Something we've all done - 46 people on a Sunday on Haight at Clayton on a city tour using public transportation. 😇
By Sam Whiting, Reporter Updated May 25, 2025 8:47 p.m. - San Francisco Chronicle
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.
It’s finally easy to find Golden Gate Park’s WWI monument, a century after armistice
Greg