Читать книгу San Francisco's Lost Landmarks - James R. Smith - Страница 8
ОглавлениеSand dunes like these covered most of the western side of San Francisco, as well as a good part of the remainder. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
Chapter 1
The Original Land and Shores: Sculpting a City
In 1847, American San Francisco was not exactly ideal for the local inhabitants. The hills were too steep for daily walking and for heavily laden, horse-drawn wagons. The sand, marshland, shallow lakes and meandering streams were obstructions to a well-planned city. The shallow coves and mudflats were barriers to efficient handling of ships’ cargos and indeed made it difficult to anchor those ships. Any one of them could be found stranded at low tide and if they built up suction in the mud, they might swamp before breaking loose at the onset of a rising tide. Rocks and small islands in the bay were impediments to shipping traffic. More than a few ships had their hulls ripped out by a rocky peak, like Blossom Rock, lying just submerged at low tide. However, the city’s natural contours, boundaries, and features were considered merely a work in progress to the Americans who took the city and state from Mexico.
These are truly lost landmarks, for it’s difficult to even imagine what the city once looked like, given the enormity of change. Tracking that change requires a great deal of map work as well as some imagination.
The Gold Rush of 1849 changed the landscape and shores of San Francisco radically. Within the first few years after the madness began, tidelands and coves were filled in, hills were torn down, marshlands were covered, and streams were diverted to underground runs. Between 1846 and 1856, the face of the peninsula was modified almost beyond recognition. No city ever changed its appearance as quickly as early San Francisco.
John S. Hittell, in A Guide Book to San Francisco, 1888, (The Bancroft Company), wrote,
The site of land upon which the city was built consisted, in 1849, of steep ridges and deep ravines. The nearest level and dry land was at the Mission. The place in its natural condition, was unfit for occupation by a dense population, and immense changes were made by cutting down hills, filling up hollows, and converting the mud flats and anchorage in front of the town, as it then was, into land. The city contains more than four hundred acres of “made ground” and a large part of the business is done where the water stood in 1850. The bay shore then came up west of Sansome Street, California to Jackson and a large ship called the Niantic was drawn up and normally fixed in 1849 on the northwestern corner of Sansome and Clay, a point about half a mile distant from the present waterfront. The change in the level of the ground has amounted in many places to fifty feet, or more, and railroads were built to carry the hills down to the bay. Happy Valley, Spring Valley, and St. Ann’s Valley were destroyed by transporting the hills that enclosed them or by raising the level of the low ground. Spring Valley was at the northeastern corner of Taylor and Clay Streets and was at least fifty feet below the present level. A little spring there was claimed, with the idea that by digging, enough water could be obtained to supply the city, in the days when the fluid was brought from Sausalito in a water-boat and peddled around at twenty-five-cents a bucket from water carts.
Notwithstanding all that has been done to reduce the steepness of the natural grades of streets and lots, including the transfer of 20,000,000 cubic yards of earthy material, San Francisco is still remarkably hilly, and may properly be termed “The Hundred-hilled City.”
The cycle of fill, level, and growth continued through World War II. It took more than one hundred years before the people and government said, “Enough!” Even today, there is pressure to just fill a little more or to carve out a bit of a hill.
Woodcut of pre-Gold Rush San Francisco—1848. —Library of Congress
Woodcut view of Yerba Beuna Cove in 1849. The ships begin to accumulate. —Library of Congress
WALK AROUND THE COASTLINE—MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY
The only way to grasp the magnitude of change to the San Francisco peninsula is to look back before the city, state, and federal governments, as well as the locals, started remolding the area. Yerba Buena, as the little settlement that would become San Francisco was known, had a population of 497 in 1847. This swelled to nearly 30,000 by 1849. This amazing growth put tremendous pressure on the city resources. What would become San Francisco began a massive metamorphosis.
Starting on the western Pacific Ocean side, the beach was pretty much as it is now, minus the roads, improvements, and the attempts to prevent the erosion of the beaches. It is hard to fight the Pacific and that holds true up to Fort Point and the Golden Gate (which was named long before the bridge was built). Inland from the beach, Lake Merced remains remarkably intact, with the notable exception that the outlet creek no longer runs to the ocean. Above Lake Merced, a great sand bank extends east from Ocean Beach a couple of miles inland.
The bay side from Fort Point marks a major shift in the landscape. Protected from the wind and ocean waves and sculpted by tides and streams, the bay shore presents a scalloped look of points and coves. A small double bay runs from Fort Point to Black Point (site of Fort Mason), punctuated in the middle by Sandy Point. That section, where Chrissy Field and the Marina District now stand, was nothing more than a sand bank with brackish lagoons, creeks, and marsh behind it in the mid-nineteenth century. Heading eastward into the bay is North Beach, a gently sloping sand beach terminated by North Point, the point of land jutting out northeast of Telegraph Hill. The north shores fail to provide anchorage close to the land, forcing ships to sail around to the hospitable eastern side of the peninsula.
Yerba Buena Cove provides the first available shelter for ships, as it did for the early residents. That harbor serves the little town of Yerba Buena, extending from the cove and wending around the hills to Mission Dolores. The hills jut up from the harbor, and homes fill the small valleys and dot the lower slopes of Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, and Rincon Hill. Rincon Point, set aside as a military reservation, marks the bottom of Yerba Buena Cove.
View of Black Point (just west of North Beach) from Telegraph Hill—1866. —Library of Congress
South Beach—yes, there was a South Beach—provides an ideal environment for shipbuilding and repair. The gently sloping beach, protected by low sand cliffs, makes it easy to drag a boat out of the water and to launch it again. The moon-shaped beach extends between Rincon Point and Steamboat Point to the south.
