Written By Mauricio Segura // Image By: Mauricio Segura
Golden Gate Park is not exactly short on spectacle. It has museums, lakes, gardens, bison, weekend chaos, and enough beloved oddities to keep a local busy for years. Yet one of its strangest and most revealing landmarks sits in relative obscurity above Rainbow Falls, where the Prayer Book Cross rises from a wooded knoll near JFK Promenade. The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department describes it as the tallest monument in the park, a 64 foot Celtic cross on a 150 foot rise, built from 68 massive blocks of blue Colusa sandstone and dedicated on January 1, 1894, at the opening of the California Midwinter International Exposition. What was meant to read as monumental now reads as nearly accidental. Trees have done what controversy often fails to do in San Francisco. They have turned a once conspicuous statement into background scenery. Visitors stream past the hill, chasing coffee, strollers, and sunshine, while a monument once promoted as globally significant waits above them like an unanswered question.
The cross was not erected as a generic expression of faith. It was built to commemorate the service said to have been held in 1579 by Francis Fletcher, chaplain to Sir Francis Drake, during Drake’s stop somewhere near Drakes Bay. That event has long been framed by Anglican and Episcopal boosters as the first use of the Book of Common Prayer in an English speaking Christian service on North America’s West Coast. The monument’s very wording makes the point aggressively, treating the service as a civilizational first and presenting it as a milestone worthy of stone, ceremony, and public prominence. Reports on the monument note that it was financed by Philadelphia publisher and philanthropist George Childs, a friend of California’s Episcopal bishop, and that it was first intended for Point Reyes before local lobbying brought it into Golden Gate Park instead. In other words, this was not a quiet devotional marker tucked into a churchyard. It was a deliberate civic installation, planted in one of the city’s grand public landscapes as a claim about origins, heritage, and ownership.
That is where the monument stops being merely quaint and starts becoming politically loaded. Historians have argued that the Prayer Book Cross functioned as an effort to rewrite California’s story, pushing a vision of the state as fundamentally white, Anglo Saxon, and Protestant while minimizing the Spanish colonial past, the violence of the mission system, and the presence of Indigenous, Mexican, Irish, Chinese, and Catholic communities already central to California’s history. This is not abstract academic overreach. It fits the historical moment. The 1890s were an era when monuments were often less about memory than about messaging. They told the public who counted, who belonged, and whose past deserved marble and sandstone. That reading also lands harder because Drake was not simply an explorer in a romantic cape. He also took part in slave trading voyages. Around the Bay Area, the reckoning with Drake’s legacy has already reached other public symbols. Larkspur removed its city owned Drake statue in 2020, and the Marin high school once named for him is now Archie Williams High School. The cross, however, remains where it is, half hidden and oddly spared the same level of public reckoning.
Its continued existence becomes even more curious when compared with San Francisco’s other giant cross. The Mount Davidson Cross wound up in a major church and state fight in the 1990s, after which the city sold the parcel beneath it. The site was later purchased by an Armenian American organization and rededicated as a memorial to the Armenian genocide. The Prayer Book Cross has not faced the same legal and civic drama, perhaps because obscurity is its best defense. City officials have said public spaces can evolve as values change, and that names and features may be updated to better reflect who San Franciscans are today. That leaves the Prayer Book Cross in a peculiarly San Franciscan position. It is neither fully embraced nor fully confronted. It is preserved, but mostly by neglect. It survives as a relic of a city that once loved grand declarations and now prefers uneasy inheritance. Seen that way, the cross is not just hidden history. It is a lesson in how places bury their arguments without ever settling them.
