An Unvanished Story:
5,500 Years of History in the Vicinity of
Seventh & Mission Streets, San Francisco


The Coming of the Spanish, the Gold Rush, 
and Early Days of San Francisco

The Spanish Presence At Mission Bay, 1775-1833
[Adapted from Olmsted (1986: 6-9)]

The first European boat to explore the waters of Mission Bay was a cayuco, or dugout, made from the trunk of a redwood taken from the bank of the Carmel River and brought into San Francisco Bay on August 2, 1775, aboard the San Carlos. As the San Carlos lay anchored off Angel Island, pilot Juan Bautista Aquirre followed his instructions to explore the southeastern part of San Francisco Bay. No diary has survived, but all later accounts agree that as the Spanish pilot entered Mission Bay he saw three Indians on shore, and they were weeping. He named the protected bay Ensenada de los Llornnes-or Cove of the Weepers. Thus Mission Bay was discovered by the Spanish and given a name that seems prophetic for its native inhabitants.

The Spanish soldiers and Franciscan padres explored the land around San Francisco Bay from 1769 to 1776. They were charged with finding the best sites for a fort and two missions that would establish the church north of Monterey. Using an astrolabe and a compass borrowed from the Carmel Mission, Father Pedro Font drew the best map to survive these expeditions and keyed it to his diary descriptions, complete with pen sketches of the islands in the bay. On March 29, 1776, enroute from the site chosen for the future presidio to find the most suitable spot for a mission nearby, he wrote:

Passing through wooded hills and over flats with good lands we encountered two lagoons [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.
The presidio was dedicated on September 17, 1776, and the Mission of San Francisco de Asis on October 9, 1776, both with all the fanfare, firepower and ceremony the Spanish could muster. In Farther Palou's diary he noted that the Indians were so frightened at the sound of the ceremonial cannon firing that they fled the scene.

The "Missionized" Indians

From their diaries and letters we know that the Spanish fathers viewed the California Indians as lost children, incapable of understanding beyond a simple level. Further, they saw them as lost souls, doomed to eternal suffering unless converted and baptized. The priests were appalled at the nearly naked Indians, smeared with mud to keep out the cold, living on acorn mush, in huts made of reeds. They saw themselves as inspired rescuers. Their plan was to clothe the Indians and teach them to weave cloth to improve their diet and teach them to raise beans, corn, and fruit; to build permanent houses and teach them to make adobe bricks. This plan would take about ten years, the padres calculated, then the Christian Indians would settle their families on small farms, effectively colonizing California. The saving of their souls would proceed at the same time.

Fear and fascination were the means for saving souls. The adobe walls of the mission were painted with the glories of heaven emblazoned above, and below, fiery scenes of explicit tortures reserved for the damned. The recruited neophytes were quick to learn the Lord's Prayer in Spanish and to follow the rituals of the mass. In return they were free to roam within the confines of the mission, where they attended services and found the music of bells, flutes and a small violin captivating. Missionary zeal can best be understood as the padres' conception of an inspired rescue effort: overcome all obstacles and save the Indians from the observed hardships of this world and the certain tortures of the next.

After the death of Father Serra in August 1784, followed by the departure of Father Palou for Mexico, life for the Indian converts at Mission Bay became more and more repressive. Diego de Borica, one of the most enlightened governors of California, began to look into complaints from Father J.M. Fernandez. After sleepless nights and much worry, he had written that in 1795, 203 Indians died and 200 escaped at San Francisco. The Indians were compelled to do excessive work, handcuffed, imprisoned and beaten for the most trivial offences. "When the miserable Indians, learning too late that their former gentile life, even with its precariousness, was far preferable to Christianization . . . they attempted to regain their freedom by flight. They were hunted down and punished with tenfold vigor."

