 load shall we get ready to start are you ready Chris I'm totally yeah I'm ready whenever I think I'll introduce you okay all right so hi welcome everyone to our talk hidden San Francisco with Chris Carlson my name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco if you've never been to the Mechanics Institute you can't go yet because we're not open but I am hosting a virtual tour tomorrow afternoon at noon if that's interesting to you I will put the link in the chat space meanwhile this event has been produced in partnership with the San Francisco Department of Memory the San Francisco history days and Shaping San Francisco which are three entities that I work closely with to provide learning experiences that are relevant to the San Francisco Bay Area community our speaker today is Chris Carlson who perhaps doesn't need an introduction he's a prolific writer a historian an activist a cyclist a professor a public speaker and a tour leader he's the director of Shaping San Francisco and found SF org and thus is a leader of San Francisco's cultural community and I think you'll find tonight that his talent is making the stories that from our shared history relevant to what's going on in the present moment he has written three books and edited several more you can get all of these through your local bookstore or through Shaping San Francisco direct we work at the Mechanics Institute with Alexander book company who's right across Market Street from us they are phenomenal they can get you books in 24 hours if you order it during the week so they completely put Amazon to shame check out check it out check out if check out Chris Carlson's books on Alexander comm I'm going to put the link to that in the chat as well as Shaping San Francisco's link there as well so the way it's going to work today is Chris will share some stories from his new book Hidden San Francisco and then I will moderate the questions so please post the questions that you might have that percolate as Chris is talking in the chat space and we hope we can get to them all by the end of the evening all right thank you so much for coming and thank you Chris for coming here to this virtual space here we are yes well thank you Tara and so much for for inviting me and the Mechanics Institute for hosting us I will put up the shared screen to get us started with and I just wanted to sort of give a little bit more introduction to Shaping San Francisco for starters since that's the project that this book is a direct outgrowth of I've been doing this project since the mid 90s it's going on 25 years now when we first thought back in the mid 90s you know as a during this period of time when everything was about interactive multimedia and it was going to change everything and get rid of newspapers and magazines and radio and television and everything was going to be delivered by CD-ROMs that's right let me see if I'm got this the right screen up here let's go there CD-ROMs there they are that was our first output that came out in the beginning of 1998 and we also had some of you will remember a series of public kiosks around the city at city lights and modern times and in the basement of the main library and a number of community centers and branch libraries hosted our kiosks from time to time over the following years the one at the main library lasted about 10 years but basically what we were trying to do was really challenge this concept of interactive because for us it was not much of an interactive experience between you and a computer that's kind of like multiple glorified multiple choice in a box is how we use you know you refer to that interactivity that we're interested in is that which happens between human beings when we get into conversations and when we begin to contest and debate and discuss history and you know basically we felt for a very long time that I've been living in an amnesiac culture my personal history goes back into the late 70s when I arrived in San Francisco and I was a student up in Sonoma State before that and I grew up in Oakland born in New York but I was actually you know going around with an underground magazine project in 1980s called Processed World which was about the underside of the information age long before most people were considering what that was and what it meant and what how that was going to transform our everyday lives so with that experience and then dancing around the streets in funny costumes and you can read about that on our sprawling archive at foundsf.org lookup processed world on there and see funny photos and videos of me and the old days dancing around but we would meet people on their lunch breaks on Fridays typically down the financial district and very often they would come out scratching their head and go you know this is so horrible and we're yeah it's a really crazy world it's organized this way but you know it hasn't always been this way so no of course it has it's always been this way this is the way to always be and that's it and it's like no it really is quite recent this particular configuration of the city and it will be different in the future as we already can clearly see now and they're just like no I don't see it and then it was clear to me that this amnesia was not an accident it was rather deliberately inculcated in our culture so a big part of this project was born out of my long-term frustration with living in an amnesia culture and wanting to really begin to challenge that so we started out trying to make a game and then it turned into the CD-ROM and public kiosk scenario and as time was on went on from there