South Beach was the center for ship and boat building and repair. —Library of Congress
Looking out at Steamboat Point from South Beach in 1866. —Library of Congress
Mission Bay, just below Steamboat Point, offers access to the Mission region via Mission Creek. The creek runs near Mission Dolores, emptying midpoint into the bay. Only shallow-draft boats can use the tidal bay, and any boat can be stranded by a low tide. Inland rolling sandhills, pastures, marshland, creeks, and ponds make up the landscape. The area is called Potrero Nuevo or “new pasture,” because it was originally pastureland set aside for use by the local inhabitants, according to Spanish law. This area includes Potrero Hill, which terminates at Potrero Point in the bay, and marks the bottom of Mission Bay. Potrero Nuevo terminates at Islais Creek.
Potrero Viejo, “old pasture,” starts below Islais Creek and was added to the Bernal land grant that extends from there to modern day Hunters Point (a long finger of land) and Bernal Heights. The creek defies description and, as such, is optionally referred to as a navigable creek, a bay, a tidal basin, or an non-navigable swamp. The name Islais (pronounced “iss-lis” as in “bliss” and “list”) is not Spanish and is said to be the Ohlone Indian word for the wild cherry trees found growing in the area. The inlet, or bay, was called Islais Creek or Islais Creek Bay depending on the speaker’s perspective and the tide. It reads about three feet deep at average high tide and it is bare mud at low.
The land below Hunters Point to what is now Candlestick Point, San Francisco’s southern border, can be described simply as mudflats, which held little interest for the early locals. Valuable but unusable wetlands, no one even bothered to begin filling them in until the mid-twentieth century.
South Beach from Steamboat Point—1866. —Library of Congress
ISLANDS AND ROCKS
San Francisco Bay quickly evolved into a critical shipping port after the discovery of gold. Nearly all of California’s wealth funneled through the Golden Gate. The local, state, and federal governments responded quickly to any hazard to navigation. Blossom Rock became the first shipping hazard identified as requiring a permanent solution and the solution turned into a citywide event.
Islais Bay and Creek prior to filling the wetland. Note the plank walkways used to access boats at both high and low tides. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
Blossom Rock lay just five feet below the waterline a half-mile northeast of North Point (near Pier 39). It was part of a four thousand-foot crescent consisting of four underwater rocks starting at Blossom Rock, then continuing to Harding Rock, Shag Rocks, and Arch Rock and terminating at Alcatraz Island. Ideally placed to waylay or even rip the hull from any unwary ship, Blossom Rock was first named and charted as a navigation hazard by Captain Frederick W. Beechey on the HMS Blossom, a British man-of-war visiting San Francisco in 1826. Legend claims the Blossom located the rock by striking it, but there is no documentation confirming that event. Regardless, many a ship has encountered the rock, both before it was charted, and since. An East India ship, the Seringapatam, ran aground on Blossom Rock in the early 1830s, waiting until the tide turned before she could slide off and continue her voyage. Her teakwood hull saved her from serious damage.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began test explosions on Blossom Rock in early 1867 in the hope that it could be topped off to a depth of twenty-four feet. The Corps determined that the approximately 105- by 195-foot underwater peak could be demolished and proposed a budget of $50,000 to accomplish the task.
Alexis W. Von Schmidt, a civil engineer and builder of the first dry dock in San Francisco, proposed using a similar method to remove the underwater impediment as that used for the dry dock. Von Schmidt asked for $75,000 to accomplish the task. The Corps awarded him the contract, to be paid after assurance that twenty-four feet of clearance had been achieved.
Von Schmidt’s team built a square crib at the wharf and then floated it out to the rock. The crib was anchored to the rock and then solid supports were used to fix it rigidly to Blossom Rock. Von Schmidt used the new technology he had devised to build the Hunters Point dry dock, and in October of 1869, he lowered a boiler-iron cylinder nine feet in diameter and thirteen feet tall down to the underwater peak to create a coffer dam, and then sealed it and pumped it dry. His team then inserted a six-foot diameter, seventeen-foot tall pipe inside the first and began the excavation. They excavated downward into the rock to a depth of fourteen and a half feet from the bottom of the dam. From that point, the rock was excavated horizontally to form a cavern sixty feet wide and one hundred forty feet long, with a domed ceiling of twelve feet. Rock columns that had been left for support were replaced with eight-inch by ten-inch wooden beams.
On April 20, 1870, the team began the arrangement of thirty-eight sixty-gallon barrels and seven boiler-iron tanks around the perimeter of the cavern, each one filled with sodium nitrate blasting powder and waterproofed with asphalt. After connecting all with gas pipe and rubber tubing up to the crib on the surface, the underground activity ceased and the cavern flooded with bay water. Von Schmidt announced that the rock would be blown on April 23, 1870.
Blowing up Blossom Rock in San Francisco Bay. —Author’s collection
On that day, thousands of spectators, radiating a holiday spirit, gathered on Telegraph Hill to gain a clear view of the great spectacle. Shortly after two in the afternoon, a boat played out the single insulated wire and anchored eight hundred feet away from the crib. The wire was attached to each of the detonators set to the twenty-one and a half tons of explosives. The salt water of the bay served as the return to complete the connection.
