Getting Your Sea Legs on Land

Every now and then I see signs that I've been working on a topic too long. I saw one last week after I posted some cool images of San Francisco that I found in the Bancroft Library. One in particular caught the attention of a faithful follower, this drawing of a San Francisco street scene in 1849:

I had seen this image a few times before so I didn't give it a second thought. The reader, however, noticed something kind of wacky about it. "I had no idea old ships were turned into storehouses and hotels!" she wrote, and if you take a really close peek, you can see that she's right. The "Storeship" and the "Niantic Hotel" are, indeed, ships. I didn't even think to point them out last week because, well, I have been immersed in San Francisco history for the past seven months and for me it was old news. I've become San Fran-jaded! So I figured it was time to put on a new set of glasses.

The artist of this drawing was not crazy nor making things up. There really were ships situated between buildings and, even more oddly, often resting many blocks from the bay.

Huh?

It's true. When gold was discovered in 1848 and the news finally got out to the world, people rushed in. Some came overland, but most landed in San Francisco by way of schooner. The gold fever was so hot that sailors from these ships - and sometimes captains - would abandon their vessels and head to the hills, often breaking their contracts and forfeiting their pay. The lagoons and wharves were choked with these abandoned ships. There were so many, wrote one newcomer, that it looked "like an immense forest stripped of its foliage." The renowned harbor, wrote another, was "crowded with the shipping of the world, mast behind mast and vessel behind vessel," a veritable "forest of masts."

Here's one of the earliest images of San Francisco, taken between 1850 and 1851. Note the countless masts in the background:

A problem very quickly arose. All those ships naturally brought humans, and all those humans, naturally, needed shelter. Building materials were through-the-roof expensive, so anyone with two eyes could see the possibilities with all those abandoned ships bobbing nearby. Sure enough, some enterprising businesspeople took it upon themselves to appropriate some of the lonely watercraft and put them to good use. Ships became hotels, saloons, casinos, storage, and more. One was even used as a jail in 1849 to confine some of the rowdies who were up to no good.

But how did some of them get landlocked next to normal businesses? The Niantic Hotel, in particular, was one such ship that was surrounded by streets and typical buildings. At the time, the water came up to Montgomery Street and the ship Niantic was parked near there (at the current site of the TransAmerica Building). Starting in the early 1850s, the city underwent massive efforts to expand out into the bay, filling in the water with tons of earth excavated from the knocking down of hills and sand dunes. In the 1852 map below, the curved, solid black line shows the then-current waterline with the shaded portions of filling-in in progress.

The red dot is very roughly where the Niantic was parked, and when builders filled in the bay, they built around the ship and kept going. The Niantic (and other such flotation devices) became landlocked and reincarnated into their new uses.

So where are the landlocked ships today? They've all fallen victim to some passing or another. They were mostly torn down as San Francisco continued to grow, or they rotted from disrepair. The Niantic burned in the great fire of May 4, 1851.

But here's the coolest thing. Some of these ships are still around, and in fact, San Franciscans walk over them every day. As the city built itself up, some of these old ships became buried underground and rest there today as artifacts of a long-gone era. SFGeneology, which tracks Bay Area history, has a whole writeup about these interred hulks, and better still, a map which shows where they are!

All of this is a wakeup call to me. When I start writing this book about Ah Toy in Gold Rush San Francisco, I need to look at the story as if I'm seeing it for the first time. All this about old ships is cool, and very few places in the world can claim this kind of unique history. I have to remember to keep it fresh, exciting, and look at the story through the eyes of a San Francisco history newbie.

And most importantly, pay attention to my readers!