we started doing tours because we wanted to really help people get out into the streets and begin to peel back the layers of the city's history in the physical locations where it could be observed and that's really what gives rise to this book Hidden San Francisco is this long multi-decade experience of going out talking telling stories and getting better at telling stories hopefully finding the punchlines etc and a little bit of the Pavlovian training that comes when people tune out and get forward and don't find what you're doing very interesting but one of the things that we discovered early in this process was that there was a lot of problems with coherence both both in terms of putting things together out you know in the digital world but also just generally everything that you do in history tends to be very specific and tell a story that was beginning middle and end and a narrative art but what we were creating was this online archive it wasn't online back then eventually it is so by 2005 finally Lisa Ruth Elliott joins the project and she and I are co-direct shaping San Francisco and we co-direct the digital archive at foundsf.org we are standing in front of the internet archive out in the Richmond district where we house all of our video and audio including all of our talks going back to 2006 and all the video clips we use on our website on our in our archives all the oral histories we've collected all of those things we put on to our collection our shaping San Francisco collection at the internet archive which you are welcome to check out but anyway back to the point of coherence one of the issues that we had and continue to have if you go to the found as if i kind of jokingly referred to it sometimes these days as the Winchester Mystery House of local history projects and i'm constantly adding new rooms you know and sometimes the rooms just are dead ends they just you'll open the door and there's a brick wall or you know same thing as in San Jose at the Winchester Mystery House there's not always a path and or the path doesn't necessarily mean very much and so what happens is that over the years i've collected all these stories i've understood pretty well where how they connected each other and i've gone out into city streets with bike tours and walking tours and most recently uh bay cruises and i make the connections i put the stories together and make it make sense to people and it's very fun to do and i think you'll you'll have some of that experience here tonight as well but that's a way of imposing a narrative thread a narrative arc on stories and and really finding the meaning and creating the connections in the meaning that otherwise wouldn't present themselves and so that problem has emerged again and again in our work because you know what are the boundaries what are the categories why would you put things in this one and not that one i mean case in point you'll see some of the ones coming up tonight are things i'm having to do with that are both ecologically interesting but are also about people's work and this goes to the point of the major themes of the book which are ecology labor transit and descent and there's their each chapter the major chapters have a bike tour map at the beginning and then an opening essay and then a series of stops that are places in the city that i visited or you can visit yourself where i tell a story about what happened there and so those four themes then are just for the themes that i particularly interested in and focus on because that's come out of the bike tours that we organized early and carried on for all these years and are very much part of what the larger project is so for the first excerpt from the reading of the book tonight i'm going to read you just the opening paragraph from the beginning of the book just to get you a little bit more sense of our philosophy the approach of this book embodies a commitment to history from below to history has lived to documenting our time alongside critical in-depth sometimes controversial histories the histories we present here will deepen your understanding of where you are and how the city got this way and hopefully help you see your own participation in the city's life whether as a resident or a visitor in a new light in the following pages you will find a complicated and contrarian historical understanding a dissenters history of san francisco framed by the belief that history is a creative act in the present and that's our motto for shaping san francisco history is a creative act in the present we're making history right now tonight all of us together this is something we do all day every day we make history and we don't very often let ourselves think about it that way and that's part of the drama that we're all living through is getting better exercising the muscle beginning to understand our own agency and shaping the world around us so the book has some underlying themes that i think i that i like to sort of emphasize at the outset just to help us get a get a sense of where we're going here so labor in a college i just mentioned there's you know kind of one of my passions in life with both of those topics i guess that makes them two of my passions from my earliest days i was involved in anti-nuclear movement back in the 70s i've been in with the process world was a very much a magazine about the underside of the work day work a day life that we all live and one of my ongoing questions is always the why is it the case that people involved in work work in labor politics don't think about the physical world and the way the work shapes that