At three-thirty that afternoon, a twist of the crank on the magneto-battery initiated an explosion that sent a column of water and rock shooting upward from two hundred to five hundred feet into the air, depending on who did the reporting. The main black column coming up from the cofferdam was surrounded by shorter columns of debris and water that marked the perimeter of the cavern below. Pieces of rock and timber seemed suspended in air before gradually falling back to the bay. The crowds cheered, and the next day newspapers printed enthusiastic accounts of the event.
Soundings indicated that the results were two feet short of the goal. The Army Corps of Engineers refused payment until Von Schmidt could clear the additional depth. Fashioning a floating platform, with a chain operated rake suspended below, Von Schmidt’s team scraped the remaining fragments off Blossom Rock and finally achieved the required clearance.
Shag Rocks (1 and 2) and Arch Rock were dealt with after Blossom Rock and were reduced to thirty feet below the surface in 1900. In 1903, Blossom Rock was further reduced to match Shag Rocks and Arch Rock at thirty feet. As ships became larger and drew a deeper draft, additional toppings were required. On August 31, 1932, Blossom Rock was lowered again to forty-two feet below the mean level of low water.
Mission Rock, once proudly standing guard over Mission Bay, suffered a different fate. A convenient anchoring point off the bay, it became a dumping place for tons of ballast, which over the years added measurably to its size. Eventually covered with warehouses and a pier, the China Basin fill encroached on Mission Bay, to within a few hundred yards of the rock. At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Navy disputed ownership by the Mission Rock Company. After thirty-eight years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court awarded ownership to the Navy. The Navy then decided they didn’t want the island and transferred ownership to Board of State Harbor Commissioners for just under $10,000.
In 1946, plans were made to extend Pier 50 to encompass Mission Rock, creating a super terminal for shipping. The remaining buildings on the island were burned in a massive fire that could be seen from as far as Oakland, and the terminal was built as planned. Mission Rock still exists, but only as a stepping-stone.
Treasure Island remains the exception to the rule. It represents an island built where none existed before. San Francisco wanted to celebrate its two new bridges by hosting the 1939 World Fair but had no suitable land available on which to locate it. The decision made in 1935 to use the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for access to the fair with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge seemed a natural. The island was to be built on the shoals just north of Yerba Buena Island.
Construction began in early 1936. A series of piles and cofferdams surrounded a four hundred-acre rectangular area. Hydraulic dredging began, but in reverse of the normal method. Instead of removing material, the dredging added it, pumping the bay silt, sand and gravel into the form. The name Treasure Island related to the fill itself, washed down from the gold fields of the Sierra as well as referring to the glitter to be found at the fair. It required twenty-nine million cubic yards of fill dredged from the bay and the Sacramento River Delta as well as fifty thousand cubic yards of loam laid on top after the salt was leached from the fill. Nearly two hundred sixty thousand tons of rock were used to create the containment wall around the island.
By 1938, Treasure Island took shape and before the fill was even dry, the buildings and facilities of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition sprouted on the island. A causeway connected Treasure Island to Yerba Buena Island, and in 1939, the fair opened on schedule.
The island was intended to house the San Francisco International Airport after the fair, but World War II intervened. Following the fair, San Francisco traded Treasure Island to the Navy for the land in San Bruno where San Francisco airport now resides. Treasure Island became a naval air base and training center. The year 1993 saw the island returned to the City of San Francisco for civilian use.
THE FILLING OF THE BAY AND THE ABANDONED GOLD RUSH FLEET
The story of early San Francisco is partly a tale of ships coming to anchor in Yerba Buena Cove. The passengers disembarked, the crew offloaded the cargo and then the sailors skulked off to the gold fields to seek their fortunes. The ships rode up and down with the tides, their captains unable to recruit a crew. Eventually, the ships settled into the mud, locked in its grip, never to sail again. Over a short time so many ships lay abandoned that handling newly arriving ships became increasingly difficult. Wharfs were extended between and beyond the abandoned ships, but it was soon realized the best solution would be filling around and over the permanently anchored fleet, extending the eastern edge of San Francisco. That’s the story; it’s just not the whole story.
In 1848, before the gold madness, and just after California became a United States possession, Brigadier General Stephen W. Kearny, military representative in San Francisco, granted the city ownership of water lots in Yerba Buena Cove. At that time, the tides of the bay ran all the way up to the intersection of Montgomery and First streets. On the south end of the cove, General Kearny added Fremont, Beale, and Front streets to the plan. On the north side, he added Sansome, Battery, and Front streets. Green Street was to extend about five hundred feet into the bay to meet the new Front Street on the north end, with Rincon Point as the southern terminus of the new grant. Proceeds from the sale of water lots went into city, federal, and, later, state coffers.
Abandoned ships in San Francisco Harbor—1849. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
Water lots—land parcels that purportedly resided between the high and low water marks—offered an opportunity to build wharves and stores out onto the bay tidelands. The reality was that many of these never saw less than eighteen feet of water. The same plan existed for the Mission Bay area to the south, with the extension of Brannon and Bryant streets through it. Many an investor made a fortune buying these lots and later selling them for immense profits after the Gold Rush began in earnest. James Lick, piano maker and entrepreneur, joined this early crowd. Profits from later land sales, plus his other ventures, quickly made him one of San Francisco’s wealthiest men.
Map of known and suspected locations of ships buried under the Financial District. —Courtesy of Ron Filion
South Beach, located just below Rincon Point, paralleled the fate of Yerba Buena Cove. Boat builders and fishermen bought up the original lots but soon developers bought them out to use for industrial sites and shipping.
