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
