MARK BREST VAN KEMPEN ENVIRONMENTAL ART
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100 Stones
(Monument to the Forgotten Dead)
San Francisco, CA
Presently unrealized
The Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco is dedicated to the war dead and was built on the site of the original city cemetery. By the early 1900’s virtually all San Francisco’s cemeteries had been disinterred and the bodies had been moved to nearby Colma. During excavation in 1990 for earthquake retrofitting it was discovered that some 500 bodies were still buried beneath the neoclassical structure. Contractors who were supposed to move the bodies before the building was constructed in the 1920’s simply built on top of the graves and threw the headstones over the cliff at Land’s End into the Pacific Ocean.
After learning about this strange discovery through Richard Barne’s beautiful photo series I began researching this site. I discovered that some 10,000 bodies still lay buried in the area now covered by a golf course and park. I climbed down the cliffs at Land’s End and was shocked to find hundreds of grave stones still there. Their names and dates eroded by years of ocean waves.
I proposed a simple memorial that would consist of returning one hundred of these headstones (one for each 100 bodies) to the site where the forgotten and unnamed bodies still reside. The headstones would be arranged randomly in a large circle approximately 1/4 mile in diameter and centered at the Legion of Honor.