Lincoln Park/City Cemetery is now officially a San Francisco city landmark! SF Heritage worked closely with Supervisor Connie Chan, the Planning Department, and community groups to draft the designation, which is the city’s first primarily archeological city landmark and one of the most important preservation accomplishments of recent years.
Today, we joined many of these partners at the park’s Kong Chow Funerary Chapel – a remnant of City Cemetery which still stands as a symbol of Chinese culture and history in San Francisco – for a ceremony in observance of Cheung Yeung. Historically, the burial of the deceased in the Chinese section of City Cemetery was an occasion for religious rites that included prayer, the burning of incense, food offerings of roast pig and fowl, and the burning of symbolic paper money and clothes for the deceased’s journeys in the afterlife.
We also celebrated the unveiling of a brand new sign dedicated to City Cemetery, the first piece of interpretive signage at the park that tells the story of the thousands of people – primarily immigrant communities and the poor –interred before the cemetery’s closure in 1898.
