by Gary Kamiya
Richardson converted to Catholicism, was baptized at Mission Dolores, and married Maria Antonia in 1825. He spent his honeymoon at a beautiful little harbor across the Golden Gate called Sausalito, becoming the first white man to fall in love with the Lugano-like splendors of that corner of the bay. Putting his seafaring skills to good use, he bought a 15-ton sloop and went into business transporting goods around the bay, piloting foreign ships and serving as a middleman between their captains and the Spanish-speaking ranchers. He became known as Captain Richardson.
Richardson had come at the right time. California was opening up to the world. Determined to keep its colonies completely tied to their mother country, Spain had forbidden foreign trade. But after Napoleon conquered Spain in 1808, Madrid’s already-shaky grasp on Alta California grew even weaker. In 1821, Mexico won independence and opened the California ports to foreign trade.
Until the early 1830s, the missions dominated California’s economic life. But it had long been clear that the fathers were never going to succeed in “civilizing” the neophytes, and the settlers coveted the vast lands the church was holding in trust for their charges. In 1833, over the bitter protests of the fathers, Mexico secularized the missions, taking the 10 million acres the church controlled and giving them to the neophytes and the settlers. The already-moribund mission system quickly collapsed—in many cases, literally. By 1846 many of the missions had fallen down, and there were only five priests left in California.
For the Indians, the decision proved disastrous. The neophytes were supposed to receive half of the church’s holdings, but they ended up with nothing. Many became little more than slaves on the ranches they should have owned. For the gente de razón, however, secularization was a bonanza. And the biggest winners of the land jackpot were veterans.
Starting in 1833, Mexican governors approved about 800 petitions for land, totaling 13 million acres, mostly to retired soldiers, pueblo dwellers, and recent immigrants from Mexico. If they had become Mexican citizens and converted to Catholicism, foreigners—primarily Americans and British—could also apply for grants. The grants were easy to get, and they were vast. Most applicants received 10,000 to 20,000 acres, and a few received hundreds of thousands of acres. Former privates and sergeants who were neither as high-born nor as pure-blooded Spanish as they claimed to be suddenly found themselves the quasi-feudal heads of enormous estates. It was the world’s most lucrative G.I. bill, and it opened what 19th-century historian Hubert Howe Bancroft dubbed the “California pastoral”: the 25-year era of the 50-odd ranching families who, like the rest of the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the territory, came to think of themselves not as Mexican citizens but as Californians—in Spanish, Californios.
Large tracts of San Francisco were deeded over to Mexican settlers, many of whose grandfathers had lived in grinding poverty. For example, a former soldier named José Bernal, whose impoverished grandfather had come with the Anza expedition, was given two enormous grants: the Rincón de las Salinas (“corner of the salt marshes”), including today’s Excelsior, Crocker-Amazon, Outer Mission, and Bayview–Hunters Point; and the Potrero Viejo (“the old pasture”), today’s Bernal Heights and Holly Park. Together these lands, granted in 1839 and 1840, made up the southeastern 15 percent of San Francisco. Bernal lived in an adobe way out in the country, at Duncan Street and San Jose Avenue. In 1846 José de Jesus Noe, a rancher and civil servant (he was Yerba Buena’s last Mexican alcalde, a position, dating back to Moorish Spain, that combined the functions of mayor and judge) who had come from Mexico with an immigrant party in 1834, was granted the Rancho San Miguel, 4,444 acres constituting a huge chunk of south and central San Francisco, including Noe Valley, the Castro, Upper Market, Twin Peaks, West Portal, and St. Francis Wood. Other grants in San Francisco included the de Haro, Diaz, Bolton, and Ridley ranches.
