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Lincoln Park - Then and Now.

Lincoln Park Reader: Historic Golf / Hallowed Ground

Jun 8, 2025by - San Francisco Public Golf Alliance

Lincoln Park, 13th Fairway & 1st Green seen through the Kong Chow Funerary Structure
 

 “In the Midst of Life:  A Walk Through the Secret Graveyard of San Francisco’s Lincoln Park” Golfers Journal, May 2025, by Haight-Ashbury resident Arlo Crawford:

"The popularity of golf rises and falls, cities boom and bust, our own lives expand and contract over the decades, but one thing that humans have always needed - will always need - is a place to play. And, just as importantly at the end, a place to rest. Lincoln Park has offered both to generations of San Franciscans. Out here on the edge of the continent, watching a ball arc into the cool air against the green of the Monterey cypress and the blank, unending blue of the Pacific, time may stop for a moment. And the ball lands and rolls, and the round goes on, just as it always has." – Arlo Crawford

First Full 18 Hole Layout at Lincoln (Fowler, Sampson, Watson)

“The first golf holes at Lincoln Park were added during a “Golden Age” of USA golf course architecture... As Lincoln Park Golf Course developed over time, it is purported to be the site for some of the first “public” golf holes on the west coast. It is also the first regional course to offer affordable golf to the public. The first nine holes completed after 1913 were initially free to the public.. Eventually, a “Resident” card was provided through the City and County of San Francisco for discounted play for youth, general San Francisco residents and seniors. This level of accessibility to golf includes being the site of one of the very first and longest running amateur championship tournaments in the nation - affectionately known as “The City”. For these reasons, Lincoln Park Golf Course represents some accessibility qualities generally cherished in the San Francisco ethos and by the author of this essay.” – Paul Lord

Early aerial photo of Lincoln Park and the Legion of Honor at Lands End.

“Perched on its towering sand dunes overlooking the Golden Gate, Lincoln Park is a jewel of San Francisco history. The earliest three golf holes appeared in 1903, making Lincoln one of the oldest public courses in the West. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor was built in the early 1920’s by art collector Alma Spreckels as a memorial to California’s war dead of World War I. The car park oval across the street from the Legion of Honor is the Western Terminus of the Lincoln Highway – America’s first transcontinental highway, completed in time for the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition.  The San Francisco Holocaust Memorial rests on the north slope of the car park oval. Predating all these are the two monumental cemetery remnants – the Kong Chow funerary altar near the Hole #1 green, and the Ladies Seaman’s Friend Society’s bronze obelisk near the #15 green.” 

No description of Lincoln Park in golfing literature is complete without including our co-founder Bo Link's golf fantasy "Follow the Wind". The first chapter begins with a round at Lincoln Park that is mystically interrupted when a wayward shot lands in the the Kong Chow monument:

 

"Everyone who plays Lincoln Park knows about the Monument. It is one of the last remaining landmarks of a Chinese cemetery that covered the land before the City decided this hallowed stretch of earth should be a resting place for wayward golf shots instead of Asian families. The Monument is no mere headstone; it is over twenty-two feet tall. It is made of gray stone, but over time it has broken down to the point where all that remains is a simple arch-way infested with lichen and covered with creeping greenish moss. Even though the archway continues to stand its ground, it has all but surrendered to the aggressive reach of overhanging tree limbs. The archway is perpetually bathed in shadow now, and the surrounding darkness gives it an eerie quality. The Monument is a marker of death, yet as the greenish moss continues to spread over its surface, it is also the seat of life. I find the Monument and its peculiar setting so haunting that I often sense the presence of ancient spirits hovering nearby. I feared those spirits this day, feared they had struck me down in the midst of an unforgettable streak, ruining the round of my young life. But I pushed onward, hoping I could salvage something from the wreckage. I trudged into the fog knowing the best I could expect was an unplayable lie, a score of at least six or seven, and no doubt an ignominious departure from the course I loved. And that's when it happened..."

We won't tell you what happened next. You'll have to read the book. 

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Finally, perhaps the most unique Lincoln Park entry can be found in one of the more interesting books of golf literature, Michael Murphy’s best selling “Golf in the Kingdom”. Lincoln Park is the only golf course mentioned in the book outside of the fictional Burningbush Club in Scotland:

 

"Imagine the golf ball as a hole in space." The memory of that sentence sprang out at me one day at Lincoln Park, a course on a cliff looking down on the entrance to San Francisco Bay. Fog was rising in slow spires around the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and rows of pine and cypress trees lined the fairways like monastery walls... I walked the fairways between those green sentinel walls and listened to the foghorns in the Golden Gate and watched the ships come into the sunlit sea. Remembering Shivas's words, I saw the ball become a porthole into empty space, with memories of all those fearful glimpses of the Void sorting themselves out for my inner eye. Emptiness within emptiness, protected all around by green grass, good friends, and the blue Pacific hundreds of feet below.” – Michael Murphy

Lincoln Park is a special place immersed in centuries of San Francisco history. Do yourself a favor. Be part of it.