by Gary Kamiya
Now I was approaching that mystery spot. My first view of India Basin, as I rode along Hunters Point Boulevard, was revelatory. I’ll never forget it. It permanently altered my imaginative sense of the city. For that gentle cove embodied a lost world. I did not know anything about its history. But I knew with absolute certainty that native people had lived here, and working people, and that farms had been nearby, and that ships had been built and sailed in and out of this little harbor. I knew this in my gut simply because of how the cove looked. Geography was destiny here, and history, and poetry.
Later I found out it was all true, and more. In addition to shipyards and farms, San Francisco’s Butchertown was located near here, after it was kicked out of the city proper. As late as the 1930s, cowboys—some of them Mexican Americans carrying on the tradition of the Californios who were the finest horsemen on earth—used to ride down Third Street.
I rode down to the waterfront park in the center of the cove. A few black men were sitting at a picnic table, smoking and laughing. Some Latino kids were playing in the playground. Out in the cove was what appeared to be a large abandoned houseboat, listing heavily to one side. The peaceful, protected atmosphere reminded me of another bayfront park, a lovely cove called China Camp in San Rafael, so named because of the Chinese shrimping camps that once stood there. It turned out there had been Chinese shrimping camps at India Basin as well.
I rode back up to the main street and headed south, below the projects. Some fancy new condos had just gone up, facing the water, rubbing shoulders with older buildings that had seen better days. Behind them, to the south, a series of bleak stairs ran down bare ground from some beige projects on the ridge. It was getting late. I turned around and went past a tiny shuttered-up Victorian house above the cove that looked like it hadn’t changed in 140 years. Across the street was one of the most wonderful buildings in the city, a castlelike structure that in the 19th and early 20th century housed the Albion Brewery, whose owner made award-winning ale using water from springs that gushed out of the ground on the hill. I rode back around the industrial park, where huge sprinklers were washing trucks, up Illinois, across Mission Bay, and back into the familiar city.
A few days later I went back, this time with my car. I threw my bike in the back. I wanted to see everything, and I wasn’t sure I could do it all by bike. Plus, I didn’t really want to do the Tour de Hunters Point. I went back down Illinois, visited the salt marsh again, and drove out to India Basin. As I approached Middle Point, a street the taxi dispatcher used to call, I turned the wheel to the right and headed into the projects.
Mordor wasn’t what I expected. There were a few run-down older buildings, but most of the housing was fairly new and well maintained. In fact, these were some of the better-looking projects in the city. The landscaping was good, too. There was no garbage on the street, no knots of ominous young dudes hanging around on corners. I drove around and around, reveling in finally being here, trying to cover every single block. I went past Dormitory Street, the name bearing witness to the reason these projects were here at all.
On the eve of World War II, the Navy took control of the huge shipyard to the east and began recruiting tens of thousands of workers. Many of them were blacks from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, eager to get decent-paying jobs and get out of the Jim Crow South. Between 1940 and 1943, 94,000 people migrated to San Francisco, the majority of them black. Blacks made up a third of the 18,000 workers at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
Before World War II, there were virtually no black people in San Francisco. Its population of 634,536 was 94.5 percent white. (Mexican Americans and other Latinos were classified as white.) The Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood had 14,011 people, 7 of whom were black. By the end of the war, 32,000 black people were living in the city. When they arrived, they had to find housing. Some moved into the Western Addition. But those who tried to find housing elsewhere, including in Hunters Point, ran up against landlords who would not rent to blacks, and restrictive covenants. Needing a place to house its workers, the Navy, along with federal and local housing authorities, seized Hunters Point Ridge and threw up 4,000 family apartments and 7,400 dormitories for single workers. Other wartime housing projects were built at Double Rock, Candlestick, Portola, and Potrero Hill. By all reports, the racially mixed housing projects were good places to live. (Jack Kerouac sang the praises of the similarly integrated Marin City projects in On the Road, saying they were “the only community in America where whites and Negroes lived together voluntarily.”) After they were released from the camps, hundreds of Japanese Americans lived in the Hunters Point apartments, including a Kamiya family at 738 Northridge Road—Motojiro Kamiya, machinist; Sumiye Kamiya, housekeeper; and Wataru Kamiya, waiter.
