San Francisco Secrets

[Requested by George]

George asked me to share one 'secret' thing about San Francisco that I like. I tried to come up with something deserving of the word 'secret', and wound up learning a secret I hadn't known...and like all good secrets, it's a little unsavory. Which I guess is one of the reasons I love this city.

But I digress.

Start with a cold clear morning after a massive Gulf of Alaska storm. Early morning joggers are out at Ocean Beach. They notice that the storm has uncovered something beneath the sand...something that turns out to be gravestones.

This is unnerving to some people. Some take it as a sign. Some call the authorities. The Chronicle carries a story about it, in which they report the origin of these tombstones.

Flash back to the turn of the century. (No, not that one; the one before it.) San Francisco has big cemeteries on Lone Mountain and Laurel Hill, and a potter's field out where Lincoln Park is now. Civic boosters are pushing to have these cemeteries moved out of the City. The pretext is health; the subtext is real estate. They succeed in their crusade, and the cemeteries are removed. In theory, they make every effort to contact next-of-kin to ensure an orderly transfer to the new cemeteries in Colma. In practice, apparently, they cut a few corners...and a lot of people get buried in unmarked graves.

Those tombstones are recycled, used as a base for the sand at Ocean Beach. Where, every once in a great while, a storm uncovers one of the City's dirty little secrets.

This has happened at least twice in the 30 years since I moved to the Bay Area. The second Chronicle story was, as I recall, nearly identical to the first; only the names were different (I assume--really, they could have used the same names and I'd have been none the wiser). Every time it has to be explained. It's a testament to the loss of memory in a city where so many people are recent arrivals.

That's the part I knew. While searching (in vain) for some online reference to the Ocean Beach gravestones, I discovered the part I didn't know: some of the gravestones were broken up and used to line the drainage gutter in Buena Vista Park.

So of course I had to go in search of these fragments. I found several; photos are below the fold. Thank you, George, for giving me the nudge that got me going somewhere I didn't anticipate when I started.









[That's all, folks]