physical world why is that so absent from the conversation why is the labor movement as a whole abdicate any responsibility over deciding what work we do and why and how that what the impacts of those the work is and that's an ongoing dilemma and then on the flip side is the ecology movement which oftentimes just ignores work completely it acts like well yeah we should just write checks on sunday and you know fix the you know this little ecological niche or that species or that habitat and all that's to the good we want that to happen but really to fully understand our relationship to nature is to understand the physical ways we engage with nature most of that has to do with work and labor so that's an ongoing dualism that you'll see running throughout the book and under explores many many of the stories that that i get into and talk about genocide and slavery i'm going to read you an excerpt about in a little bit i won't tell you talk about it at great length here but just to say that you can't really deal with san francisco really you can't deal with the united states at all without really understanding its foundation and the foundational importance of both genocide against the native peoples of north america and slavery which impacted not only the africans who were stolen and brought here but quite a few other populations as well including the indigence peoples so we'll get to that in a bit war and anti-war is one of the underlying themes to me that sort of has shaped san francisco's long-term history it starts here so shortly after the mexican-american war the people who arrive here are many times veterans of that experience they're veterans of indian wars they bring a warlike mentality certainly you know that that kind of white white supremacist expansionist mentality is very much at the heart of the founding of san francisco but from the very beginning a lot of the people who arrived here were dissenters were people who got here because it was the far edge of the world and it was as far away as they could get from the world that had created that warlike mentality and that kind of brutal behavior and they were here from the earliest days writing things that were quite oppositional to the kind of sensibilities that prevailed and you get right up through into the philippines uh you know seizure of the philippines in 1898 in hawaii and you've got mark twain leading the anti-imperialist league of the united states and anti-war sentiment being expressed great deal during that period of time again in world war one you have major anti-war dissent here a little bit less in world war two but you did have some and we can show that too as well as obviously more recently in the vietnam period and the gulf wars that have proceeded to the last few decades so we have a very rich history of both being a bastion of anti-war sentiment and a complete economic dependence on the federal government and war-making so it's a very odd dualism that we confront when we try to confront the history of san francisco and then the last dualism that i like to bring up is modernism and romanticism which i think is a kind of a concept that we all run into a lot because you know everybody gets here and you know for those of us who've been here for any like the time we always sort of tend to think romantically about how great it was before either in our earlier times here or more likely before we were here so those of us who've arrived in somewhere else or people who even people who grew up here almost always have a romantic vision that oh it was so much better earlier it was so much better before they built all those highriders or before one thing happened to another for some people it's before different populations got here whatever there's a lot of not always positive ideas about that that underlie that so there's this kind of version of sort of romanticizing our past and romanticizing our architecture romanticizing sort of the things that make san francisco san francisco you know from sourdough bread to to you know the views from the hills those are things worthy of romanticizing in many cases but it's also ultimately and profoundly modernist project here that's been going on since the beginning as well we're always at the cutting edge of technologies we talk about tech booms these days well the first tech boom that happened was here in the 1849 50 51 period in metallurgy and metalworking when the gold rush drove this huge expansion of new ways of washing away the mountains essentially and producing the world that led to a quick accumulation of capital at the expense of nature and so the modernist project you know recurs regularly as often as the romantic yearnings for something that's a little bit slower and a little bit different and those are in conflict with each other but also the mutually reference and mutually reinforce each other in their odd ways so i'd just like to bring those themes up to help us sort of get beneath that and there's a little short excerpt about the last part there modernism and romanticism san francisco is a global city repeatedly regaled as a trendsetter a city at the edge of the continent where countless thousands have come to discard old identities and resurface with imagined pasts and uncharted futures innovators have been welcomed by a bohemian culture suspicious of fixed truths ossified class boundaries and imported traditions music literature poetry technology art cooperation and collective invention have all flourished in san francisco the same cultural dynamism has also provided a rich foundation from which huge corporations have