I drove past Espanola Street, named after Espanola Jackson, one of the so-called Big Five—five indomitable community organizers, all black women, who for decades fought for integrated housing, social services, and affordable health care. Well-maintained town houses lined the streets. A few blocks away, an older Asian man was washing his car. A Latino family was unloading groceries. Two young black girls waited by a bus stop. It was hard to grasp that more murders per square foot took place up here than anywhere else in San Francisco.
I drove off the hill and through the surrounding streets, just cruising. At the top of a ridge, looking down on the vast shipyard, there was a big sign for Lennar Corporation. Lennar, in partnership with the city, was planning a $2 billion, 10,500-home development at Hunters Point and Candlestick Point. But Lennar had so far been unable to secure financing. Many Hunters Point residents charged that the scheme was just the latest attempt to kick black San Franciscans out of town.
I drove down to the shipyard, which the Navy closed in 1971. It’s a Super-fund cleanup site, filled with old chemicals and radioactive material. I had never been here. A bored guard at a little security booth waved me through.
The base was huge and silent and flat. Enormous buildings cast long de Chirico shadows in the late-afternoon sun. It was completely deserted. I parked my car near an odd wooden structure next to some railroad tracks—some kind of depot. As I got out of the car, a jackrabbit bounded away across the asphalt. I got on my bike and headed toward a big, green-windowed building I had noticed for years from Candlestick Point. A faded sign said “Building 253. Ordnance, electrical shops and electronics.”
Building 253 turned out to be one of the most amazing buildings in the city, a stunning glass-walled monolith that could have been dreamed up by the design team of Willis Polk, Mondrian, and Le Corbusier, working under the direction of Uncle Sam. The two-colored green glass panes gave it a weirdly modernist look. A big crane thrust out near its top. I tried the door but it was locked. It was just as well: Later I learned that Building 253 was used to decontaminate ships on which the military had dropped hydrogen bombs during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946.
Next to it, behind a fence, was a smaller frame building bearing a number of signs near its roof reading “Toilet.” Near it was an ancient bus stop sign. Across from Building 253 was the cafeteria, where thousands of workers ate every day. I went down a little street and came upon an old office building that was starting to collapse. An open staircase led to the sagging roof. I tiptoed across it. In the distance, the signature structure of the shipyard loomed up, a monstrous 630-ton overhead traveling crane capable of lifting a million pounds.
Everything here was large and had once been strong. These 979 acres of filled and unfilled land contained six dry docks, 200 buildings, and 17 miles of railroad track. All of them were dedicated to turning out ships and turrets and guns and sights and explosives as quickly as possible.
It was the “Toilet” signs that did it. Maybe it was because I had worked in a military shipyard myself. Maybe it was the fact that I had just come from the ridge where so many of those workers once lived. Whatever it was, that silent and deserted place was suddenly filled with ghosts. I could see them cl
early. They were coming out of the bathrooms and bustling into the electrical shop and pouring out of the cafeteria and lined up by the bus stop and welding in the dry dock. They were men and women, black and white and Hispanic. They were from New York and Texas and Louisiana and Ohio and every other state in the country. They moved past one another efficiently and easily. They were on the same team.
All that those black immigrants and their families needed when the war ended were decent places to live, decent jobs, a modicum of acceptance. They didn’t get any of it, or not nearly enough of it. White San Francisco pretended they didn’t exist and kept them segregated in de facto ghettos. There was little overt racism, but there was semi-intentional neglect, and it proved to be malignant.
In the 15 short years between 1945 and 1960, the die was cast. The young men who were born to those shipyard workers and grew up in the decaying housing on Middle Point or Hudson or Kiska Road, in an isolated, virtually all-black neighborhood that became even more cut off when the Bay-shore Freeway was built in 1958, were angry and disaffected. And when the shipyard jobs began to dry up, things got worse.