    View 1816 eyewitness drawings of Mission Indians
The Indians left the San Francisco mission at every opportunity. It is from the accounts of a handful of visitors, perhaps ten in all, that we know how the Spanish tried and failed. It should be remembered that these observers of San Francisco's mission, much as they deplored the means and effect of religious conversion, looked upon the California Indians in their natural state as uncivilized and in need of help. Accounts written after 1815 began to list the grim statistics of Indian death by disease: measles, cholera, smallpox and "the disease given them by the Spanish soldiers" or syphilis. One account in 1816 stated ". . . of the 1000 Indians in San Francisco, 300 die annually. . ." By 1833, only 204 converted Indians were left at Mission Bay.

In 1806, G.H. von Landsdorff, a German doctor who accompanied Nicolai Rezanov on a Russian expedition to northern California, described the Indian dances:

In their dances the Indians remain almost always in the same place, endeavoring, partly with their bows and arrows, partly with the feathers they hold in their hands and wear on their heads, and also by measured springs, by different movements of their bodies, and by facial contortions, to imitate scenes of battle or of domestic life. Their music consists of singing and clapping with a stick at one end. The women have their own particular song, and their own particular way of dancing. They hop about near the men, but never in time with them. Their principal action is in pressing the abdomen with the thumb and forefinger, first to one side and then to the other.
Mission lands, according to custom, extended to meet the nearest adjacent mission holdings. In its first half-century, the Mission Dolores claimed land all the way from the Golden Gate southward to San Francisquito Creek. By law both mission and pueblo were entitled to four square leagues of land. At the time, much of the 46 square miles of the peninsula were covered with sand. San Francisco would be clearly an outpost of the great Spanish Empire. Only in the 1830s did commercial activity pick up, as it did all along the California coast, thanks to the hides and tallow the Californios could exchange for eastern and European manufactured goods.

Sailing past the Presidio in 1792, the Explorer George Vancouver dropped anchor at a sandy cove several miles down the bay from the Presidio which was called Yerba Buena. Ships demonstrated a preference for the spot over the exposed anchorage opposite the presidio as did the people. Forty years later permanent buildings were put up on the shore, and thus the pueblo moved to Yerba Buena. This center, recognized in 1835 as a "pueblo" under Mexican law, had as always, a plaza. Originally located adjacent to a natural shipping cove, it now lies inland because the City filled in Yerba Buena Cove. The old plaza is now Portsmouth Square located at Kearney and Clay Streets, depicted below on a copy of O' Farrell's 1847 Plan of San Francisco. Note that the map shows Portsmouth Square, as well as the filled-in Bay.

Site of 1835 'pueblo' plaza. Originally located adjacent to a natural shipping cove, it now lies inland because the City filled in Yerba Buena Cove. Map: O' Farrell's 1847 Plan of San Francisco. Note that the map shows Portsmouth Square, as well as the filled-in Bay.

As Yerba Buena was formally recognized, citizens such as Jacob P. Leese applied for lots. The need for a survey prompted the first formal survey of the town, that of Jean Jacques Vioget in 1839. His survey laid out a grid of blocks around the plaza, each block composed of six square lots.

Jean Jacques Vioget's survey map of 1839. His survey laid out a grid of blocks around the plaza, each block composed of six square lots.

Early American Period

In addition to the rancho owners, the peninsula had another claimant, the pueblo and now American city of Yerba Buena. Like other claimants, it too would have to submit a survey of its land even though city lots had already been granted since 1836 and would continue to be sold. Later surveys such as that of the City Surveyor William M. Eddy in 1851 repeated the pattern established by Vioget. Eddy's map is known as the "Red Line Map" since a dark red line showed the shoreline as it was in 1847 when the city was founded, with First Street at the shoreline. The outer line represented the farthest extension of filling permitted by the State Legislature. The intervening tidal flats were in the process of being filled, their names in place. Most of Yerba Buena Cove had been filled in. Yerba Buena Cemetery, on outer Market Street, was near the site of the present Civic Center.

This same year, 1851, San Francisco, as the successor to the pueblo of Yerba Buena, had put in a claim to the Land Commission for its four square leagues of land, a claim that was finally patented by the United States in 1884. In the interim a number of conflicting claims cases filled the courts wherein the grantees of Mission Dolores ranch land claimed title to the same land San Francisco called its pueblo land, but the mission eventually lost to the city.