Ships abandoned in Yerba Beuna Cove, San Francisco, 1849–1850. —Library of Congress
Suddenly, San Francisco had its own Manifest Destiny—move east. The city and the new state of California recognized the opportunity to gain revenue by selling additional water lots. Within a year, the Front Street property owners were land-locked and two years beyond that the next group locked out the latter. Regardless, each group profited since the city found itself crowded on the northeast corner of the peninsula. Developing west meant dealing with the hills and the dunes. The city marched eastward into the bay.
Yerba Beuna Cove from Telegraph Hill, ca. 1848. —Library of Congress
Map of San Francisco in 1853—The map identifies buildings, roads and bay conditions. —Library of Congress
While Mission Bay provided an ideal calm water anchorage, traversing by land from one end to the other, north and south, required a serious westward detour due to the incursion of the low-tide shallows landward. The land area to the south comprised San Francisco’s new heavy industry zone, where water met rail. The steamboats plied the bay and moored there with cattle for the stockyards and slaughterhouses, grain, fruit, and vegetables for the market and restaurants, and raw materials for everything from the gunpowder factory, the lumber mills and the brick yard to the sugar refinery. Steamboats carried away finished goods.
The creation of Long Bridge in 1867, connecting Potrero Point, just below Steamboat Point to Hunters Point in the south, provided a solution to the detour around Mission Bay and Islais Creek. Long Bridge became an attraction for recreational fishing, Sunday buggy rides, rowing clubs, and small waterside cafes. The bridge also created an eastern boundary for fill and the rush for land began anew.
Located far from the higher-class residential areas, Mission Bay became an ideal dumping site for San Francisco’s trash. The city generated massive amounts of garbage and it had to be deposited somewhere. Soon the stench at Mission Bay helped fuel the demand for filling the polluted waterway. The rolling sandhills nearby provided an easy supply of clean fill, and the additional advantage of leveling the landscape. Still, the process progressed slowly until 1906 when Mission Bay became the dump-site of choice for the refuse and ruins left by the earthquake and fire. By 1912, it was completely filled in with the exception of a large channel dug at Mission Creek to allow ship traffic access to the commercial district inland. Mission Creek or Mission Channel is still active and bisects the filled in bay now called China Basin, home of SBC Park and the San Francisco Giants.
Mission Bay in 1853—most abandoned ships were left in Yerba Beuna Cove. Still, Mission Bay didn’t escape the city’s desire to fill in the bay. —Library of Congress
One of the largest incursions into the bay occurred after the earthquake and fire of 1906. The city wanted to exhibit its great recovery as well as celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, and it needed land for a world fair. A massive lagoon, separated from the bay by a breakwater and situated between Black Point (Fort Mason) and the Presidio offered an ideal location. The Army Corps of Engineers used a liquid-fill technique, using sand and sediment pumped from the bay, as well as rubble from the 1906 quake, to create the area now known as the Marina District. The fill extended from Chestnut to the present day location of the Marina Green and Yacht Harbor just north of Marina Boulevard.
The subsequent Panama Pacific International Exhibition succeeded on a grand scale. When complete, the fair was razed and homes were built. Ironically, the land that celebrated the city’s recovery was seismically unstable, due to the sandy fill, and sustained major damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake seventy-five years later.
North Beach wasn’t immune to change either; it just took longer. Meigg’s Wharf was built in 1852 on Francisco between Mason and Powell. At that time, now land-locked Francisco ran along the side of the bay. Meigg’s Wharf lasted longer than most, but eventually the city constructed a breakwater beyond the limits of that long pier. They then proceeded to fill it in. It is said today’s Fisherman’s Wharf sits on the site of Meigg’s Wharf. Not so. By 1896, the base of what had been Meigg’s Wharf resided five full blocks south of the bay and Jefferson Street, the current northern-most street along Fisherman’s Wharf. Telegraph Hill provided much of the fill between Francisco and Jefferson.
North Beach in 1866—Francisco Road skirts the beach, now located far inland due to filling in the shallows. —Library of Congress
Hunters Point, a long finger of land, protrudes out into the bay near the south end of the city. Named for an early family of settlers, access to deep water made Hunters Point valuable. Shrimpers, anchovy, and salmon fisherman and shipbuilders all took advantage of easy access to the bay. By 1867, it boasted the first permanent dry dock on the Pacific Coast. Change was slow at the Point. Seafood packinghouses, warehouses, additional dry-docks, and a few wharves, one measuring four hundred sixty-five feet long, made up the bulk of the changes. Hunters Point retained its character until the Navy moved in and took it over.
Tearing down Telegraph Hill—the job proved too expensive, but the face was torn away to help fill the bay. —Author’s collection
The winds of war in 1939 dictated a need for military shipbuilding and repair on the West Coast. The Navy purchased forty-seven acres on the Point, gaining both a foothold and dry-docks. In 1942, all aliens were evacuated, and within a few weeks, the Navy summarily seized the entire Hunters Point neighborhood. An article printed in The San Francisco News, March 10, 1942, summarized the situation.
Immediate expansion of shipyard facilities at Hunters Point on land soon to be acquired by the Navy will force at least 100 civilian families to move, it was revealed by 12th Naval District headquarters today.
The Navy announcement set no deadline for removal, but police, who were asked to serve notice on residents, told them to be prepared to move on 48-hour notice. Indications were, however, that the Navy would not require the removal for at least two weeks.
It was not revealed what machinery the Navy had set up to pay property owners or to provide them with new living quarters. All Hunters Point residents are citizens, aliens having been removed several weeks ago.
We sincerely regret these families must move, but military necessity must come before other considerations, declared Rear Adm. John Wills Greenslade.
