot and killed by a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court.)

The same year SFGC opened, Van Cortlandt Golf Course in the Bronx became America’s first public course. Soon more than 5,000 New Yorkers were playing there each week, many arriving via subway. Lincoln Park became part of a wave of municipal courses built across the United States. 

When newspapers announced plans for its opening, headlines touted that Lincoln represented another example of San Francisco’s triumph as a world capital. Local professionals were called in to walk the land. Soon, nine holes were laid out, and clay was trucked in to give grass a chance to grow.

The public good was paramount. As the San Francisco Examiner wrote at the time, “San Francisco will soon have the distinction of possessing the finest free golf links in the world.” It was a vision shared in the pushes for City Cemetery and the munis springing up in the wake of Van Cortlandt: They offered everyone, regardless of rank, a place at the table. 

The hope at Lincoln was that, according to the Examiner, “many people who have never taken up golf will be induced to play.” It was specifically designed, noted the Chronicle, as a “golf links where anyone can play who wishes.” The fact that tee times were free meant that the only barrier was the cost of a streetcar ticket.

The clubhouse at Lincoln, a rambling brick building with a now-threadbare snack shack, further emphasizes this point. During the throes of the Great Depression, funds via the Works Progress Administration built new libraries, improved athletic fields and erected the city’s zoo and aquarium. They also built Lincoln’s clubhouse. A faded plaque from 1939 can still be found on the building.

Like other public courses across the country, Lincoln was proof that with determination and support, common people could have some of the same opportunities as the rich. An early scorecard makes the goal clear: “It is the desire of the Recreation and Parks Department to keep Lincoln an IDEAL MUNICIPAL GOLF COURSE.”

The green at 15 is hidden by a rising hill, but there’s a convenient way to aim your drive: Just fire at the 15-foot-tall plinth at the crest that leans drunkenly in the fog.

The Ladies’ Seamen’s Friend Society obelisk was raised as “a landmark of the seaman’s last earthly port and resting-place.” It once had a long view over the bay, but the trees have grown high in the 100-plus years since. The location was noted in a newspaper story at the turn of the century: “‘Them’s mariners,’ said the gravedigger, who stood dreaming on his shovel, and flicking a curly dog with a coffin rope. ‘They’re put there so’st they can see the ships come in.’”

The 17th comes with a shock. As you climb through overgrown bushes of roses and wild sage, a wide view suddenly opens: the Golden Gate Bridge, strung across the strait to the east. When the weather is right, the orange towers seem close enough for a well-struck 5-iron. There’s a viewpoint for tourists, and in the early mornings an old woman performs tai chi among the low, dark trees that ring the green, drifting through a loose dance with the fog.

The neighborhood pushes up against the fairway as No. 18 heads back to the clubhouse, but there’s still a long row of cypress trees that likely once marked the Italian section of the cemetery. A 1921 Examiner article recounts the experience of a “girl reporter” who spoke to caddies about the gravestones that remained there. They’re unimpressed, for the most part, leading to an exchange where she jokingly asks if some of the graves are from “players who died of grief because they couldn’t play golf very well.”

“Media vita in morte sumus,” a Gregorian chant that translates from the Latin as “In the midst of life we are in death,” could be a fitting epitaph for a round at Lincoln. But the dead sit lightly on this landscape, mostly forgotten, and it doesn’t feel morbid or eerie to play there. Beyond that view of the Golden Gate on 17, the petty frustrations and fleeting thrills of the round leave the most lasting impression. The dead don’t hold sway at Lincoln anymore.

Still, its history is felt on some deeper level. When the haunted-house aspect fades, it leaves behind an awareness of the loneliness and self-sufficiency that are core to the game. As someone who often appreciates being alone, I find that a game at Lincoln is a way to tap into an eternal community—not just of golfers, but of those who once made San Francisco their home.

I often see groups of older men playing at Lincoln; their Ford F150s and Toyota Tacomas parked in the lot are vehicles you don’t see often on the streets of this city. They’re usually from places like Walnut Creek or Pleasanton, cities to the east where families fled from San Francisco in the 1960s and ’70s in search of more room and better yards. But Lincoln is something they still share, and they return to be a part of the city they grew up in, the one their parents built.

The popularity of golf rises and falls, cities boom and bust, our own lives expand and contract over the decades, but one thing that humans have always needed—will always need—is a place to play. And, just as importantly at the end, a place to rest.

Lincoln Park has offered both to generations of San Franciscans. Out here on the edge of the continent, watching a ball arc into the cool air against the green of the Monterey cypress and the blank, unending blue of the Pacific, time may stop for a moment. And then the ball lands and rolls, and the round goes on, just as it always has.

Lincoln Park San Francisco Graveyard No. 32