Golden Gate Cemetery (San Francisco)

The ground beneath the lush, rolling fairways of Lincoln Park and the elegant architecture of the Palace of the Legion of Honor holds a starkly different history. In the late nineteenth century, this entire area served as the Golden Gate Cemetery, a sprawling municipal burial ground for thousands of San Francisco residents. It functioned as a final resting place for the city's poor, indigent, and immigrant populations, including large numbers of Chinese, Italian, and French laborers. Because the site was considered distant and windswept at the time of its opening in 1870, it was often referred to by the less formal name of Potter's Field.