The city of San Francisco has a long and storied history, a multi-faceted one with curious details.
Many areas of the city no longer exist and one of those places is Yerba Buena Cove, a small shallow
bay where the city’s Downtown and financial district currently stand. To understand what
happened to Yerba Buena Cove, we have to begin our journey through time, in the late 18th century.
For thousands of years, the Ohlone tribe of American Natives occupied the Bay Area,
but Spanish settlers arrived, some with the goal of evangelizing the native people.
Mission San Francisco de Asis, was founded on October 9th, 1776 in order
to house the Ohlone people, convert them to Christianity, and force them into hard labor.
The Spanish settlers then took over the rolling hills establishing the Presidio of San Francisco
and the Pueblo of Yerba Buena. But after Mexico won its independence from Spain,
it was Mexican citizen Captain William A. Richardson that founded Yerba Buena as a trading
settlement in October of 1835, using Yerba Buena Cove as a place for merchant ships to drop anchor.
Over a decade later at the start of the Mexican-American war, Captain John B. Montgomery
of the United States Navy arrived at Yerba Buena Cove aboard the U.S.S. Portsmouth. His men planted
the American flag on the shores on July 9th, 1846, in the place where Portsmouth Square now stands.
Two years later, the war ended and California became a territory of the United States,
and in 1849 gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range,
then began one of the largest human migrations in history.
Hundreds of sailing ships ferried settlers from all over the world, funneling them into the wild
California through the Golden Gate and landing at Yerba Buena cove. The tall tales of miners
immediately striking riches and picking up golden nuggets the size of potatoes right off the ground,
had led to such anticipation that passengers sometimes didn’t even wait for the ship to
drop anchor before they jumped off. The desire to find gold was so strong that ship
Captains couldn’t even prevent their crew from abandoning their vessels to head for the mines.
Many of the sailing ships that arrived were more or less abandoned, they were still owned
by merchant and passenger companies, but without a crew to sail them, they were left in the harbor.
At one point, over 800 vessels sat neglected in Yerba Buena Cove, earning the title,
“The Forest of Masts”. There was no choice but to sell off the ships to anyone who would take them.
Many of the ships were hauled ashore and repurposed into hotels, shops, and bars.
Some were purposely sunk in the harbor, you see, the water was only a few feet deep, so by partially
sinking the ship, it would stand up in the soft mud and the superstructure of the vessel could be
used as a home or business. The Niantic Hotel was made of a former whaling ship, and the ship is now
currently buried next to the Transamerica Pyramid. As the city of San Francisco continued to grow,
and more ships rotted and sank into Yerba Buena Cove,
there was a financial incentive for companies that owned the surrounding wharves to build their
piers longer so they reached the deeper waters of the bay in order to access freight ships.
There were several major fires that broke out in the city, fires were common in major cities due
to the flammable materials they were constructed with. The San Francisco Fires of 1849 and 1851
had each leveled large amounts of the city, whole blocks of businesses and homes had burned to the ground.
There was nowhere for the city to dump the debris, so land owners simply
cleared their plots and dumped all the debris in the unusable shallow waters of Yerba Buena cove.
Over the next few decades, any kind of trash or debris the city produced
was dumped into the cove, slowly filling it in.
New city streets were paved over the dump to add more land to the downtown area as it grew.
In 1875 the first version of the San Francisco Ferry Building was opened at the end of Market Street,
where the landfill met the waters of the bay. This marked the new edge of the city forever,
and anything constructed within this new boundary was built atop the remains of the past.
In December of 1994, while the Muni Metro company was building a tunnel underneath Embarcadero
Plaza, heading away from the Metro Station, construction workers discovered the remains of
a large wooden ship. Archeologists were called in, they determined that what the workers had found,
were the remnants of the sailing ship Rome. The Rome was a passenger vessel that arrived
at Yerba Buena Cove in the year 1850, fully loaded with men destined for the gold mines,
and the cargo hold was carrying ale and salt pork. The ship was abandoned upon arrival,
and was finally scuttled in place in 1852 to become a permanent fixture of the city. The
Archeologists determined it was not possible to excavate the entire ship from the mud and debris
of the landfill, so construction workers simply bore the tunnel right through the bow of the ship.
Even to this day, when the foundation of a new skyscraper is dug out in Downtown,
construction workers often discover the remains of old buildings, piers, and ships.
So far 42 ships hulls have been found, and several other structures and debris as well.
It took almost exactly 25 years for Yerba Buena Cove to go from being a
beautiful harbor to a landfill for city expansion.
So much of the past is buried beneath the streets of Downtown, and it would be fascinating to know
just how much more is down there, and to rediscover the hidden stories of the past.
As the decades flew by, most of all the old buildings and structures of San Francisco’s early
years have been destroyed by earthquakes, fire and demolition. Ironically, the first building to be
erected in the city still exists to this day. Mission San Francisco de Asis, the place where
the Ohlone people were worked hard and converted to Christianity way back in 1776, still stands today.
It’s now more commonly known as Mission Dolores because of the newer basilica constructed
next to it in 1918, you can find the old Mission located on the corner of Dolores and 16th streets.
The last remaining structure related to the story of San Francisco’s lost Yerba Buena Cove.