San Francisco’s early waterfront was a chaotic, constantly changing, never-to-be-seen-again place — a lattice-work of hastily erected wooden structures, none of which would meet OSHA requirements.
One of San Francisco’s civic treasures, the shrinking Municipal Pier at Aquatic Park, was recently closed for safety reasons by the National Park Service after an earthquake in late October. Just how unsafe the Muni Pier is remains unclear — the NPS said it sustained unspecified “structural damage” during the earthquake.
Today, the corner of Leidesdorff and Commercial Streets, between Montgomery and Sansome and Sacramento and Clay, is an obscure inner-block intersection in the heart of the Financial District. It has no connection whatsoever to the Bay, which is six blocks and more than half a mile to the east. But from 1849 until the early 1850s, this corner was the heart and soul of San Francisco’s waterfront.
These wharves were the engines that drove the instant city’s skyrocketing economy. Stores, warehouses and other structures were erected on many wharves, making them essentially city streets on piles. By 1851, as James Delgado notes in “Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront,” “San Francisco had an entire commercial district standing on piles.” Sub-piers ran off some of the wharves. In “Men and Memories of San Francisco in 1850,” T.A. Barry and P.A.
And some walkways required the nerves of a tightrope walker. Booker cites the ordeal of a Mrs. D.B. Bates, who arrived in San Francisco in April 1851 and took an ill-advised shortcut.
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