grown to straddle the globe while their owners have exercised and enduring control over the city's growth and development san francisco holds a vital place at the heart of modern world history the city's own saga is barely 200 years old and yet those years straddle the u.s. imperial push across north america and into the pacific the industrial revolution and the emergence of class war mass immigration and racism technological breakthroughs from railroads to photography agriculture to chemicals machines to microchips and more it's also an epicenter for resistance to war home to the beginnings of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1950s the neighbor-driven campaign to stop the freeways of the 1960s the unparalleled success of the save the day movement in preserving and cleaning up the san francisco bay since 1963 and for changing how we live among ourselves by shattering norms of racial sexual and gender stereotypes the city's immigrant ethnic groups continue to organize and resist the deep historical racism that has dominated elite policymaking here san francisco manages to be both a beacon to malcontents and nonconformists and one of the most tightly run oligarchic municipalities in the country the distribution and power influence results from an endless tussle between competing interests factions organizations and movements as they ebb and flow across time movements of or excuse me moments of contestation and conflict saturate our past whether we know it or not as our predecessors made decisions that continue to reverberate down the years a definitive portrait of how we got here is elusive but by revisiting locations and histories across the ever-changing landscape we could uncover continuities and contradictions and present our version of how the city arrived at this moment like any history worth its name it's not meant to be the last word but a contribution to our ongoing shared efforts to understand how the hell did it turn out like this so so we'll start off with a some excerpts from our ecological section the first chapter in the book that's the title of the chapter turning shorelines wetlands creeks sand and hills into a city and the first one that i like to talk about is really the year of rena cove and the filling of filling in of it and really it's kind of worth mentioning you know we we easily gloss over this and forget about it but it's not even been 200 years since this particular part of the world was an incredible food paradise and that is evidenced even as late as 1837 when William Richardson's son Esteban when he was still a mexican national later Steven Richardson he writes a memoir later that describes sitting on the veranda of the very first house built on Yerba Buena Cove which is about two blocks up a sandy slope from what is then the beach today it's the transamerica pyramid and in that exact area he's sitting up on his veranda and he's looking down the sandy slope and the house was built around what we call today clay and grant but then it was just a short distance down the hill to the beach the tide has gone out there's a big mud flat there so Yerba Buena Cove is quite shallow and in that title mud flat are flopping dozens and dozens of giant fish salmon and sturgeon i mean these are 10 20 feet long some of them and he's sitting there watching while there's a coyote and a wolf and a grizzly bear fighting over those fish this is 1837 it's not even 200 years ago and that was just one example of sort of the incredible abundance of the bay people thought you could get out of a boat and walk across the water because it was so dense with fish you know we can't remember we can't we really have no sense of what it must have been like to be in a place that had literally billions of salmon pulsing back and forth through the golden gate and up into all the rivers of california three times a year three different migrations of per year and so many fish running in so many rivers and creeks all throughout the bay area and all the way up into through the dolphin into all the major rivers of the state it's just an astonishing thing to try to wrap your head around what that was like so there's that incredible abundance there's all the shellfish and you know crustaceans and everything that are near the area there's all these huge mammals living around here plenty of food that's that sort of food and then of course there's the sky i mean you look out your window right now you'll see a blue sky and you know a nice sunny evening just before sunset and in that in that era it was uncommon to see an open sky like this what people describe even or i think it was around 1810 and 1812 there's some diary entries of people being here in october a little later in the year when the sky was the sun was blotted out for three days at a time because of the overflight of billions of birds i mean it's been a long time since i've seen a flock of birds even flickered the sunlight in my daily life so there's a world of nature and and physical abundance that has been sacrificed and lost through this successful modernization project here all the beneficiaries of these days and it's worth stepping back on remembering that world now how do we get to that world is of course we've changed the physical landscape here dramatically over time so the cuts there's a small stop in the book at the richland overpass of the burnall cut but there's quite a few city hills that have been massively altered and changed over time you're looking here at the broadway cut in the 1860s as the part there on the right of this of the image is actually still part