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Legion of Honor
The California Palace of the
Legion of Honor or just Legion of Honor to the locals, is a
marvelous fine art museum located in San Francisco, California and
is the name of the museum collection and the building that houses
it. The Legion of Honor was a wonderful gift by Alma de Bretteville
Spreckels, the wife of sugar baron and thoroughbred racehorse owner
and breeder, Adolphe B. Spreckels. The magnificent structure is a
three-quarters scale copy of the Palais de la Legion d'Honneur in
Paris, France that was designed by H. Guillaume and George
Applegarth in the early 1920s. The design was based on the model of
the Hotel de Salm that was shown at the Panama Pacific Exhibition,
and finished in 1924. The museum is located on an elevated place in
Lincoln Park in the northwest part of the city that looks out over
the Golden Gate Bridge, with the Lincoln Park Golf Course
encompassing the site of this potter's field that was called the
Golden Gate Cemetery, which the city purchased in 1867. The cemetery
was finally closed in 1908, and the interned remains moved to Colma,
although in the seismic retrofitting of the 1990s, there were some
remains and coffins uncovered.
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