The Gold Rush

The period 1849-1859 has been described as:

". . .the greatest mass movement of people since the crusades. They came by boat around the treacherous seas of the Horn, or made the dangerous journey across the malaria-ridden swamps of Panama; they came by foot, overland from Independence, Missouri, as soon as the spring grass was high enough to feed the oxen pulling their wagons" (Resource Consultants 1993: 33).
Incredibly, between 1847 and 1849, the population of the city rose from 459 to nearly 30,000. Housing was practically non-existant and most new arrivals were housed in canvas tents or rough-board shanties. Immigration continued to accelerate in succeeding years. In Yerba Buena Cove, a shifting mass of men from every nation in the world, having abandoned their ships, were soon on their way to Sacramento and the gold mines. Abandoned ships were quickly improvised for shelter or as store-ships by merchants (Resource Consultants 1993: 33, 38).
    View Daguerreotype of Yerba Buena Cove in 1851 [71 K]
Maps drawn in the early 1850's show the extended waterfront as of that date, Battery, Front, and Davis Streets occupied, the wharves relocated ever deeper in the water, and the extensive marshlands that projected inland. In 1847 Market Street had been laid out at an angle pointing toward the old mission settlement, and later the streets south of Market were laid out parallel to Market, but in blocks four times as large as those to the north. Land was set aside for public use. With the Gold Rush, the population rose quickly to pass 35,000 in 1850 and to 56,800 by 1860. The business of the city demanded new services. To provide for the office needs of bankers, shippers, insurance companies, and miners, a Financial Center began with small brick buildings near Portsmouth Square and gradually spread southward with ever-larger buildings.
    View U.S. Coast Survey Map of 1852 [45 K]
    View 1857 U.S. Coast Survey map [80 K] and detail showing location of Seventh & Mission Project Area [30 K]
In 1900, one out of every five people in San Francisco lived between Market and Townsend Streets, from the waterfront to Eleventh Street. Those boundaries, however did not enclose a homogenous work or living place. Closer to the wharves were the boiler factories and foundries, the homes of sailors and waterfront workers, the breweries and multiplicity of saloons. The most desirable sites in the neighborhood were occupied by saloons. San Francisco had more sailors than any other American city, even more than New York. As one looked to areas west and toward the Eleventh Street boundary, despite the many single male "lodgers," there were more women and families proportionately than in other areas of the city. Sailors were not the only single men in the boarding houses; lumbermen from Alaska and miners who came to the city with their "stake" swelled the "lodger" population. They lived mostly east of Sixth Street, and the census data of 1900 show a pattern of deprivation. Children of ten and twelve worked, and women worked as house cleaners. West of Sixth one would find more clerks and low-paid white-collar workers. Overall, half the population in the area at large were foreign born.

Before the earthquake and fire of 1906, much of the area consisted of two or three-story wooden rowhouses packed wall-to-wall. Larger masonry buildings stood on Mission Street. Narrow, residential alleys, such as Jessie and Stevenson streets, ran east and west, where wooden buildings and owners' neglect was the rule. In contrast, the Mission District, which began at Twelfth Street and spread west, was primarily an area of families. The Mission District had a population density far below the citywide average and much lower than the densely packed area to the east. Here were found large wooden churches and neighborhood businesses. Thus, we can look upon Block 3703, lying between Sixth and Seventh streets, as transitional; it was densely packed, with many foreign born workers and small businesses, but fewer saloons and no boiler factories.

The 1906 fire took out nearly all the buildings east of Ninth Street, and this downtown area fell within the newly drawn fire line. Brick buildings or other fireproof structures replaced the old. As the century progressed South of Market became more commercial, less residential, and buildings were torn down to allow for parking lots. It was during this 20th century development that the buildings we can document through property records in Block 3703 came to be built.

South-of-Market History


An 'Unvanished' History Site Map
South-of-Market History
Restoration of the U.S. 
Court of Appeals Building
Project
Earthquake & Fire
References Cited
Prehistory
Archival Study
Recommended Reading
The Early Days of San Francisco
Additional Internet Sources