San Francisco wasn’t suitable for raising cattle, and none of these lands were ever ranched in more than a small way (although Richardson’s future neighbor Jacob Leese grazed cattle on San Bruno Mountain, just south of the city). For a variety of reasons, most of the owners of these ranches failed to make any money from their land, or even to hold on to it for long. (After California became a state, the Californios were dispossessed of their vast holdings, thanks largely to unjust American laws that threw their land titles into question and forced them to sell off their ranches to pay for endless litigation.) But elsewhere in California, the great cattle ranches flourished—and became the backbone of the California pastoral. The ranchers—about a third of whom were foreign—used their seemingly endless lands to graze vast herds of cattle, which yielded two valuable commodities: hides and tallow. The Californios traded these for luxury goods brought by the Boston ships. Between 1826 and 1848, California exported more than 6 million hides and 700,000 tons of tallow. So universal was the use of hides for money that they became known as “California dollars.” The era of the hide-and-tallow ships was immortalized in Richard Henry Dana’s elegiac 1840 classic Two Years Before the Mast.
Richardson prospered thanks to the hide and tallow trade. He piloted the Boston ships into the cove he named Yerba Buena, or “good herb,” after a fragrant mintlike herb that grew on the slopes of Loma Alta (Telegraph Hill) and in the sandy soil nearby. He also picked up hides and tallow from ranches around the bay and carried them back to the ships. To help him, he hired a team of Indians, who built a temescal (sweat lodge) near Montgomery and Sacramento, where a little stream flowed into the bay. As their ancestors had done for thousands of years, they would sit in the temescal until they were steaming hot, then run out and plunge into the cold water. It is one of the last carefree images we have of San Francisco’s first inhabitants.
After seven years on the cove, Richardson moved his family south to Mission San Gabriel, where he befriended the governor of Alta California, José Figueroa. In 1834, he recommended that Figueroa establish a trading post and customhouse at Yerba Buena, and asked him to grant him a lot to build a house. That was the fateful year that the missions were secularized: The territorial assembly in Monterey had voted to make “San Francisco”—which included Yerba Buena and made up most of the peninsula as well as parts of the East Bay and Marin—a pueblo, or town, removing it from the jurisdiction of the mission. Eager to develop commerce in the barren northern reaches of Alta California, Figueroa appointed Richardson captain of the future town’s harbor and granted him its first lot.
Richardson, his wife, and their three small children arrived on June 25, 1835. We know the exact date for a homely reason. When they reached the site of their new home, on a chaparral-covered rise a few hundred yards above the gently curving cove, Richardson’s nine-year-old daughter, Mariana, asked if she could have a pony of her own. Richardson told her that if she was good, she could have a pony by Christmas, “just six months from today.”
Richardson proceeded to erect Yerba Buena’s first structure, a crude shelter made out of a ship’s foresail stretched over four redwood posts. The tent stood on what is now Grant Avenue between Clay and Washington Streets in the teeming heart of Chinatown. A weather-beaten old metal plaque, hidden behind cheap T-shirts hanging on a rack at a tourist-trap shop and attached to a run-down apartment building at 823 Grant bearing the oddly hyphenated name the Dick-Young Apartments, announces: “The birthplace of a great city.”
The Richardsons were the only people on the cove. Three miles away, next to Mission Dolores, there was a rural village where several extended Californio families lived. There were also a handful of people at the decaying Presidio, whose troops were being moved to Sonoma. A dauntless woman named Juana Briones and her family were the only other people not living at one of those two places: Briones, her husband Apolinario and their seven children inhabited a house on a little spring near what is now Lyon Street, just outside the Presidio. The only person the Richardsons saw regularly was a soldier named Candelario Miramontes, who had started an Irish potato garden on a level piece of land just below the Richardso
n’s tent. That piece of land, soon to be known as “the Plaza,” was renamed Portsmouth Square after the American conquest. It is San Francisco’s historical ground zero.
The Richardsons had moved to a barren and inhospitable place. The terrain around the curving mile-long cove, now a concrete jungle of skyscrapers, was so different that it’s impossible even to begin to visualize it. (One of the city’s great secret views, looking down onto Aquatic Park from the lawn behind the Officers’ Club on the bluff at Fort Mason, probably comes the closest to capturing the look of Yerba Buena cove, although in one-third scale.) Behind their tent was an unbroken stretch of low, thick brush, flattened by the wind and filled with quail. The beach, 100 feet wide and fronting today’s Montgomery Street, was just two blocks from their tent, beneath a 10-foot bluff. At the base of a ravine that ran down Jackson Street, there was a swampy saltwater lagoon, the Laguna Salada, through which Richardson and his family had to wade to get to the anchorage at Clark’s Point near the base of Telegraph Hill.