The district is defined as the area from the water to Coleman-st and from Fairfax-av to Oakdale-av. It will be a military zone, banned to the public. The 86 homes and 23 business houses in the area have a total value of more than $250,000.
The Navy’s action set the stage for a massive filling of the shallows around the point. Hunters Point swelled to 400 percent of its original land area, creating a huge wartime shipyard, and by 1945 employed eighteen thousand people. The area lost any semblance to its original shoreline, redefining a major San Francisco landmark. The shipyards closed in 1974, and by 1980, a portion of the area was set aside for an artist’s colony. Today it marks one of the largest colonies in the country, housing over two hundred artists.
The last of San Francisco’s major landfills was at Candlestick Point next to the San Francisco/San Mateo county line. The name Candlestick Point originated with the practice of burning abandoned ships off the nearby point. As they burned, they sank into the bay and the burning masts looking like candlesticks. The Navy filled in one hundred seventy acres then failed to develop it due to the end of World War II. Locals continued dumping there, illegally.
Candlestick Park, later called 3Com Park, opened as the Giants home field in 1960, and immediately became the most hated ballpark in baseball history. It was cold beyond reason during the summer with an icy wind blowing in off the bay. If the twenty-degree chill factor didn’t drive the fans away, the inconsistent breezes, constantly changing direction, drove the players to tears. Dirt devils blew trash about the field and a pop-up could be carried anywhere. Some players included clauses in their contracts that precluded a trade to San Francisco. The Giants were happy to abandon “The Stick” to the 49ers football team, moving on to the new SBC Park located in China Basin.
The land outside Candlestick Park was purchased by the state in 1973 and set aside as a park in 1977, becoming the first urban recreation area in California. Today it’s a functioning state park favored by windsurfers taking advantage of the stiff breezes on the bay.
TEARING DOWN THE HILLS
If San Francisco wanted to be a proper city, it needed proper roads. San Francisco consisted of two civilian centers in its earliest days: the village of Yerba Buena on Yerba Buena Bay and the Mission Dolores. Travel between them required snaking around the hills and dodging the marshland. Two thoroughfares were planned to correct the situation—Market Street and the Mission Toll Road.
The building of a plank toll road from Mission Bay to the mission (today’s Mission Street) proved expensive and time-consuming. Forty-foot piles were driven into the sand and marsh to provide a stable footing. What the builders didn’t count on was the depth of some areas of marsh. A pile driven into one section disappeared from sight in one blow from the pile driver. A second pile placed in the hole left behind met the same fate. Whether the marsh was in fact an underground lake or just a deep bog was unknown but setting the footings proved an arduous task.
Civil engineer Jasper O’Farrell provided the first American layout of San Francisco based on the original plan for Yerba Buena done by Jean J. Vioget. O’Farrell began at the present Kearny and Washington streets and extended it to North Beach and west to Taylor Street. Market Street was laid out at a thirty-eight degree angle from Kearny Street—a straight shot between Yerba Buena Cove and Mission Dolores. While this may seem ideal planning, it didn’t take into account the hundred-foot-high sandhills that intervened, such as the one at Market and Third streets, later site of the Palace Hotel. Circumnavigating the hill required detouring on Geary and Dupont (now Grant). A series of sandhills running east to west dominated the area.
Most roads were unpaved, suffering the whims of the rains and tides. Private toll roads dominated the small number of paved roads (mostly plank). The busiest roads often were impassible by man and beast. John Williamson Palmer’s article, “Pioneer Days in San Francisco,” The Century, vol. 43, issue 4 (Feb. 1892), describes the city in the winter of 1849 and 1850 as follows:
The aspect of the streets of San Francisco at this time was such as one may imagine of an unsightly waste of sand and mud churned by the continual grinding of heavy wagons and trucks, and the tugging and floundering of horses, mules, and oxen; thoroughfares unplanked, obstructed by lumber and goods; alternate humps and holes, the actual dumping-places of the town, handy receptacles for the general sweepings and rubbish and indescribable offal and filth, the refuse of an indiscriminate population “pigging” together in shanties and tents. And these conditions extended beyond the actual settlement into the chaparral and underbrush that covered the sandhills on the north and west.
The flooding rains of winter transformed what should have been thoroughfares into treacherous quagmires set with holes and traps fit to smother horse and man. Loads of brushwood and branches cut from the hills were thrown into these swamps; but they served no more than a temporary purpose, and the inmates of tents and houses made such bridges as they could with boards, boxes, and barrels. Men waded through the slough and thought themselves lucky when they sank no deeper than their waists. Lanterns were in request at night, and poles in the daytime. In view of the scarcity and great cost of proper materials and labor, such makeshifts were the only means at hand. [See engraving, “Muddy Street in San Francisco”]
By 1855, a seawall enclosed Yerba Buena Cove, preventing the tides from flooding the streets. Owners of the water lots began filling in their property. The low tide areas between the wharves and stranded ships needed fill. San Francisco’s sandhills became that raw material.
While the shallows of the bay provided opportunities for revenue and access to San Francisco Bay as a deepwater port, the city’s hills offered the raw materials to fill their dreams. However, using the hills as fill wasn’t the only reason for the drive toward leveling the city. The hills also made transportation and travel difficult.
Starting in 1859, David Hewes took on the task of leveling Market Street. Using his “Steam Paddy,” a steam-driven shovel so named because it could do the work of a dozen Irishmen, Hewes carved out the street and the land immediately to the north. Sand cars running with a donkey engine on a temporary movable railroad moved the sand to Yerba Buena Cove and filled the marshland south of Market. Market Street finally met its goal—it became the main commercial street of San Francisco.
