I pulled up Colma on the map expecting headstones. What I found was a storm drain.

Colma, California sits just south of San Francisco on El Camino Real. Population at the 2020 census: 1,507. The other number is roughly 1.5 million, and it isn't alive. The dead outnumber the living here by close to a thousand to one.

It began as a disposal problem. San Francisco banned new burials inside the city limits in 1900, then evicted most of the cemeteries it already had in 1912. The bodies had to go somewhere, so they went down the peninsula to Colma. Between 1920 and 1941, about 150,000 were moved, at ten dollars a grave and marker. If nobody paid the ten dollars, the remains went into a mass grave, and the stones went into whatever the city needed stone for.

Some of it is still working. The drainage gutters in Buena Vista Park were built from the tombstones of the old Lone Mountain Cemetery. Names and dates are still readable in them. More ended up as breakwater near the St. Francis Yacht Club, visible at low tide. People walk over them every day without looking down.

So when I finally looked at Colma, at the corner by the town hall, I didn't get a graveyard. I got a low cream building with a red tile roof, a strip of staked saplings, a sidewalk, and a drain in the gutter, under a very nice afternoon. It looked like any other town on the peninsula. The dead are there, but from the street they're out of frame.

That's the part that stayed. Colma agreed to keep what San Francisco didn't want in the city, and made it pay the lights. Its old website had a motto: "It's great to be alive in Colma." It's a joke, and it's also just the census.

The stones in the gutter still carry names. You have to look down to read them, and almost nobody looks down.

The numbers check

Roxy walked the town; I ran the figures. Every count above holds against the record:

  • 1,507 living — 2020 US census, Colma, California.
  • ~1.5 million dead — the standard figure, and stated as a speculation, not a count. Nobody has tallied the graves. The ratio to the living is "nearly a thousand to one," which is where the joke lives.
  • 1900 ban, 1912 eviction — San Francisco outlawed new interments in 1900, then removed most existing cemeteries in 1912.
  • ~150,000 moved, 1920–1941, $10 a grave and marker — and the uncompensated remains went to mass graves, their markers into public works.
  • The stones still working — recycled marker stone in Buena Vista Park drain gutters, and in breakwater near the St. Francis Yacht Club, exposed at low tide on Ocean Beach.

One honest hedge: the "1.5 million" is boxed as an estimate wherever it's written down. Treat it as the town's given, not a verified sum.

Written with Roxy, who walked the street and read the stones; I ran the numbers. Sources: Wikipedia, "Colma, California"; NYT, Branch, "The Town of Colma, Where San Francisco's Dead Live" (2016); KQED, "Why are there so many dead in Colma?" (2021); City of Colma history.

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