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Part II: Mission Bay and Mission Delores
It was still misting a bit when I got out on Wednesday morning. I had gone online the night before and found a walking tour of the Mission Bay area—it started about two miles from my hotel. On my way to the tour I stopped to get a 3-day Metro Pass. For $20 I was able to jump on any kind of public transportation—except BART. That day, it came in real handy.
The Mission Bay Walking Tour was a lot of talk and not much walk. The Mission Bay district is one the east side of SF below Market Street–and it is no longer a bay. By the late 1800s, Mission Bay had been filled in and was used as a major rail yard for the Southern Pacific—still a giant and powerful California entity. In the 1980s, the railroad pulled up the tracks and a huge swath of land lay waiting for development. For about 20 years the city debated what to do with the land. About 2000, the San Francisco Giants built a new stadium in Mission Bay’s China Basin area. Meanwhile the Southern Pacific Railroad started the largest building project in SF since 1906, the year of the earthquake and fire. Mission Bay began to fill in once again.
Now the Bay is about 50% developed. Several hundred private condominiums dot the landscape, while the University of San Francisco has begun building a new medical campus in the area. Of course, everything came to a halt two years ago; there has been little activity lately. Still it seems to be a good and needed addition to the city. In the midst of all this building, 20 houseboats bob on Mission Creek, a large stream bisecting the district. It’s quite a sight to see them strung along the creek, with brand new rows of condos towering over them.
While on my tour, the sun came out and the pavement dried up. Suddenly life was much better. I hurried back to my hotel to change and then headed out. I took the trolley to 16th & Mission Street: a more depressed area then that around my 9th and Mission hotel. At least the sun was shining.
My destination was Mission Delores. You may have noticed that this missive contains a lot of references to Mission: Mission Bay, Mission Creek, and Mission Street. All of them take their name from Mission Delores. La Misión de San Francisco de Asis is the oldest building in San Francisco, dating from 1776. At that time, there were only two structures in the area, the mission and the fort on the Presidio: church and state. San Francisco was, like Santa Fe, the northernmost post of the Spanish Empire in America.
Some of you brighter lights, those who haven’t dozed off by now, may be saying, “Wait a minute. The Spanish came to America in 1492; Santa Fe was founded in 1610. Why did it take the Spanish until 1776 to found a city near the greatest natural bay in the world?” Why indeed.
Folks had been poking around the west coast of the America since the 1500s. Sir Francis Drake reported landing on the coast of California in 1579, probably somewhere near Monterey. For 200 years after, hundreds of ships had passed along the coast. Yet no one was able to find the entrance to the great harbor; no one even knew it was there! The thick fog that so often curls up from the Pacific Ocean hid the bay entrance. In fact, the Golden Gate was not first discovered by sea, but by land.
In 1769 a lowly Sergeant Jose Ortega, on an expedition to the northern reaches of the Spanish Empire, found the La Boca Del Puerto (the mouth of the Bay). It took seven years before the Spanish colonized the area, coming in 1776. The military set up at the Presidio, near the Boca, and the Franciscans set up about three miles to the southeast, on a creek leading into the bay.
Under Spanish rule, San Francisco remained a small concern; it was simply too far north. Meanwhile, the Spanish Empire was slowly disintegrating and there was little money or will to exploit the area. It wasn’t until the Yankees and other foreigners came into the bay in the 1820s that business began to pick up. Whaling ships had begun to use the bay as a place to take on wood and water, and enterprising Yanks began to trade with them, using the Yerba Buena Cove (the cove, like Mission Bay, is completely filled in and is home to SF’s Financial District). Captain Montgomery raised the American flag in Portsmouth Square in 1846 and two years later the U.S. had secured California. It January of 1848 gold was discovered in the mountains to the east. It took a while for the news to leak out, but by 1849, the rush was on.
San Francisco went from a town of @ 500 in 1848, to a city of 35,000 by 1850. Such an explosion of humanity naturally overwhelmed all the resources of the civil administration. SF was as wild a town as there was. In 1850, an egg cost $1.00. Thoughout the 1850s, vigilanty justice was the law of the day. The city boomed throughout the late 1800s and into the 20th century. The great earthquake and fire of 1906 slowed it down for a year or two, but it went right on booming. Today the Bay Area has a population of 6.9 million people.
But I digress.
Throughout this time, Mission Dolores remained a magnet. Market Street started out as a way from the bay to the mission. As SF began to prosper, the church was remodeled and a new cathedral was built next to it. Still the old Spanish mission continues to draw people to it—people like me.
End of Part II.
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Neil Trembley's Missives 
Interesting stuff. However, I like hearing more about the cool women you meet. Pix would be nice, too.
Comment by Bunkie Joe March 31, 2010 @ 9:53 pm