"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang
But a whimper."
TS Eliot, also somewhat obsessed with armageddon.
And lo... the world goes on.
In my happy place. Rain coming down--in sheets, buckets, garbage cans. Spent the day yesterday tracing the original coastline of Yerba Buena Cove. The ultimate SF history geek thing to do. The sort of thing everyone tells me I will have no time for once Lombard of the Intertidal Jr. arrives in about two months.
So getting my last wandering-around-San Francisco-retracing Yerba Buena Cove days in.
Clark's Point. The northern boundary of Yerba Buena Cove, now located somewhere below the intersection of Broadway And Battery Streets.
Started at Clark's Point (buried under ten feet of concrete) and walked down to Rincon Pt (which has a bridge tower on top of it now). Making sure to follow the contours of the old shoreline as delineated in the 1849-51 maps as much as I could. I've always found these early SF maps confusing because no two are alike. Finally realized why (slow learner). A map of SF made in January of 1850 is going to look entirely different from a map made 6 months or 11 months later--so fast was the rate of development. Unreal. All the dirt excavated to build those early houses was dumped on the shoreline. And if you figure 50,000 houses were built in the first two years after the gold rush... that's a lot of dirt.
All that remains of Rincon Point: buried under several hundred thousand pounds of concrete and steel.
Happily, there are plenty of maps out there detailing the original contour of SF's shoreline for the lunatic fringe of the history buff contingent.
Most of these are from the Madrina Group site
And from www.foundsf.org
Original shoreline map with "points" drawn in by MFN Editorial Dept.
I guess I'm particularly obsessed with YBC because... well because for one thing it's where everything began (Richardson settled there, Montgomery came ashore there, etc). For another it was a cove. I mean, you look at the SF shoreline now, it's sort of a gentle, cove-less curve. Nothing particularly notable about it. But back in the pre-gold rush days it had as many coves as the Marin shoreline from the North Tower to Point Bonita.
The main coves from north to south were these: Marina/Harbor View, North Beach, Black Point Cove, Yerba Buena and Mission Bay. Nice to think about these gentle coves and the wildlife therein. We're talking salt marsh galore. Eel grass. My gawd. Imagine the eel grass. The fishermen here know what I'm talking about. (My friend John Foss, fisherman, fishmonger and rover of the coast has "eelgrassroots" as his email address). But they never had a chance (the coves I mean). The early settlement of San Francisco was, as we all know, a furious and ungentle affair. We've all seen the photographs of the hundreds of abandoned ships along the bay. These ships contributed heavily to the filling of Yerba Buena Cove... as you can see below.
Yerba Buena Cove same year as the map above, 1851.
Trying to think of a local area where one might get a sense of what the SF shoreline was once like... It's kind of tough because in the case of North Beach cove and Black Point you had a combination of rocky and muddy intertidal. I can't think of a place that combines these features now. Belvedere maybe? Hmmmm. Definitely plenty of subtidal eel grass in there. In fact that's the reason the herring spawn near Belvedere.
Unfortunately most of our salt marshes are now way up (and down) at the ends of the bay. (Imagine pre-columbian horseneck abundance in Mission Bay!) Hmmm. Gotta think about this one for a while. The early settlers all described three things: mud, sand dunes and shallow water.
Yerba Buena Cove 1853
It's quite possible I suppose that the ecosystems of those coves are simply lost to us forever. But it's not too hard to imagine them. Thinking of some of the coves on the south side of Tomales Bay... maybe...
Here's an interesting (and quite illustrative) quote. This comes from the log books of Father Pedro Font, who was sent to scout out the bay in 1776.
March 29, 1776:
"Passing through wooded hills and over flats with good lands we encountered two lagoons [Yerba Buenba and Mission Bay?] and some springs of good water with plentiful grass, fennel and other useful herbs, we arrived at a beautiful arroyo . . . It [Mission Creek] enters the plain by a fall which it makes on emerging from the hills, and with it all can be irrigated, and at the same fall a mill can be erected, for it is very suitable to that purpose."
An artist's rendering of the Portola expedition. (FYI: Would've credited it but I could not find the artist's name. Downloaded the image from these guys: exploresf).
A waterfall where Mission Creek came out of the hills. What hills? The hills above the Mission. Potrero? The Castro? Delores Ave? Huh.
Here's a bit on Mission Creek:
"On April 5, 1776, Juan Bautista de Anza’s party rowed up Mission Creek from the bay to establish a mission. April 5 is the feast day of Our Lady of Sorrows (Nuestra Señora de los Dolores)—thus the name Mission Dolores. {MFN Editorial Machine: Are we then to assume that the stories of the two sobbing Yelamu are false?} The creek they entered wound through marshes to a tidal lagoon. The creek probably spanned a width of forty feet or more and, at 100 to 200 cubic feet per second, offered enough current to require real effort in the arms of the rowers. The bay-bound water was sweet and excellent for drinking (as it still is today), though brackish as it mixed with salty baywater."
{My bad. I don't remember where I found this quote. FoundSF most likely}
Estero de Limantour
Actually, thinking now of some of the coves in Tomales Bay... also Estero de Limantour... I bet they were not so very different from Mission Bay... food for thought.
Anyhoo. Here's some early maps to gawk at (above). Not sure why the rain brings out these melancholy reveries.
Where the hell are the herring?
Kirk-out
The earth shaker is very upset with Spinnaker Restaurant