In 1963, James Baldwin showed up in the Hunters Point projects with a TV crew to make a remarkably radical documentary, Take This Hammer, about “the San Francisco Americans pretend does not exist.” The program features extensive interviews with a number of young black men. In 2012, Caroline Bins, a student at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, tracked down several of the men who appear in the film for her own documentary, Black San Francisco. One of those men, James Lockett, had moved to Hunters Point from Oakland in 1959. “I turned to robbing to feed my family and the community,” Lockett told me. “We couldn’t get jobs. If you went downtown to look for work, they wanted skills, but there was no training. My mom was a single woman with four children. As we got older and hungrier, we decided we were going to eat like everyone else. We stole a quarter cow from James Allen’s slaughterhouse and dragged it to the car. We fed about 30 families.” Lockett said he felt no remorse. “What we did wasn’t really crime as crime is today. It was survival.”
The situation in Hunters Point was ready to ignite. “We had no income, that was the main thing,” Lockett said. “There was corruption in the police department. And then we started seeing these busloads of Caucasians coming into Hunters Point to work in the shipyard, when we couldn’t get work there. They had a store down there, G&E Liquors. We’d see them cashing these $200 and $300 checks. That was a lot of money in those days. Then we’d go home and eat these meatless dinners.”
On September 27, 1966, a policeman shot a young black man who was running from a stolen car. He died in a ditch on Navy Road. Hunters Point exploded. Angry young men took to the streets, burning cars and smashing windows. The mayor called out the National Guard. Lines of guardsmen cleared Third Street and confronted hundreds of young black men who were farther up the hill.
What happened next could have been a tragedy on the scale of the Watts or Detroit riots, when dozens were killed. For the only time in San Francisco’s history, an all-out firefight took place. “There were three levels—Third Street, uphill from that behind the school, and on top of the hill,” Lockett said. “We started throwing rocks and bottles, but a lot of us had guns. When the National Guard began firing over our heads, we began firing back.”
Miraculously, no one was killed in the shootout. The riots, which also took place in the Western Addition, lasted for four days.
The riots triggered an orgy of soul-searching, an invasion of social workers and bureaucrats and poverty pimps, grand promises, and large amounts of federal, state, and local money. Although some of the programs had an impact, it was too little, too late. The toothpaste was out of the tube. The same problems—widespread unemployment, poor schools, isolation, drug dealing, gangs, violence, the destruction of families and communities—have plagued Bayview–Hunters Point ever since. When real estate values soared in the district during the dot-com boom, thousands of black homeowners sold and moved out of the city. In 2010, there were only 48,000 black people in San Francisco—a drop of 22 percent in a decade. I wondered if the exodus would continue until there were as few blacks in the city as there had been before the war.
As I went past the derelict cranes on Illinois Street, it struck me that wastelands were not always what they seemed. The vast dead city of the shipyard was a wasteland, but it connected the visitor with a living and vital past, a past when blacks and whites worked together toward a common goal. Its buildings might be filled with radiation, but in a deeper sense they were as clean as the little salt marsh a mile north. The newly painted projects on the ridge, by contrast, didn’t look like wastelands at all. But they were more broken, abandoned, and forgotten than the most decrepit building at the shipyard.
Someday, I thought, perhaps America would overcome its toxic racial past. Someday Martin Luther King Jr.’s words would come true, and people of all colors would sit down together at the table of brotherhood. Then those projects would just be well-kept buildings. But until then, they will be whited sepulchers, reminders of a shame that cannot be painted over and will not go away.
Chapter 19
The Bridge
The Golden Gate Bridge
There are many Golden Gate Bridges. There is the industrial cathedral of orange steel that soars overhead at Fort Point, all latticework and flying arches and filigree. There is the vast Aeolian harp that appears from the Marin Headlands, whose Pythagorean strings seem to be playing the city behind them into existence. (This is only partly a metaphor: The great engineer who designed the bridge was a classicist who read the Greeks in the original.) There is the mysterious bridge one can see from Nob Hill on a gloomy evening, the south tower appearing at once tiny and vast as it rises out of the silver sea. There is the bridge as it appears from the top of Larsen Peak, marking the hidden strait like the world’s biggest golf flag.
