Learning from Our City’s Ghosts

With Halloween later this month, I find myself meditating on ghosts.

I always enjoy thinking about the Richmond District’s secret, nearly forgotten part of San Francisco history; the neighborhood used to house many cemeteries before we built houses here.

While Colma is now the city with more dead residents than living residents, the Richmond used to have the honor of housing our residents that passed beyond the mortal coil. From Lincoln Park with the Golden Gate Cemetery, aka City Cemetery, to the “Big Four” that encircled Lone Mountain – Laurel Hill, Odd Fellows, Masonic and Calvary – this sleepy neighborhood could have had a very different character had residents not pushed to improve the surrounding infrastructure.

Even though the cemeteries had been officially declared a nuisance and closed, their presence can still be felt today if you know where to look. Physically you can find a monument or two in Lincoln Park or tombstones down on the shore below Lands End. While a majority of their physical bodies have been moved out of the City, perhaps their spirits still linger on and wander the west side. Maybe one can be seen on All Hallow’s Eve near the Columbarium tucked away by Rossi Park or among the manicured greens of Lincoln Park Golf Course when the veil between worlds is thinnest.

What about some other ghosts that currently haunt us in the present beyond these potential spirits from the former cemeteries? One of my favorite playwrights, Henrik Ibsen, wrote a play titled “Ghosts” that uses them as a metaphor of social issues that were hidden beneath the surface. Items that linger on from our collective past based on decisions made long ago. The figurative ghosts that have guided the neighborhood since before many of us were even born maintain a hold on how we view what is considered the norm.

The structure of our streets was laid out over a century ago for the streetcar lines that brought residents out from the City Center – wide streets and intersections were built for the more heavily used lines and turnaround points, which is still evident at the terminus of the N-Judah in the Sunset. Until the rails were ripped out in 1948 to be replaced by bus lines, the development of the merchant corridors closely followed where old streetcars were put in place.

Narrower residential streets contrast the wide design of corridors like Geary Boulevard and Fulton Street that originally served cable car lines which were replaced by the Municipal Railways, the precursor to Muni. The shift to buses and the increasing car usage that followed took advantage of these wider streets and have been adapting to the limits based on lines laid out more than a century ago. Could the ghosts of the streetcars reclaim our roads as we continue to see modes of transit shift with attempts to move away from fossil fuel dominance?

As more and more things change, the skeletons get buried ever-so-slightly more. More recently we are seeing the transformation of laundromat spaces into restaurants due to long-term cultural shifts. While these are the physical remnants that are still apparent for those who understand what to look out for, there are less obvious items that still hold sway in the present.

Just like with the cemeteries and the streetcars, changes implemented a century ago brought downzoning to the west side with height restrictions. Zoning combined with racial restrictive covenants were used to limit the spread of minorities to the western half of the City. While this worked through the transformative World War II era to contain the flood of transplants to the Bay Area, the Civil Rights era reduced some of these restrictions and allowed minorities to finally own homes on the west side.

So, be on the lookout for these ghosts this month. Not all neighborhood skeletons leave their bones to be found easily. Understanding these ghosts of the neighborhood’s past are only the first step to seeing how we can start toward an even better future. While there are some friendly ghosts, if we don’t work to overcome the restrictive and exclusionary decisions of the past, they will continue to haunt us. Exorcising the Church of Satan that used to be on California Street isn’t the only ghost we have gotten rid of.

Brian Quan is a Richmond District native, co-leader of Grow the Richmond, president of the Chinese American Democratic Club, member of the Park Presidio-Sunset Lions Club and participant in monthly Refuse Refuse S.F. street clean-ups.