Fishing & Terraforming

NARRATOR
Look upward to the freeway above you. This was once one of San Francisco's most spectacular residential hills. In 1935, the city had flattened and lowered its summit by 10 feet to make way for the Western approach to the Bay Bridge. Several city blocks were cleared of buildings, including apartment flats, tenements, shacks built after the 1906 earthquake, and even an elementary school. But these demolitions were not the first time that Rincon Hill was disrupted by a major construction project. The first houses on Rincon Hill were built in the 1850s just after the Gold Rush. The Hill was a beautiful quiet place of refuge from the riotous neighborhood to the north, a place known as "Happy valley" full of saloons, brothels, and gambling halls. Archaeologist Jennifer Wildt explains the lure of Rincon Hill.

JENNIFER WILDT 
Once merchants got established and the city started to grow, you did get women and children and families and people who didn't want to live near tanneries and didn't want to live near, you know, all of these gambling houses. So people looked for a new place to live. And many of the rich people moved to Rincon Hill, so we have a whole lot of mansions that were built there in the 1850s, '60s, and '70s.

NARRATOR
For wealthy shipping merchants and foreign nobility, Rincon Hill became San Francisco's most desirable address. Dozens of large, comfortable homes sprang up and even some larger mansions with manicured gardens. But there were others in San Francisco who viewed hills like Rincon as barriers to progress. Entrepreneurs leveled numerous sand hills and steep streets in the growing city to make it easier to build and easier to haul things in those days by horse and wagon. To quote an 1863 newspaper article, "The city was laid out by those who believe there is no beauty in anything topographical but dead level." Real estate broker John Middleton was one to advocate for flatness. He envisioned a flat passage cut right through the middle of Rincon Hill to connect downtown with the wharves and the property he owned just a block east of here at Second and Bryant. Using his business connections, he got himself elected to the State Assembly and had a law passed to enable what's today known as the Second Street Cut.

JENNIFER WILDT 
He got the city to agree that they would cut a trench through the middle of Rincon Hill, almost 100 feet deep, almost 100 feet wide. This was vehemently opposed by the residents, but Middleton was able to use his influence to get it done. So it took them a year, there were 500 men and 100 horses to make this cut happen. It created huge problems—that winter when the rains came, the hill was destabilized. Sand started falling in; at least one house fell into the cut.

NARRATOR   
The chasm split the neighborhood in two. A bridge had to be built to reconnect Harrison Street at a cost of $90,000, a lot back then. The wealthy gradually began migrating to more pristine hills—Nob Hill, which then colloquially became known as Snob Hill—and Russian Hill. The infamous swindler, Asbury Harpending, described it as "a sordid bit of real estate roguery." But it was an accomplished fact—the old high-priced residence property was going for a song. By 1880 when writer Robert Louis Stevenson briefly settled nearby, he said, "I had discovered a new slum, a place of precarious sandy cliffs, deep sandy cuttings, solitary ancient houses, and the butt ends of streets. The neighborhood became a lower middle class mix of shabby boarding houses and a few remaining grand old homes until 1906. Jennifer Wildt:

JENNIFER WILDT
The 1906 earthquake and fire that went for three days destroyed everything on Rincon Hill, so even the old houses that were still there, and the decrepit slums that were still there, were burned. The Hill was almost abandoned.

NARRATOR 
In the wake of this destruction, the hill-flattening proposals rose again. This scared off real estate speculators for a while, as did later talk of plans for a trans-Bay bridge to be anchored here. Just before the hill was cleared for the bridge, a journalist described it as "dotted with homemade shacks, compounded a refuse lumber, packing boxes, and sheet iron, very trim and shipshape. Geraniums run blushingly up to the low windowsills." Today, the wealthy have returned to Rincon Hill once again, populating residential towers on the northern slopes, lured as in old days by its views and its easy access to downtown and the waterfront.

NARRATOR
The land beneath your feet was once a beach, the shore of the Bay beneath the steep cliffs of Rincon Hill. You can find some brass inlay in the sidewalks nearby, marking the former shoreline. And just a little ways down the beach, to your left there was a small fishing village in the 1850s, where dozens of Chinese immigrants lived, launched their boats, and prepared their catch for market. During the Gold Rush, many Chinese people came to California, which they called Gum San or Gold Mountain, and they initially came for the same reason everyone else did—to find gold. However, when racist anti-Chinese mining taxes forced them out of mining operations, they began working in other industries like fishing. Established around 1854, the fishing camp was a cluster of some 28 houses and other buildings on the bluff about 30 feet above the Bay. Wooden stairs led down to the beach and a dozen timber piers jetted out into the water, enabling the fishermen to launch their Chinese style of fishing boats known as junks. Historian Sylvia Sun Minnick describes how an early fishing village might have looked.

SYLVIA SUN MINNICK  
They have rough boards, walkways, planks, and they use the land around them. After they put up gill nets and other nets, they dry their fish or their shrimp right where they are. So the fishing villages or shrimp villages are more homey, and they live there. A lot of them live right on the water, it's just on stilts.

NARRATOR 
Some two hundred people lived in this village until the late 1860s when developers began filling in the nearshore waters to create valuable land for waterfront development. The Chinese fishing families relocated to other fishing camps in places like Hunters Point and China Camp in San Rafael. At about that same time, Chinese Americans began harvesting a new commodity from the Bay, small shrimp just a few inches long, which they caught by the thousands in huge nets. One appeal of shrimp fishing was that there was a huge demand for dried shrimp in China, where it remains a prized ingredient in kitchens across the country.

SYLVIA SUN MINNICK 
The fishing industry were pretty much on their own, but they would take the shrimp and the products that they had—half went back to China. The other half went into feeding the people in the California area.

NARRATOR  
Shrimpers in the late 1800s sailed in flat-bottom boats some 20 feet long, with crews of three to five men. They would start at high tide dropping large cone-shaped nets into the water held open by weights, and as the tide began dropping hundreds of shrimp would be swept into the nets. By the 1890s there were some 40 shrimping villages around the Bay catching more than a million pounds of shrimp every year. But anti-Chinese racism had grown in California and police patrols began raiding fishing camps, harassing and arresting fishermen on various pretexts. These patrols along with a declining demand for shrimp led some fish camps to close. Many more disappeared after California passed targeted racist laws in 1905, prohibiting the export of dried shrimp and a 1911 banning the use of bagged nets. A few Chinese shrimping camps made a comeback with more modern equipment at Hunter's Point in the 1930s, before finally closing in 1962. You can visit the preserved site of a shrimping village at China Camp State Park in San Rafael.