of telegraph hill in this in this picture and goes down to the year we're going to cope directly and so all of that gets blasted away pretty systematically during the first couple of decades you also have famously the second street cut where gunning john middleton gets himself elected to the state legislature in 1868 in order for one purpose really to get a law pass that would allow him to cut and level second street down to a much lower grade in order to make his commercial property owned on the southern side of of rink on hill more commercially viable and he succeeded he was elected he got the bill passed and while they were cutting the hill and it looked a lot like this uh they were actually at the same time going through another legislative process with william ralston and asbury harping in the state legislature to get a bill passed to level the entirety of rink on hill which is of course where the bay bridge lands today and a number of those giant condominium towers are on top of it but back then it was just a kind of a scrabbly hill that people decided well let's just get rid of the whole thing which was kind of a common attitude because it was a normal attitude here for more than 100 years to fill the bay the idea was to take any hills are stood in your way or sand dunes or sanding blocking market street etc and uh you know level them and take that sand and debris and there was a guy named david hughes who made a fortune doing this and run it on his little train lines down to the nearest shoreline that had people with waterlots who wanted to have land where their waterlots were and they would fill in their waterlots and get home making land and it was considered universally a good idea and part of it was because it really smelled bad i mean the organic smell of wetlands of rotting mudflats is just a normal smell but for some people it's unpleasant and then you add into that human waste and the waste of all these different animals particularly horses and huge abundance and then you also add in the slaughterhouse materials that are being poured into the bay and then eventually all the industrial wastes uh you know for most of the 100 years that we didn't think about saving the bay you can sort of see why people didn't think about it the bay was a putrid mess and it was not a safe or pleasant place to be near and it smelled really bad and so if you could actually turn it into land and extend land you made taxable property businesses homes etc why not uh another two other quick hills that to bring into the conversation is irish hill you can still see a tiny stumb of it out there in dogcatch at pier 70 uh they're supposed to make a little park out of it we'll see if they do but um that's a fun hill to go and look at i take people out there on bike rides quite often and it used to extend all the way up to the rest of patero hill which is actually consists of three peaks and it's massively cut on both east and west by the building of interstate 280 and highly 101 when that was happening uh and then the other cut of course is the burnal cut if you've ever driven out of the mission district on san jose avenue to get out to 280 that way or out to glenn park if you don't want to take the freeway um you will have gone through the burnal cut and the burnal cut was cut through the hills that once were continuous from burnal heights across to pheromone heights and up to gold mine hill and what they call diamond heights today uh they found the lowest point in that little ridge and they cut through it and that was for the southern pacific san jose railroad back in the day and that cut then gets widened in the 1920s and so on so the carving of the hills and they're sort of forcing an urban landscape onto the world we live in this is a huge part of our lived experience it's kind of present visible and yet invisible because we're not familiar with the process that led to that or how how it all got done uh of course mission plank road is the first road built across this crazy landscape from downtown and it's a pretty interesting story because you actually had you assume that market street was the first big street in San Francisco because of its prominence and the way it divides the two grids of the city and you know from one side to the other but actually there was an 80 foot plus sand unit third in market uh and it continued on westward a bit on on the path of market street and it took a long time for them to level that and the first part of that leveling process didn't happen from east to west it happened from north to south it coming down carney street from Portsmouth Square which is where all the urbanization was happening and the density of the city was over there above the urban bank code uh they were coming south along carney and they would hit this dune that they were market and third are and they cut through it and then if you go to stand on market and third today you'll notice it drops nearly 25 feet down to mission street it's a good good long drop and when you get down to the corner of third admission is where mission plank road then turned right and follow the path of today's mission street all the way up to 16th street then known as center street and it was built out of four inch thick Oregon fir planks and the road was quite unstable when it was first set up they brought the engineers out this is according to Nancy Olmstead's fine working vanished waters the history of San Francisco's Mission Bay and she's quoting J.S. Hittel who's a well-known historian from the 1870s describing how they would lay down first they try to put pilings into