as urging me on. No man deserves to be this lucky.
Introduction
San Francisco’s Lost Landmarks: A City in Perpetual Transition offers an opportunity to look back at earlier times, lives, and lifestyles. Little comparison is made to what the city is now and as you’ll find, the tone remains as neutral as possible except in a couple of instances. No attempt was made to judge those times or these—San Francisco is unique in that it is for the most part amoral but not immoral. It has always been a “live and let live” place populated by people who dare to take risks.
San Francisco’s city emblem, the phoenix, is as applicable today as always. The city continually renews and reinvents itself. I meet people who tell me they won’t go to the city any more because it’s become so dark and sinful; yes, it has changed and not necessarily for the better. Yet it’s no more dark or sinful than it ever was. Part of that is media sensationalism and part the sanitation of old memories, and I’m as guilty of the latter as anyone else. Yes, the city had changed, but the factor of change is ongoing, because it, more than any other city in the world, embraces change.
So please take this book as a fun look backward, with stories and illustrations of the days, events, and places that we have built on. History doesn’t have to be serious, so enjoy and take from this what you will.
Sand 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
