Underground and Across the Bay: Transit & Exchange

NARRATOR
About 30 feet underneath this plaza, construction workers in 1994 were digging a light-rail tunnel to connect the line running north along the Embarcadero to the underground train station on Market Street. As the workers slowly dug their way through wet, muddy soils, they suddenly hit something hard—says archaeologist Jim Allan, who consulted for the project.

JIM ALLAN
Prior to encountering this obstacle, the miners were able to make 12 to 15 feet a day. And once they hit it, they were stopped dead. They couldn't get through it, not knowing what it was. It was just a wall of wood to them. And they tried a number of different ways of getting through it and burned up an unbelievable number of chainsaws trying to cut through. The wood was so hard it didn't work. So they finally invented a tool that was like a grinder. They just ground their way through the wood wall and pierced it and then realized that it wasn't a wood wall at all. It was a hull of a ship.

NARRATOR
Jim Allan and his team quickly surmised that this must be a ship from the Gold Rush because many wooden ships from the late 1800s were known to be buried beneath the streets. The tunnel's path was headed right into the port side bow of the ship, a curving surface of solid oak, sheathed in a thin layer of copper that protected the wood from ship worms. The workers began cutting away the pieces of the ship's hold that stood in the path of the tunnel. They had to cut the wood hull into many small pieces in order to get it out of the confined space within the tunnel.

JIM ALLAN
There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of timber that came out of the excavation that we pretty successfully pieced together in our warehouse just down the road here. It's kind of like putting a jigsaw puzzle together and reduced massive piles of cut of wood that we had to move around and sort of pieced together to figure out where we were in the ship and what this curvature meant and what that particular timber was, where it went, and how it connected to this.

NARRATOR
Eventually, they had assembled enough pieces that they could identify the vessel as a cargo ship named the Rome. The Rome had arrived in San Francisco in 1850 on its last voyage from New York. Allan says its cargo from that journey is well documented. 

JIM ALLAN
It was carrying a number of passengers whose primary goal in coming to San Francisco was to get into the gold fields. But it was also carrying a cargo of dried apples, 1,200 bottles of ale, 1,200 bottles of brown stout, barrels of beans, salted pork, cement, 50 cots, and 200 boxes of window glass.

NARRATOR 
And like many ships arriving during the Gold Rush, the Rome was quickly abandoned in the harbor as its crew headed off to search for gold. Within a couple of years, a former ship's captain from Norway named Fred Lawson bought the Rome. Lawson was engaged in a peculiar business, he sank ships on purpose to help people turn water into land. Jim Allan explains that this was part of a larger effort to create new real estate in the growing city.

JIM ALLAN
They had piers and wharves; city fathers projected those in such a way that they divided the cove up into blocks, rectangles, or squares that they sold as if it were real estate. They're called water lots. If you had the money, you could buy a water lot, which was just a square in the cove—a square of water. And it was yours, but you were responsible for filling it. And the quickest way to do that was to take the sand from the surroundings sand dunes, which not only assisted in filling the water lot but it also created more buildable land to the west. And another way of doing that was just to take any one of these hundreds of abandoned ships, float them into the water lot and sink them because they took up a lot of space. It meant less cost for filling that water lot and quicker turnaround.

NARRATOR
Dozens of the city blocks around the foot of Market Street started out as water lots and Captain Lawson sank numerous ships on these lots. He told a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner how he sank the Rome in 1852.

HISTORICAL QUOTE
"The ship Rome was sunk by me at the southwest corner of Market and East streets. Now Embarcadero where the ensign saloon was; her bow touches the edge of Market Street. I sank her for Joseph Galloway and I had to do it in a hurry. One morning he came running up to me and excitedly asked if I had a ship. I told him yes that I had the room. He told me an injunction was to be served to prevent him from having any more piles driven but that if he could have the ship scuttled before one o'clock, he would be all right. Before one o'clock my towboat took the Rome in to where he wanted it. And down she went. I got $5,000 for that job."

NARRATOR
The Rome was left largely intact when it was sunk, says Jim Allen.

JIM ALLAN
It appears that the only thing that Fred Lawson did was strip it of its masts, and its tackle, sailing gear, and whatever cargo may have been left. And he removed the fore deck—the top deck closest to the bow—so that he could get the sand in the bottom of the hull to sink it.

NARRATOR
Allen says that Lawson did leave some very large jars sitting on the deck of the Rome:

JIM ALLAN
Ceramic jars that are sort of amphora shaped and maybe two to three feet tall. One was broken; a couple of were intact. They were sitting right on the deck; I'm pretty sure they were used for water.

NARRATOR
Most of the Rome still sits buried underground. The construction crews only removed what they needed so that they could finish the tunnel. Then they sealed off the rest of the ship behind the tunnel walls. That means the if you're writing a Muni N train or T train northbound into Embarcadero station, you'll ride right through the hull of a sailing ship that's more than 150 years old.