this area near seventh admission uh to build a bridge over the bog because the bog was quite wet there and there is a huge amount of fresh water you know the fountain in u.m. plaza is the fresh water coming out of the aquifer that's slamming into the side of the barge stations and barge spends a huge amount of money pumping two and a half million gallons a week of fresh potable water into the sewage system to keep civic center and powell street barge stations dry so there's all this fresh water under the city that people haven't properly understood or how to how to live with or use but anyway there's a big sort of swooshing pattern comes from Lone Mountain down under the civic center goes out through the south market and there's still a great deal of subsidence all around between fifth sixth the seventh and eighth through the south of market areas if you go off the main streets into a little alleys you almost always go down three four five feet right off the main streets up seventh three especially because of subsidence it's still continuing to have a great great deal of water moving through that area historically it was a bog or a deep fresh water wetland and when they built the road they first try to put pilings in 40 foot pilings and then the 40 feet disappeared and they put another 40 feet on top of that one that disappeared so 80 feet of bay mud still wasn't they still had hit bottom and so they laid a bed of logs out and put the road on the bed of logs and hope that would stabilize it and make it go and the first time the engineers came out the road had disappeared and they had to redo it so some funny stories associated with that but anyway this is a artist rendering of mission plank road in 1856 they had around ninth in mission so it's kind of funny to go there and stand there today and realize that the sort of the side the edge of this huge boom in high rises going from there all the way through what's known as the hub there in the mid-market so yeah mission plank road one of my favorite spots to to remember how different the landscape once was and of course we've had a experience of the woodrush back in 1904 there was suddenly a declaration by get rich quick hucksters that we face up a hardwood famine in california and the best solution to the hardwood famine was to invest in this incredible new wonder tree the eucalyptus tree and now blue gum eucalyptus had been in california already for some decades there was some here's in 1860s and 70s they were brought in from australia to be ornamental some horticultural types were importing them because they just thought they were nice trees and people were using them for windbreaks there's some massive ones on the lake hill highway up in petaluma or the big mariella pleasant ones over on octavia street that are quite old and quite huge and date back quite a long way but in 1904 was when we got essentially the boom in eucalyptus plantings that led to the world we're in today where eucalyptus is covering great parts of the bay area and the sanford and california for that matter so the eucalyptus tree is touted by these entrepreneurs you know get rich quick you know give us 25 bucks will give you a acre of land that's already got all these trees planted on it and you're going to get rich and the kids are going to get rich and your children's children will live off the proceeds and you'll never have to worry again a lot of people bought into this and it kind of boomed for a while there was actually a plantation on telegraph avenue oakland with 30 000 people at this tree seedlings in it and then in 1914 the department of the interior the department of forestry came out with a study that showed that the eucalyptus is basically useless couldn't be used for timber it was actually problematic for every use they could think of in the end there's been a lot of work done since that showing that ecologically it's actually problematic because it turns the soil alkaline at its roots at its base and leads to you know a real difficult habitat for any kind of native plants or species so it tends to supplant any kind of native habitat and then you have this invasive species problem so this picture here that you can see is from the you know sutra forest and there's just this incredible invasion of german ivy all through these essentially senescent forests that exist here and there now people have been working up in sutra forest and did a nice job of opening up the trails and there's you know we can we can work with this there's people you know Harold Gilliam's account of this that he wrote in 1966 was pointing out that the eucalyptus had sort of performed some of the same functions as the redwood trees in terms of the fog drip and catch and watering the soils etc but obviously quite a different impact in the big scheme of things than you would otherwise expect so another little piece of lost history for us and then of course we all like to eat you know so thank you some of you are eating right now and enjoying some of the incredibly delicious fresh organic produce that's so readily available in our lives that is actually a pretty recent phenomenon and what we don't really remember and have a very strong sense of is that you know we had this huge produce market here in San Francisco there's a photograph of it in the lower part lower left-hand side of the screen there down just to the north of where the embarking of the center is and all that that park is in the carter park and you know looked low low-rise Jackson Square historic district that was all much of that was part of the produce market once upon a time