MISSION BAY

This 1863 photo shows Mission Bay before it was filled. Street at left is 3rd Street, swamps begin to right of 4th Street. In the upper right distance is the original 3rd peak of Potrero Hill, known as Irish Hill. To it's left is Mission Rock. Photo: San Francisco History Room, San Francisco Public Library

Go south on 4th Street until it intersects 3rd Street and you are in the middle of Mission Bay. In 1849, when the gold rush began and San Francisco was a small village on the northeast edge of the peninsula (near today's Montgomery Street), Mission Bay was actually a wide, shallow bay full of clams and oysters and teeming with marsh life.

From the 1850s to the late 1870s shipbuilding and repair at Steamboat Point (Townsend from 2nd to 4th Streets, at the time the southernmost point of land extending into Mission Bay) was the main industry around Mission Bay, while the waters continued to yield a healthy supply of oysters and clams. Butchers got the land in the Mission Creek marshes near today's 9th and Brannan set aside as an industrial zone for their slaughter-houses (butchertown), and the blood and guts of their business was dumped directly into the creek on its way into the bay.

The steam shovel, the steam-paddy, was used intensively to shovel the 30- to 100-foot sand hills from various locations throughout the area from Market Street south, first along Townsend Street, and later 4th, 5th, and 6th Streets, depositing the material in Mission Bay. The long process of filling in the water lots in Mission Bay lasted from approximately 1860 to 1910. After the steam shovels had leveled the numerous sand hills, the Second Street cut in 1869 provided thousands of cubic yards of rock and dirt, followed soon after by early blasting of Irish Hill (today this is the land east of Illinois Street between 20th and 23rd Streets, home to abandoned Todd Shipyards and adjacent to a small residential district just east of Potrero Hill at 22nd & 3rd, affectionately known by locals as Dogpatch), which also contributed its rubble to the filling of Islais Cove. From the 1870s to the '90s garbage dumps along 7th & 8th Streets near Berry provided steady fill to the Bay. The earthquake debris from 1906 provided the last large quantity of fill, although many wet spots needed additional filling in the following years.

Mission Bay's business would eventually be subsumed by the nation's controlling capitalists of the time, the railroad barons.

The China Basin building built in 1925 as part of the Del Monte Cannery empire, remains to this day a prominent landmark at the northern edge of Mission Bay, though it actually sits on what was once the Bay itself.

Today 7th & Berry is the site of a sewage treatment plant at the land end of the Mission Creek Channel. The channel is a delightful hidden community, home to a fleet of two dozen houseboats in the shadow of the useless (I-280) freeway spur built in the early 1970s to lead to a never-built second crossing bay bridge.

--Chris Carlsson

Houseboats on Mission Creek, 2008, now surrounded by new condominium development across the creek, and the Mission Bay UCSF campus to their south. Photos: Chris Carlsson

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