You're standing on top of a Jewish cemetery. Two of them, actually. The land under your feet was home to two cemeteries — Home of Peace and Hills of Eternity — from eighteen sixty until eighteen eighty-eight. When San Francisco decided dead people shouldn't take up prime real estate — a running theme, as you may have noticed — the remains were moved to Colma and the land became a park.
In nineteen oh-three, more than a thousand property owners formed the Mission Park Association and put the purchase on the ballot. It passed with seventy-four percent of the vote. The city bought thirteen point seven acres for two hundred and ninety-one thousand dollars, with a promise that the site would — direct quote — always remain a place of beauty.
Three years later, it became a refugee camp.
After the nineteen oh-six earthquake, over sixteen hundred families pitched tents and set up redwood cottages right here. The cottages were painted park-bench green so they'd blend into the landscape. You c
ould rent one for two dollars a month. If you wanted a pot-bellied stove, that was extra. Eventually you could buy the cottage outright and drag it off to wherever you were rebuilding your life. Some of those earthquake shacks still exist around the city, hidden inside the walls of houses on the surrounding blocks.
Walk to the corner of Church Street and Twentieth — the southwest edge of the park