and that food process that kind of food was essentially you know all the food coming from all over california and being processed through the fingerpeers of San Francisco and into the cannery some of the all the fishing when fish went or the stuff from the you know silicon valley that been known as the valley of hearts to light because it was full of so much incredible produce so that was a long history of San Francisco was as a food processing center and we you know canned food has got a lot of point of origin here technological etc but it was in 1965 when Cesar Chavez and Larry Ithlion merged the two farm worker organizing campaigns amongst Filipino and Mexican American workers and became United Farm Workers Union and they lost their strike against the table grape growers in 65 in Delano but out of that they started the boycott grapes campaign which became one of the great success stories of consumer boycotts in American history and in that process people stood in parking lots and I I did this myself in 1974 when they were doing a lettuce boycott but in the great boycott time was really crucial because they were standing around talking to people in parking lots all over the country people who were supporting the farm workers asking them not to buy grapes to support the farm workers in California to support their upper security union but letting people know that their number one issue was not even the wages or the union itself necessarily as much as it was to get the prevention and stopping of having the workers spray the DDT while they worked so in this respect their campaign dovetailed with a growing awareness of the problems of chemically soaked food and chemical based agriculture because you know Silent Spring by Rachel Carson has been published in 63 and it started to galvanize public popular opinion and now you have all these grassroots organizing amongst working in middle class americans all over the country really and the great boycott works they eventually get union contracts of course it's a long and sorry story what happens with the ufw over the following decades but we'll leave that one aside for the moment just talk about how much it changed our actual experience of food because then not only do you have that labor push that leaves they make a lot in alliance with an early environmental defense fund and they file the first lawsuit against the use of DDT in the United States and they win and it gets DDT banned that's why you have pelicans still out here in the bay thanks to the farm workers you need to believe it or not and then you also have the the rise in that same period time of food conspiracies and eventually the people's food system and these are all kind of left wing projects to cut out the middle men to cut out the corporate agriculture that's dominating people's lives to reestablish a connection to good tasting food and healthy food and sort of in some ways it gets sort of racialized thing or against white bread and white flour and white sugar and so on and so all of that stuff created a culture and there was no organic culture at that point you couldn't go out and buy organic produce you did not have these giant pyramids of pornographically perfect produce that we have today in Whole Foods and elsewhere all over the place and that comes out of this consumer demand that's created by this essential repudiation of what had developed since World War II of commercial and corporate dominated agri-business now it's still a conflict there's still a lot of things going on around all that but you know you can definitely thank our fine cuisine here to the multiple threads of immigrant groups that have come through here and brought with them all sorts of wonderful things to eat and then the rather dramatic proliferation of small farmers and organic farmers that have happened in California especially around the Bay Area over the last several decades and thanks large part to this astonishing transformation of you know it comes out of the social movements of the 60s so very much left-wing origins for our very bourgeoisified food world today which is one of the great ironies that we all live in of course you can see the bananas down there the guys are bringing in the bananas when you're down by the Giants ballpark you might not know but right along that area is where the bananas were all offloaded for a very long time by coming in from Central America along the offloading and it was the United Fruit Company's warehouses on the south side of Mission Creek and on the north side that big building that's still there the China Basin building was the Del Monte building in 1925 and that was where they would offload the bananas right into the refrigerated rail cars and then maybe into the warehouse for future processing so that's all part of the early days in Chinese shrimpings another piece of the story there's a very large and well-developed shrimping business in the Bay Area for quite a long time and that's gone by the wayside as well all right next keep moving here I want to I'm going to go a little bit faster now and try to shorten some of these stories if I can because I think I'll overdo it and take too long otherwise so the labor chapter is called whatever happened to the eight hour day and of course you know when you think about labor history I just did the labor history bike tour the other day it's really worth sort of pausing and recognizing that there is a difference between unions and workers are not one and the same and that when you talk about labor history it's not just this one unbroken glorified story of the great rise