Golden Gate National Cemetery

One of the largest U.S. military cemeteries, with 140,000 graves laid out in geometric ranks

Despite the name, Golden Gate National Cemetery is not by the Golden Gate at all — it sits 12 miles south of San Francisco in the western flats of San Bruno, surrounded by suburban streets. San Francisco banned new cemeteries within the city in 1937 and the federal government picked this then-empty site for the new burial ground.

The 161-acre site holds the dead of every American war from the Spanish-American conflict onward, with a particular concentration of Second World War and Korean War graves. Five Medal of Honor recipients are buried here, including Edward Vincent Rickenbacker and Admiral Chester Nimitz. The cemetery is laid out in the classic American military style — white marble headstones in perfectly aligned ranks across rolling lawns — which makes it a quietly powerful place even for visitors with no personal connection to the dead.

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A story
When the cemetery was dedicated on Memorial Day in 1942, the keynote speaker was California Attorney General Earl Warren, who would later become Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and famously author the unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. Six months earlier, Warren had publicly demanded the removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast — an act that would lead to thousands being held at Tanforan, just a mile from the cemetery he was helping to consecrate.