When Glenn Lym first moved to SOMA, as an architect he quickly noticed that things were a little out of whack. Buildings tilted here, streets cracked there – nothing was straight. As he began to look into it, what unfolded was a story of how downtown San Francisco was changed from a field of dunes to a street gridded flatland.
Of course, that’s hard to imagine these days. It’s hard to think that our Market street — along more or less flat straight shot to the wharf — was a non-obvious even audacious idea. The truth is that downtown was the last stop of the sands being blown across the peninsula. To make the gridded streets we have today, road builders had to cut through huge sand dunes.
Glenn made this more real through photos and a 3D model he’s built using maps done by U.S. coastal surveys around the time of the Civil War — the dunescape was an important feature of the land.
The dunes in those days were thought of as being the abode of thieves and vagabonds, not something to be preserved let alone protected. They were slowly and surely carried off and used as fill to further expand the city, the 60′ dune at 2nd and Market, the 120′ dune further up Market.
Glenn talked about the development of SOMA, Rincon, Happy Valley — the chief residential area of the city for a long time –, the Hayes street marsh upon which many of those sinking SOMA buildings are built on, the private plank roads that were built out over the sand to the flat and desirable Mission area.
The sand reached the edge of the Mission district, Glenn showed a picture of Woodward Gardens built on a dune. But it was not the dunes alone that were removed, things like Rincon Hill and the Clinton mound were good solid rock.
It is amazing to think of the effort, industry, and vision required to do all of that — in such a relatively short period of time changing the face of this place. It seems like we would be hard put to recognize this place if we had a chance to go back.
Glenn also showed a video on the history of Golden Gate park, which you can watch yourself online:
Part two is also available on YouTube. Or you can watch it in higher resolution in its entirety on Glenn’s site.
Also worth watching, are Glenn’s other videos from his HERE series.
SF Natural History Series 