A Steam Paddy like this sand shovel owned by the railway company did the work of a hundred men. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
Rincon Hill, overlooking Yerba Buena Cove, later provided more of the fill for that doomed portion of the bay. Based on its view and proximity to the town center, it early became the most distinguished neighborhood in the city. As men made their fortunes, they sent for their families. However, they couldn’t ask their wives and children to live in tents and shanties. Mansions sprung up on the hill; some were of timber cut from the redwood forests up north and some reassembled homes originally built on the East Coast. The finest residences on the hill were built between First and Third streets.
Unfortunately for that community, commerce and declining esthetics intervened. China Basin to the south, formerly Mission Bay, attracted unsightly, smoky industries like lumber mills, brickyards, foundries, and the like. It also supported the China shipping trade, spawning convoys of wagons and carts as well as trains coming up from the south bay. It quickly lost the remainder of its dwindling appeal when the city put through the “Second Street Cut,” a ravine 100 feet deep like a knife through the heart of the hill. Earlier, wagons had to go around the hill. Now they could go through it. One home, undercut by the ravine, slid to the bottom. The hill lost its luster. When the invention of the cable car in 1873 enabled easy access to new residences atop Nob Hill, many of Rincon Hill’s well-to-do joined the migration to that area.
View down Second Street prior to cutting down the grade. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
View down Second Street after the cut. Second Street Bridge spans the cut. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
The excavation of Second Street dividing Rincon Hill. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
The Latham residence on Rincon Hill—1872. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
The library inside the Latham residence on Rincon Hill—1872. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
The exclusive South Park community on Rincon Hill—1866. —Library of Congress
Industry spreading at the foot of Rincon Hill made the hill much less desirous as a prestigious community. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
Immediately following the Second Street Cut, investors attempted legislation to level the rest of the hill. The governor’s veto prevented the plan from becoming law but the fight continued for years. In the mid-1930s, San Francisco acquired a portion of Rincon Hill for the footing needed to build the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The need for access to the bridge and the lack of influential homeowners left in the neighborhood cleared the way for the final demise of the hill. Plans were drawn for lowering the streets and leveling the remaining bluffs. Rincon Hill became no more than a bump in the road and was relegated to light industry and warehouses.
Telegraph Hill suffered a less threatening circumstance. Anyone looking at the bare-rock, northeast face of Telegraph Hill might assume that side of the hill had fallen away in an earthquake. Not so. The northeast face of Telegraph Hill lies under North Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf, and what once was Yerba Buena Cove. After the soil and sand of the hill was scraped away to reveal bare rock, dynamite was used to blast away the rock. Only when it became too difficult and dangerous did the city give up on leveling that great city landmark.
The Parrott residence on Rincon Hill prior to the Second Street Cut. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
Excavating Harrison Street to level the street further divided Rincon Hill. —Photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
SAN FRANCISCO’S SAND DUNES AND MARSHLAND
Nearly half of San Francisco was originally covered with sand. Some of the sand formed hills like those obstructing Market Street, some settled into lowlands that became marshland such as in the Mission District, but most comprised what the early settlers called the Great Dunes on the west side. Regardless, none of the land in the city was flat, and its form varied according to locale, weather, and the winds. Blowing sand, both fine and coarse, was a curse to the early residents.
Some of the dunes were barren, but most supported a covering of stunted trees, shrubs, plants, and creepers. San Francisco’s live oaks, dwarfed by the harsh conditions, never reached their potential. The few pines, spruce, and cypress trees grew nearly horizontal on the west side of the city. There were no wooded areas in the city such as can now be found at the Presidio or in Golden Gate Park. These were all planted in the late nineteenth century. Many native plants existed nowhere else and are now near extinction, maintaining a toehold in the Lobos Creek Dunes and Valley as a part of the Presidio Trust. Some, like San Francisco’s long-gone “Shelly Cocoas,” were just plain fun.
SHELLY COCOAS
Walter J. Thompson, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote an article titled “Out Where the ‘Shelly-Cocoas’ Grew,” published in the September 24, 1916, edition. He bemoaned the loss of the native plant habitat from the perspective of his childhood. The term “Shelly Cocoas” must have been a name assigned to the plant by the locals since no record can be found of a plant by that name. Given the description, it’s most likely the wild cucumber or more specifically the California manroot, Marah fabaceus, native to San Francisco.
Out Where the “Shelly-Cocoas” Grew
—by Walter J. Thompson
Just by way of a foreword, I would say that I spell it “shelly-cocoa” advisedly. I don’t admit it is correct. I could show how “shelly-coke” has the backing of authority of weight, but refrain, and maintain that the official orthographical architecture of the word is one of the secrets of boyhood that must be considered inviolate, no matter how old one grows. Wild horses shall not tear it from me. Boyhood’s trust and all that it implies is involved.
Also I remark that I am confirmed in the opinion that shelly-cocoas have ceased to exist, like the ichthyosaurus and other things with even worse names belonging to those dear old days before the Pleiades sisters were transformed into stars.
To the old boys of the old town it is not necessary to hold up a shelly-cocoa for identification purposes. We all remember what it looked like, and recall with thrills of joy and pride the days when the city was a kiddy, like ourselves in short pants, and freckled with a magnificent profusion of vacant spaces on its thinly settled slopes, said spaces being the homes of the shelly-cocoa vines. They shared the soil with lupine bushes and stunted oaks, spreading in green patches six and seven feet in size. Every fellow’s home had a shelly-cocoa patch annex of varying size, according to location, and out beyond Van Ness Avenue they could be measured off by the acre, until human habitations were not and King Shelly-Cocoa reigned monarch of all he surveyed.