And those are just external views. There are also internal ones. For like all great human creations, the Golden Gate Bridge reflects and distills and deepens whatever one brings to it.
When I was writing this book, I stayed for a few weeks in the Berkeley Hills. In the mornings and late afternoons I would walk up to the Rose Garden and look across the bay at San Francisco, perched on its narrow peninsula. It was often wreathed in fog while Berkeley basked in sunshine. On some afternoons when the fog was in, the bridge, directly opposite my perch, was completely invisible. Other days just the tip of one of its towers, 191 feet higher than the tip of the Washington Monument, pierced the fog.
At the time I was immersed in researching California Indians. They were not particularly drawn to San Francisco. Many more native people lived in the East Bay, with its better weather and abundant trees and mud flats, than on the narrow sliver of land across the water.
That knowledge, and the fact that I was observing the city from the outside, caused a Copernican shift in my sense of San Francisco. For the first time, I saw San Francisco as an undesirable outlier. It was an exposed spit of land—too far west, cut off, peripheral, a windy, gray, isolated peninsula across six and a half miles of water. Take away its two bridges, and it was virtually an island. And the mighty Golden Gate strait, a mile wide, haunted by towering fogs and scoured by one of the most powerful tidal movements on earth, was the most daunting barrier of all.
More than any other object, manmade or natural, the Golden Gate Bridge defines San Francisco’s place in the world. But it does so in a paradoxical way. On the one hand, it is a supreme demonstration of man’s ability to tame nature. Old paintings and photographs taken of the Golden Gate before the bridge was built show a narrow gap in the coastal mountains, a void to which the eye and the imagination were inexorably drawn. The great structure filled that void, replacing a natural absence with a manmade presence. The Golden Gate Bridge represents the triumph of man over his environment. It was built during the Depression, yet more than any other modern American structure, it embodies the Renaissan
ce optimism expressed by Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!” Hamlet’s description of the sky, “this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” could be a description of the bridge itself.
As a feat of engineering, the Golden Gate Bridge ranks with any structure ever built. The greatest challenge was the south tower, which had to be sunk in the open ocean, 1,125 feet offshore, through some of the most powerful currents on the planet.
But the bridge also draws attention to the very forces that it overcomes. In crossing that turbulent strait, it highlights it. Every time one looks up from a thousand places in San Francisco and sees its mighty orange towers, or its magnificent profile, or the enormous shadow “H” it casts on the Marin hills, one is reminded that the city abruptly ends at an inexplicable gap in the coastal mountains, through which icy ocean waters rush twice a day. Every time one crosses it and looks down, one has a sense of the awe-inspiring power of that ocean, a power so vast that even the omnipotent bridge pales by comparison. And every time one looks back from the bridge at the white city, rising delicately from the sea on its narrow peninsula, one realizes just how fragile it is.
So the bridge returns San Francisco to the comforting, pre-Copernican center of the universe. But it also reveals just how close to the edge it is.
The bridge’s history, too, reflects this charged encounter between nature and man. It was built to open Marin and Sonoma Counties to development, and to alleviate long lines at the ferries: The thousands of San Franciscans who had begun going on weekend excursions to Marin County frequently had to wait for up to three hours to put their cars on the Sausalito ferries. But the Sierra Club opposed the bridge because it feared it would desecrate its site. The original design submitted by Joseph Strauss, the engineer who was the project’s Napoleonic driving force, was for a clunky monstrosity—opponents called it “an upside-down rat trap”—that would indeed have profaned the strait that in 1846 the self-aggrandizing explorer John C. Fremont christened Chrysopylae, or Golden Gate, after the Golden Horn of ancient Constantinople. (Fremont’s desire to place San Francisco in the august lineage of the capital of the Byzantine Empire was more powerful than his sense of geography: The Golden Horn bears only a slight resemblance to the Golden Gate.) Fortunately, an engineer named Charles Alton Ellis took over. Strauss fired Ellis before the bridge was finished and did his best to make sure that Ellis received no credit. But the bridge designed by the unassuming engineer from Maine—who was finally given major credit for designing the bridge in 2007—is one of the most beautiful structures ever built by man.