Sand dunes stretched in all directions. About 200 yards south of their tent was a big sand hill, running east-west along what is now Pine Street. (In the 1840s, a colony of thieves, escaped convicts, and international desperadoes built a shantytown in a hidden hollow atop this hill, near the southwest corner of Bush and Sansome, from which they would descend at night in search of victims. The derivatives traders and investment bankers who now occupy this part of town have much better digs and work in broad daylight.) The incessant westerly winds whipped the sand into everything, although living in the lee of Nob Hill gave the Richardsons some protection.
The only sign of human habitation were two ancient trails. The first, which started a few hundred yards to the south of their tent, was a rough two-mile-long path covered with low-hanging trees that ran to decrepit Mission Dolores. To get to the even more decrepit Presidio meant ascending the puerto suelo, the 300-foot-high saddle between Nob and Russian Hills. In October, Richardson and Yerba Buena’s first alcalde, a former Mexican officer named Francisco de Haro, laid out the grid of the future village. De Haro drew a proposed street in front of Richardson’s house, which he called Calle de la Fundación, or Street of the Founding. This phantom street, the first in Yerba Buena, ran diagonally toward the puerto suelo. Eventually straightened and paved, it became Grant Avenue.
There was also a third trail, miles away across the sandy wastes, that connected Mission Dolores and the Presidio. Known as “the old Spanish trail,” it zigzagged across the hills, following their lowest contours. Today, that trail—the lower Haight’s version of the puerto suelo—lives on in a bike route called the Wiggle, on which hordes of cyclists zoom back and forth between the Mission, north of the Panhandle (NoPa), and other points northwest, in a hipster reincarnation of a trail once trod by priests, soldiers, and Indians.
There were no people living near the Richardsons, but there were lots of wild animals. One night when the family was inside the tent, a bear put his paw under the canvas, grabbed a screeching rooster, and made off with it. Richardson’s son, Esteban (Steve), recalled looking down at the waterfront, along what is now Montgomery Street, and watching “bears, wolves and coyotes quarreling” over the fish that washed up on the shore. A true Californio, Steve started riding to Mission Dolores and ranches beyond it at the age of five or six, often passing bears and wolves “so close [he] could have thrown a lariat over them.”
One story starkly illustrates their utter isolation. Richardson was away on a trip to Mission Santa Clara, leaving his family behind, when their fire went out. They had no matches and no neighbors. For two days, they had no fire to cook with, no heat, and no light at night. Finally, a soldier from the Presidio happened to pass by and made a fire.
Chapter 18
The Dead City
Building 253, Hunters Point Naval Shipyard
Many of my happiest moments have been spent in the weirdest, most obscure, often ugliest parts of San Francisco. Every explorer, even a two-bit one like me whose realm is only a seven-by-seven-mile square, lives for the moment of discovery. And just about the last places you can still discover in San Francisco are those nobody wants—vacant lots, abandoned buildings, unclassifiable patches of dirt filled with old tires and rusting cans and ripped-up girlie magazines and pieces of unknown machines. Wastelands.
But while part of the allure of wastelands is the joy of discovering them, their appeal is deeper. Cracked pavement and old mattresses and fading signs and broken springs and lost piers are the fallen leaves and branches in the great artificial jungle that is a city. Entropic, unclaimed, decaying, created by man but no longer under human control, they are a kind of second-order nature. No-man’s-lands are evidence that a city is dying, which means that it is still alive, that it has not yet become an android. They are a healthy sign of defeat and decline. A city without wastelands is a city without soul.
The photographer Larry Sultan captured the weird allure of noman’s-lands in the ironically titled “Homeland,” a stunning series of enormous staged compositions in which he placed Latino immigrants in suburban wastelands. By using as props people whose own exiled existence takes place in a twilight zone, Sultan heightened the surreal combination of nature and crumbling artifice that characterizes the strange locations where the sidewalk or the culvert or the mall or the ring road ends.