The fruit of the shelly-cocoa vine could have been designed by kind Mother Nature for no other purpose than as an implement of amusement for youth, even as marbles and pegtops. Was there anything more alluring to the eye of a boy than that light green sphere, covered with spines about half an inch long, ranging from an inch and a half to three inches in diameter, the spines, while not stiff or particularly sharp, being full of electricity, which only required contact with the human skin to complete a circuit of radiating thrills and spasms?
And what an exquisite soft, soapy and sticky lather was concealed within the bulb, with an odor which, if not exactly comparable with the spirit of fragrance wafting over the rose-strewn Vale of Cashmere, was markedly of a distinctive character. The shelly-cocoa served a double purpose. When acting in conjunction with a human chin or eye, it titillated the nerves with its electric thrills, and at the same time stirred the tissue of one’s olfactory organ to a frenzy of revolt against its atmospherical environment.
Shelly-cocoas and war whoops! They went together in the brave days of yore. The taint of war was in the air. Around the family table the battles of the Rebellion were discussed in detail, and the current literature of boydom told of little else but blood-curdling encounters between painted Indians with uncurbed ambitions, to acquire scalps of palefaces and scouts and trappers whose business in life was to roam around the boundless plains, staked and otherwise, and circumvent the cunning of the predatory savages and tear from their ruthless clutches certain comely damsels who had been nabbed while plucking wildflowers upon the prairie.
To the young San Franciscan this Indian warfare was most appealing, its methods of bang and batter and of direct attack and defense being more understandable than the maneuvering of troops in accordance with a military manual. Many and great were the battles fought on the hillsides where the shellycocoas grew, with the spiny bulbs as weapons. King Philip of Pocanoket never displayed more cunning and daring in hurling big Wampanoags through the New England settlements, nor the redoubtable Captain Church more dexterity in chasing them, than did the hillside warriors in factional strife. Confined as it was to the northern side of the city, owing to the refusal of the shelly-cocoas to propagate in the red-rock soil of the Mission, the warfare was between the settlers of the downtown district and the upland Indians. The line of demarcation was the ridge about the line of Jones Street, but the street was not entirely cut through then. Along this frontier were numerous nifty lots sloping down from Washington to Pacific Street. There the tide of war ebbed and flowed.
The downtown Pilgrim Fathers were in big majority, but the Wampanoags of the hills were the best fighters. They had a King Philip, too, in “Ducksy” McGinn, who was mighty in courage and strength. “Ducksy” would plan his campaigns with exceeding care. Preliminary to a planned conflict, every shelly-cocoa patch for blocks around was denuded of its fruit, and arsenals would be established in certain secret spots. Then would the enemy be taunted into attack by certain well-understood methods of aggravation. When the Pilgrims charged up that hill the wily Wampanoags led them along their own trails, and soon would have the Pilgrims in a disastrous ambush. Every shelly-cocoa vine was bare and the air was clouded with the volleys which the Wampanoags sent in. The Pilgrims could not even follow the well-known Beadle movement, “and seeing the enemy approach, he hid behind a tree.” There were no trees. They could only run.
It was on the slope running up from Pacific Street at Leavenworth to Washington that the famous battle of Shelly-Cocoa Hill took place. That memorable engagement was sprung as a surprise upon the Wampanoags while King Philip was absent, he having an hours’ overtime engagement with his teacher. Up and over the hill poured the Pilgrims loaded with shelly-cocoas and headed by Captain Church, mounted upon his father’s heavy-hoofed and formidable dray horse. Cavalry was a new element in the warfare and the Indians gave way in disorder. The enemy held the hillside and the shelly-cocoa patches. Dark was the outlook, when suddenly their feeble war whoops were reinforced by one which had a “Charge, Chester, Charge,” ring to it, and up came King Philip Ducksy, armed with an eight-foot fence rail which he swung around like the wing of a windmill. Right for the cavalry he charged, and as Captain Church swept down upon him he dodged and then—whack came the formidable wing on the cavalry’s flank. Whack followed whack, and then did the war steed of the doughty Captain place him in the role of John Gilpin as it tore its way toward home. King Philip sounded the advance and the Pilgrims lost no time in following their leader. Oh, the rout was awful! Great was the carnage amid the shrilling of the victors’ war whoops. Napoleon at the bridge of Lodi and Sheridan at Winchester’s fight faded into insignificance as in-the-nick-of-time battle heroes alongside of the resourceful and brave Ducksy.
Shelly-cocoas were not always in partnership with war whoops. Under the guidance of appreciative youth they were connected with other pursuits more or less useful as well as tending to the enhancement of good feeling among all classes and the growth of uplifting influences. For instance, there was the campaign of education to popularize shelly-cocoas with the grown-up folks. Every inducement was held out to make them take notice of the shelly-cocoa and look kindly upon it. Sister’s best young man hastening homeward from the usual Sunday night parlor seance would find his overcoat pockets freighted with juicy shelly-cocoas; Pa, fat and bald headed, would, on leaving after the evening card game, slam his silk hat on hurriedly while a half dozen shelly-cocoas would rattle around inside it like dice in a box; Ma on her busy baking days was reminded of the existence of shelly-cocoas by having one fly through the open window and snuggle down with the fruit in the pie she was building.
But failure croaked like a raven over this field of industry. Strange to say, the older folks could not understand why a shelly-cocoa was born. Such perverseness!