NARRATOR
The area where you're standing, the foot of Market Street, has gone through almost unimaginable transformations over the years. For example, this particular place used to be water—part of Yerba Buena Cove—as archaeologist Jim Allan describes.

JIM ALLAN
Today it's almost impossible to conceive if you stand at the intersection of Market, or on Market, and you look all the way up to 1st Street. That was the other end of the cove. 

NARRATOR
A full five blocks of Market Street was part of the shallow cove until it was filled in with sand, rock, burned buildings, and other debris. Today, it's solid enough to stand on and to build on. But what happens if there's an earthquake? Most structures in downtown San Francisco have never been tested by a severe earthquake. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused a bit of damage here. But the epicenter was far enough away that San Francisco didn't experience the strongest shaking. One major piece of infrastructure that did fall victim to the '89 quake? The Embarcadero Freeway. This double decker roadway ran directly above the Embarcadero, delivering Bay Bridge traffic to neighborhoods north of Market Street. It was also quite an eyesore, blocking views of the Ferry Building and the Bay. It's hard to imagine how different the waterfront looked with a freeway running through it. The San Francisco Chronicle's architecture critic John King described it this way.

HISTORIC QUOTE
"The Embarcadero Freeway cut off the downtown from the water that gave birth to it. And it left the iconic Ferry Building—statuesque survivor of the 1906 earthquake—stranded behind a dark wall of car exhaust and noise. Oppressive does not begin to describe it."

NARRATOR 
During the earthquake, the shaking caused deep diagonal cracks in the pillars holding up the deck of the freeway. Officials closed it immediately. And although freeway engineers devised a plan to repair the freeway, the community movement to tear it down prevailed. This led the way to the transformation of the Embarcadero from an ugly port with declining businesses to a destination for tourism and recreation.

JONATHAN CORDERO 
Yelamu, or what we now call San Francisco, has long been known as an international city. In the late 1800s, after the Gold Rush and after California became a state, peoples from Europe, South America, China, and Australia lived in San Francisco. For thousands of years before the Gold Rush, Yelamu was an intertribal community made up of a small number of independent villages whose members had spouses from other tribes or nations across the Bay. 

Today we use the word Yelamu to refer both to a people and to a territory. The Yelamu refers to the original peoples of the territory within what is now known as the city and county of San Francisco. The Yelamu are considered to be an independent tribe of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples because they spoke the Ramaytush dialect of the San Francisco Bay Costanoan language. Also, Yelamu is used as the Native name for the place now called San Francisco. 

The Yelamu occupied several villages on the eastern side of the Peninsula near freshwater sources and the Bay shore, where they collected shellfish, hunted for fowl, and fished. Shellmounds along the coast indicate places where the Yelamu cooked and ate. One of their villages near Visitation Valley along the Bay shore was named Amuctac, which loosely translated means "place of eating." 

In order to maintain good relations with their neighbors and trade partners, the Yelamu intermarried with tribes across the Bay. They intermarried not only with tribes to their immediate south along the Peninsula, but also with tribal groups to their north who spoke the Coast Miwok language. And they intermarried with tribal groups to the east of the Bay between Oakland and Richmond who spoke a different dialect. Mission records indicate that similar marriage patterns continued after the arrival of the Spanish missionaries. If we think of the small independent tribes that formed the Yelamu community as nations, then Yelamu, the place, was international well before the Gold Rush, with spouses from many other tribes or nations living within the Yelamu community. 

In addition, because the Yelamu were the first Native peoples to be forced into Mission Dolores, their women became spouses for some of the mission staff who were brought north from Mexico. In total, five mission staff married a total of ten Native women. The multiple marriages are due to the disproportionately high death rates among Native women at the mission. 

On rare occasions, a couple had a child born at the mission and in one of the spouses home villages after being baptized at the mission. That was because the Franciscans limited the Native peoples' time on leave to usually two weeks a year, at which time they could visit relatives in their home villages. In 1795, however, that occurrence became more common because of an event known as the Huchiun exodus. During the summer of 1795, many newly arrived Huchiun peoples and other Native peoples began a mass exodus from Mission Dolores in San Francisco. They complained of physical abuse, rape, hunger, and slave-like conditions. In response, the Franciscan missionaries sent 14 baptized Natives to meet with the so-called "fugitives" in order to bring them back. Most of the mission Natives were Huchiun or had Huchiun spouses. In the ensuing fight, 7 of the 14 baptized Natives were killed. After that deadly conflict, no Huchiun tribal couple was married at Mission Dolores over the next five years. 

Most of the Huchiun peoples who fled eventually returned, only to succumb to extremely high death rates at Mission Dolores. At the time of the secularization of Mission Dolores in the mid-1830s, none of the Yelamu peoples were living.