But urban wastelands are disappearing. Just as most people no longer have any personal experience of death, so, too, many cities are increasingly devoid of dead space. In the postindustrial age, the sterilizing power of ownership and money spreads further and further, a seamless facade, impossible to penetrate. Old cities had guts—factories and docks and train yards and produce markets. And like all guts, they produced organic waste, urban shit—weed-covered tracks and abandoned buildings and vacant lots. The new financial info-city, controlled by disembodied capital, every square inch leveraged for maximum profit, its workers pushing keys on computers or serving lattes, is gutless and shitless.
But there are still patches of human-made wilderness in San Francisco, places where a once-vital part of the city had a great fall and all the king’s real estate developers have not been able to put it together again. Ground zero for these lost kingdoms is the old industrial shoreline, the complex and chaotic and polluted waterfront that runs between Mission Bay and Candlestick Park. Over the course of a week, I set out to explore it.
I made my first foray by bike. I rode south on Illinois Street, the yellow brick road that leads to a decaying Oz. The disorder and decline started as soon as I crossed Mariposa Street. Two enormous cranes on train tracks, covered with graffiti, appeared in a fenced-off lot on the east side of the street. They were almost identical to the 28-ton crane I failed to learn to operate at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock, the huge military shipyard where I worked after I dropped out of Yale. At the end of 20th Street was a foreboding complex of ancient brick factories and vast corrugated-iron warehouses. These dark satanic mills, complete with an old smokestack, looked like a stage set for a version of On the Waterfront filmed in Liverpool in 1885. You expected Johnny Friendly to be standing there, busting heads. All the buildings were locked up and had signs saying “Danger: No Trespassing” on them. An ancient wooden frame bore the faded words “Safety stories in pictures,” along with the words “Stop,” “Look,” “Listen,” and—weirdly—“Profit” in its four corners. This complex had been part of the massive Union Iron Works, started in 1849 to produce the drills, pumps, and other equipment needed for the mining industry. In 1908 it was bought by Bethlehem Steel, which also bought the dry docks at Hunters Point.
I rode down to the end of 20th Street and wound through some forlorn streets, past a big open gate that said “Do Not Enter.” A decrepit parking lot faced the bay. Behind a chain-link fence fringed with anise plants was a long pier, running out to a boarded-up building 100 yards away. The pier had collapsed into the bay after 30 yards; its cement roadway was twisted and hanging down in the water, fringe
d with algae. Beyond the gap, the other section of the pier was also drooping down to the water but was still standing.
A five-minute ride south of the state-of-the-art AT&T Park and the million-dollar condos at Mission Bay, I had entered a netherworld of Dickensian factories, dead cranes, and collapsed piers. I rode on, crossing Islais Creek and rolling past the vast defunct Continental Grain plant. Its 10 enormous gray silos rose 100 feet into the air. It was the most visually stunning factory remaining in the city, a Futurist painter’s wet dream. At the end of Amador Street, the road petered out at the entrance to a cement plant, next to a big pile of dirt. Three or four 20-foot-high pyramids of sand were scattered about near a trailer structure. No one was around. Past a low concrete barrier there was a little sign that said “Pier 94 Salt Marsh.” I leaned my bike against a fence and walked onto the marsh.
Little sinuous inlets wove their way in from the bay. Sandpipers and gulls floated in the water. Looking north, I saw the Mark Hopkins Hotel atop Nob Hill through the legs of an enormous crane. A few steps to the south was a tiny pocket beach, about 30 by 15 feet, with very fine yellow sand. Immediately behind the tiny beach was a fence topped with razor wire. All four towers of the Bay Bridge were visible. A brisk wind blew. The mournful sound of a ship’s horn sounded as a big container vessel approached Yerba Buena Island.
I rode on, heading for India Basin. This was one of the major coves on the bay’s industrial shore, but I had never been here. The reason was simple: It was next to Hunters Point.
In the urban mythology of San Francisco, Hunters Point plays the role of Mordor. The public housing projects atop the Hunters Point ridge are among the most dangerous in the city, plagued by murderous drug-dealing gangs. Nobody walks around on the hill after dark unless they have to. And even in broad daylight, it’s not a place you’d go out of your way to visit. When I was a taxi driver, most of the black drivers wouldn’t pick up there.