Then there were weird relations between policemen and shelly-cocoas. The spiny bulbs were the abomination of the knights of the star; some of whom even ascribed supernatural qualities to shelly-cocoas; others tried to figure out the tie of affinity between adolescence and the shelly-cocoa. There certainly was some mysterious influence which stirred shelly-cocoas to aggressive action when a policeman approached their haunts. Myriad cases have been reported of shellycocoas deliberately tearing themselves loose from their vines and lurking around corners and savagely assaulting a policeman as he turned it, or of leaping upon roofs just to tumble off again and swat a policeman in the neck. It was no use for a policeman to hold up some happy-hearted youth gayly tripping on his way to school, his face wreathed in smiles at the knowledge of how well he knew his lessons for the day. What did he know of the doing of erratic shelly-cocoas?
Attempts to introduce shelly-cocoas into the schools also failed owing to the narrow-mindedness and obduracy of teachers. There was a peaceful and a sentimental aspect to a shelly-cocoa’s existence, especially out in the districts where the wig-wams were few and far between and the tribes were not menaced by the strenuous struggles of the border. There the shelly-cocoa had other uses than as a weapon of war. Within the heart of the spiny bulb was an oval-shaped kernel which when dried out hard in the sun like a gourd, was susceptible of a high polish from canary yellow to a rich mahogany, and with copper and brass “Chinee” coins with square holes in the center made up the wampum of the tribes. These dried “shellies” could also be cut up into pretty designs such as baskets, rings or linked bracelets, and necklaces fit to adorn a South Sea princess.
Perhaps you knew that pretty square block of birdcage houses, each set in a garden of roses, called Tuckertown, and which nestled on the slope which caught the slanting rays of the westward falling sun, beginning at Octavia and Washington streets. Perhaps you crossed that ridge like a warrior bold and true homeward-bound from school, and gave a whoop as you gazed admiringly upon the lupine and shelly-cocoa covered vista and saw the belle of Tuckertown swinging on the family gate, just as Dove Eye the Lodge Queen might have loitered around the opening of her chieftain daddy’s tepee.
Perhaps you hurled your Davies’ Bourdon and Swinton’s Outlines, bound by a strap, to the ground and kicked them gleefully all the way before you until you landed beside Dove Eye and threw a necklace of shelly-cocoa wampum over her shoulders.
Perhaps, I say.
The shelly-cocoa and the golden and purple lupine blossoms are gone forever from all the old hillsides, having given way to the homes of other dwellers who little reck of the romance of the reincarnated Pilgrim Fathers and the Wampanoags and the dimples of winsome Dove Eye that have long since turned to wrinkles. And I have heard these newcomers in Canaan denounce those slopes of dear old San Francisco as dreary, dismal districts where raw winds and damp fogs held high Walpurgian revels. But—
There once lived in the old town an obscure poet whose thoughts over dwelt in “June’s palace paved with gold,” but whose feet trod the halls of dingy lodging-houses and whose appetite was appeased in “three for a quarter” restaurants. He finally decided to become a prosperous plumber instead of remaining a poor poet. But before bartering his minstrel harp for a plumber’s pipe wrench he twanged off a lay called “Where Purple Lupine Grows,” in which he lauded the sand dunes, expressing his reverence for the blossom-bedecked hills because of the memory of the days when he wandered over them in company with bonny Dove Eye’s sister, who probably later became his bride and the mother of a line of plumbers, and closing:
To some gay gardens are more fair,
But eye cannot impartIdeal of beauty—that is e’er The Standard of the heart.
And the poet-plumber had a lead-pipe cinch on the sentimental situation.
—Article transcription courtesy of Ron Filion [http://www.zpub.com/sf50/sf/sindex.htm]
The north and west sides of the city sported the sandhills while sand blew over the hills and filled the valleys in the southeast. Those valleys soaked up the water from rain runoff and artesian springs to form marshlands, lakes, lagoons, and streams. Just as the Potrero District was ideal for pastureland, the Mission District proved itself ideal for farming. It received more sun than the rest of the city and its softly rolling hills, sandy soil and abundant water made it ideal for row crops, grains, and orchards.
The 1867 San Francisco Municipal Report for Farms cited five thousand acres planted in barley and oats, another eleven hundred acres planted in potatoes, three hundred acres of hay, hundreds of bushels of beans, peas, onions, and beets harvested, as well as ninety tons of turnips and thirty tons of pumpkins and squash produced. Aside from reporting nearly seventy-five hundred horses, the city held within it over four thousand milk cows, more than fifty-six hundred hogs, nearly five thousand chickens, and numerous other farm animals. Orchards and vines accounted for the remainder of the report, with over three thousand fruit trees planted, one hundred raspberry vines, seventy-five grape vines, and thirty thousand strawberry vines producing. San Francisco must have had a hearty appetite for strawberries.
San Francisco’s primary crop remained houses and businesses, and soon the Mission District was apportioned with its own street layout and lots for sale. The lakes and lagoons were filled, the artesian wells were tapped and diverted through the storm drains, and the streams were routed to those storm drains as well, all emptying into the artificial Mission Creek and then directly into the bay. The land was leveled and the Mission became a working-class neighborhood for the city’s German and Irish immigrants. Not one remnant remains of the fertile land other than the occasional backyard garden, and few people have ever heard of Lake McCoppin that once covered nearly sixteen blocks in the heart of the Mission.
Is the city poorer for all its change? I would say, with apologies to the environment, no. For all its uniqueness, metamorphosis is the nature of San Francisco. We mourn the losses but hail the change that keeps this great city vibrant.
