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.
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