Golden Gate Park's WWI monument finally gets recognition, a century after armistice
Heroes Grove, the World War I monument hidden in a redwood grove in Golden Gate Park, has always been impossible to find. But everybody can find the Rose Garden next to it, and now Ken Maley, a non-veteran San Francisco parks devotee, has found a way to link the two attractions.
Maley, who is 80 and lives across town on Telegraph Hill, arranged to have a one-ton granite boulder trucked in to the entrance to the Rose Garden at John F. Kennedy Drive. It is engraved like a tombstone with the words 'Heroes Grove' and inlaid with a QR code that he says is a first for any monument or memorial in the park. The QR code works through a smartphone to access the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department website, which then gives a detailed history and description of the World War I memorial along with a park map and walking directions to the monument.
The stone marker, which was trucked in from a quarry just last week, was installed in time for Memorial Day, and on Sunday morning Maley was sitting discreetly on a green park bench near it, waiting to see if it would attract enough attention to send people up the trail behind it and onto a 10-minute nature walk through redwoods to Heroes Grove.
'I've watched people look at the QR code and walk up the trail,' said Maley, who is project director of the Veterans Commemorative Committee and has put 10 years and a $50,000 budget into installing the first signage to Heroes Grove since it was dedicated on Memorial Day 1919. 'I just felt that 100 years after the war people should understand that we have this living memorial to it.'
Heroes Grove, which began as public sentiment for planting a grove of coast redwoods to those who served, predates the city's main monument to the Great War — the War Memorial War Memorial Veterans Building and Opera House.
Its grand opening in 1932 was to feature a granite monument in the courtyard between the two buildings, contributed by the Gold Star Mothers. The 9-foot pillar was engraved with the names of 820 men and women from San Francisco. But the big oblong rock was judged to be incompatible to the Beaux Arts elegance of the Opera House and Veterans Building, so it was banished to the park, where it went completely unmarked for 100 years.
Among those who did not know Heroes Grove existed was Maj. Gen. Mike Myatt, a longtime member of the Board of Trustees for the War Memorial, who served on Maley's board. Myatt was president and CEO of Marines Memorial when Maley drove him out on a field trip.
'It really moved me when you started looking at the names,' Myatt said, 'But I could see how nobody could find it and if they found it they wouldn't know what it was.'
On Memorial Day 2019, Maley and his committee got a boulder that is 5 feet wide and 3 feet tall installed along JFK Drive in a ceremony that included a color guard and veterans in World War I uniforms.
The rock is easy to spot from JFK Drive, but there has never been an arrow or obvious path from there to the grove itself, and most people who see it are on bikes or running down the path toward Ocean Beach and not inclined to stop and investigate.
'It is amazing and so peaceful here, but I never see anyone looking at the monument,' said Julie Purnell, who lives in the Richmond District and runs her dog along the pathway. 'It is right off Fulton Street, and nobody knows it is here.'
In hopes of applying a lure, Maley last week had that stone marker on JFK also embedded with a QR code that was drilled into the rock and is the size of a compact disc.
'It's the new wave of 'interpretive' in our park system,' Maley said. 'This is the pilot project.'
It worked with Sunset District resident James Larkin and his wife, Felicia Lee.
'When we saw the stone marked 'Heroes Grove,'' Larkin said, 'I thought, 'What heroes are we talking about? Is it 9/11? World War II?' They were intrigued enough to investigate and follow the path in from JFK Drive, through the memorial and down to the Rose Garden where the path delivered them next to the bench that Maley was sitting on.
'It's spectacular,' Lee said. 'We loved walking through there and getting a hit of nature and a hit of history.'
While conducting his surveillance, Maley overheard one couple look at the rock in passing and exclaim 'Oh, it's called Heroes Grove.' That made it all worthwhile.
'For 100 years, people didn't call it anything,' Maley said.
Bruce and Kerry Grigson, visitors from Australia, knew all about Gallipoli but not about American involvement in the Great War or that they happened to be visiting on Memorial Day weekend. They felt compelled to follow the path from the Rose Garden to Heroes Grove.
'It's a bit of a privilege to be here on memorial weekend,' Grigson said, while standing at the memorial reading the engraving. 'It's amazing. I didn't know any of this.'
Maj. Gen. Myatt, who is 84 and retired in Sonoma, plans to come down with his iPhone and activate the code next week when has a medical appointment at the VA hospital.
'Then I can show it to my wife and anybody who comes along,' he said. 'It's a piece of history that says something about the people of San Francisco.'
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