Legion of Honor
The General Idea
Art museum built in honor of WWI veterans gives their spirits a place to rest
Aspects
Honor the dead, serve the living
The Face
Address
100 34th Ave, San Francisco, CA 94121
Description
An art museum in Lincoln Park, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, the Legion of Honor was built to honor the sons of California who fell in World War I. The names of all those young men (and a few women) are contained in the Book of Gold - a hand-made listing nearly 3600 names long. The Book of Gold is on display for the month of November (the month of Veteran's Day); it otherwise rests in the Fine Arts Museum's archive.
Constructed on a site known as Land's End, the buildings are a 3/4 scale recreation of the 18th century original Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris, France.
It's also built on top of what was formerly a major San Francisco cemetery, a potter's field called the "Golden Gate Cemetery" that the City bought in 1867. While they supposedly reinterred all the bodies in Colma, workers on the original project, the 1990's seismic retrofitting, and on the 2003 renovation, report laying pipes through skeletons and plowing over graves. See this blog post for more details.
People sensitive to magic will feel the spells woven into the very buildings, a warm and comforting call to the spirits of the sons of California, killed in WWI. The Legion promises them rest and peace. It is one of the two strongest spiritually-connected places in San Francisco, the other being the Winchester Mystery House. Ectomancers, mediums and spiritualists can feel the pull of these two places from all over the City, like a constant beacon.
The Winchester's pull is a chaotic thing, swirling, like a whirlpool, promising entrapment.
No one at the museum now is aware of its dual purpose, to serve both as a museum and a resting place for the California-born dead of the Great War. Scholars and bureaucrats all, they would scoff at the notion. The files detailing the construction are, of course, in the archive, but the archive is not open to the public and nobody's read those files in ages.
The Museum was the location of a major Paranet operation, No Man's Land. A featured exhibit, No Man's Land, opened on Veteran's day, November 11. An historical exhibit on WWI trench warfare, this exhibit featured an actual British Army trench, carefully excavated from the site of the Battle of the Somme, on the Western Front. Add in one disgruntled necromancer, and bad things ensued.
