Telegraph Hill

NARRATOR 
You're standing in Levi's Plaza, its fountain cascading over granite blocks facing Telegraph Hill. Just about everything you see apart from the hill itself arrived quite recently. The fountain and Plaza were built in 1980. If you could peel back the layers of concrete below, you'd find remnants from earlier times, warehouses, a Gold Rush era wharf, and under that, layers of mud and sediment deposited over thousands of years. But much older by far is the sandstone of Telegraph Hill. This rock, known as greywacke sandstone, was born about 130 to 135 million years ago, during the Cretaceous, dinosaur times. Deep beneath the ocean, two tectonic plates were colliding. The Farralon plate was forcing itself underneath the North American plate, creating an underwater trench along the junction.

From time to time, sandy sediments would come tumbling down into the trench in massive underwater landslides. This created a layer of sandy soil that hardened over millions of years into greywacke sandstone. Millions more years later, it was pushed upward to become part of Telegraph Hill, as well as Rincon Hill, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, and Alcatraz Island. Once the hill formed, it stood quite peacefully for thousands of years, touched only by the weather, plants, animals, and Indigenous peoples, its shape largely unchanged. Then in the late 1840s, when arriving cargo ships wanted a place to offload their cargo, European immigrants began digging away and later blasting away at the sandstone hillside.

JAMES DELGADO
Telegraph Hill, with its massive stone, was early whittled away to make a more firm platform and flatter ground for the warehouses that were constructed at its base.

NARRATOR
Archaeologist James Delgado.

JAMES DELGADO 
As more flatland was needed, Telegraph Hill was quarried away. That stone was not only dumped into the Bay, but it was also placed inside ships as ballast that helped stabilize them. And so it was that Telegraph Hill became one of the best traveled pieces of San Francisco.

NARRATOR 
To this day, remnants of Telegraph Hill can be found in Valparaiso, Chile. The sandstone was relatively easy to quarry, and so was used to construct streets, buildings, and San Francisco's first seawall in 1867. Among the excavators of Telegraph Hill were the notorious Gray brothers, George and Henry Gray. In 1887, they set up a quarry at Green and Sansome streets, breaking up the sandstone to make cement. They quarried so relentlessly that the hill turned into a precipitous cliff. Homes along the summit would shake with every dynamite blast. In 1895, after a house slipped off its foundation, a judge ruled that the Gray brothers had to stop. But using money and political connections, they found ways to continue carving away at the hillside. Their digging finally ended in 1914, when a disgruntled worker unable to collect his back wages shot and killed George Gray. Their legacy can be seen in Telegraph Hill's extremely steep cliffs, where boulders still come tumbling down from time to time. This site boasts more than just a view of Telegraph Hill. Continue on to hear about what the archaeologists discovered in this very Plaza.

NARRATOR
When Levi's Plaza was being built in 1980, construction crews at the site encountered a solid wood object. A team of archaeologists identified it as a well preserved sailing ship, believed to be the William Gray in the early 1850s. The ship had been used as the foundation for a wharf built on top of it. Archaeologist Jim Delgado describes what it was like to discover such a wel-preserved ship.

JAMES DELGADO 
I was able, with the team, to scrape mud away and climb over the railings, to stand on the decks of a ship that had come to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, and then had been filled with rock and buried in landfill to become the base of a wharf where ships were tying up to and discharging their cargoes during the Gold Rush. And to realize that something from that far back was there, not just something I could dive on, but actually walk on as an intact thing, from that period, was magic. It was like walking through the streets of Pompeii.

NARRATOR
Today, there is no sign that a ship is still buried beneath your feet, unless you know that the fountain marks the spot. But you can find some warehouses from the Gold Rush. Just three blocks south of here at the corner of Front and Vallejo streets are two brick warehouses built in 1855 and the Italian Swiss Colony warehouse just north of the fountain was built for Italian immigrant grape growers in 1903. Telegraph Hill has been an important icon in the San Francisco landscape for years. But in the Gold Rush years, buried ships and quarries were only a part of this place's significance. Continue on to hear how Telegraph Hill was critical to welcoming and identifying ships to San Francisco Bay.

NARRATOR 
When you hear the name Telegraph Hill, you understandably might imagine it was the site of an early electric telegraph. But you'd be wrong about that. The hill's namesake was a physical telegraph, a tower equipped with two movable arms or semaphore arms that were arranged at different angles to encode messages describing what type of ship was entering the Bay.

JAMES DELGADO
In San Francisco, the system was adopted atop Telegraph Hill, in which now when a ship sailed into the Golden Gate, the eagle eyes of the observer could look down.

NARRATOR
Archaeologist Jim Delgado.

JAMES DELGADO
They could determine what flag it was flying, they could determine what type of ship it was. And with that intelligence, they would ring a bell and rig the semaphore arms and raise the flag of the country to which the ship belonged. So you could look up when the bell rang and you could see that there was a barque inbound from Great Britain, or that you had a full rig ship of three masts coming in from the United States. If you were somebody who was anticipating a cargo of shovels or rice or beans or building materials, you are waiting every day for that ship to come in. Bong, the bell would go, you'd look up you'd see and you'd say an American ship and it's full rigged that very well might be mine.

NARRATOR
Enterprising merchants could then bid for a valuable incoming shipment of goods.

JAMES DELGADO
And when the bell was rung up on Telegraph Hill and a ship was coming in, you take a white haul boat, row out there, and say, "What ship is that? And where are you bound from and what do you have?," and that merchant would then say "I'm happy to represent you captain and sell what you have." That ship would then be brought in, it would be discharged either at a warehouse on shore or even on the pier itself, covered over with the sail to keep it from the rain or the elements, or into the hold of a storeship—a floating warehouse—then be auctioned off. This was how fortunes were made.

NARRATOR
The physical telegraph operated for three years until 1853 when an electric telegraph was installed outside the Golden Gate, making the semaphore obsolete. Today, San Franciscans looking up at the hill see Coit Tower, an art deco icon built in 1933, with interior murals depicting the Depression era, life, and labor. As you leave here, head toward Telegraph Hill. If you're able, climb some of the steps to appreciate the view and steepness of the cliff. To touch a piece of the sandstone proceed north along Sansome Street, looking along the right hand side for some rocky debris near the sidewalk.