Buena Vista Park
Hilltop park with wooded trails and gutters paved with broken marble headstones from old city cemeteries.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Buena Vista Park in San Francisco starts with a single word carved into a paving slab underfoot and works back to why it's there: the city's decision, between 1901 and 1914, to ban burials and then dig up its crowded old cemeteries as the city grew. It follows the roughly two hundred thousand unclaimed headstones left behind, and the Depression-era WPA crews who reused them as fill while shoring up this hillside in the late 1930s. Walk the gutters slowly and look down rather than ahead.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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