of unions in the past the unions themselves were very complicated legal entities that had different specific relationships to both workers and the larger economy at different moments of history and it sort of reflects the ebb and flow of class struggle in the Bay Area in San Francisco and at large you know both nationally and internationally and so when I look at the question of labor history I definitely make a distinction between workers and unions and I'm very interested in what this organizing and getting organized towards transforming how they live how they work what they do why they do it and then you see the right the rise of unions on the sort of emerging from people getting organized and many times that's very important step and self defense and improving conditions and there's been some dramatic transformations in the in sort of the class relations in San Francisco when union movements emerge so we're going to talk about a couple of those examples right here in a moment but before we get to that I would like to talk a little bit about the problem of slavery and genocide which I left by the wayside earlier but I wanted to bring that in because when you talk about the early days of labor in california and how california got built you know there's this kind of silly story of the pioneers came out here and through hard work built california well that's just malarkey you know I mean basically it was a very large number of large capitalized enterprises got going here very early and a lot of that was based on the actual you know finding gold first and then later silver and then of course the intense exploitation and nature on an industrial scale from the very beginning but even before that you had the Spanish coming in with their cattle ranch economy and they needed labor and they needed Indians because that's all the people that were here and so I'm going to read you a brief excerpt from the book that deals with this kind of deeper question of these relationships by the time the spanish missions were fully secularized by the mexican government in 1833 it is estimated that the original indigenous population of california had already fallen by two-thirds due to a combination of disease starvation and colonial violence white americans arrived with the gold rush bring with them their widely held convictions that all indians were savages and proceeded on a campaign of systematic genocide the united states senate refused to ratify 18 separate treaties negotiated in 1851 and 52 to create reservations throughout the state leaving california indians with no home of their own the federal government paid out more than one million dollars to militias and soldiers who spent more than two decades brutally murdering indian peoples across the state both the daily alta california and the daily evening bolton of san francisco openly condone genocide as late as october 1861 and the slaughter continued into the mid 1870s and we can check this all out in benjamin madley's great book american genocide the gold rush brought with it an enormous land rush as its necessary companion the wealth that accumulated in san francisco derived from mining agriculture water monopolization and railroads was fundamentally dependent on the rapid seizure of vast swaths of california and san francisco lands through displacement and slaughter of the people who had lived here for millennia that the mexican californios were also brutalized and rob of their holdings only emphasizes the profound hypocrisy of the california histories that have glorified early settlers instead of framing them as the plunderers and murderers they often were slavery was imported right from the beginning of modern california a generation after abolition by mexico indians were routinely forced into so-called apprenticeships and indentured labor and held for a decade or more in virtual slavery children were stolen by the hundreds by marauding whites often taken after their parents were murdered state laws passed in 1850 and expanded in 1860 sanctioned the indenture of quote any indian or indians whether children or grown persons including prisoners of war and vagrants which could not which could last a decade or more end quote judges were granted the right to bind an apprentice indian minors without the consent of parents or guardians approximately 20 000 california indians were held in various forms of servitude from 1850 until 1863 when president lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation at that point governor leland stanford had assigned state laws deleting the clauses in the 1850 and 1860 acts that had permitted long-term unwaged indian servitude black slavery was disallowed in california as part of the federal 1850 compromise that made california a free state but as part of that agreement the fugitive slave act had to be obeyed which meant hunting down and returning anyone deemed to be property to its rightful owner slave owners traveling through california could proceed with their property unless they lingered in the state beyond 18 months where upon their slaves were automatically free that first wave of settlers included many southerners who brought slaves with them so just wanted to kind of set you up for that a little bit to understand that you know california and san francisco courts were returning people to slavery in 1850 routinely and they were being shipped back to the south if they want kept here in some version of slave conditions but here's another bit of slavery that doesn't very often get recognized which is the incredible story of shanghai which is just you know pretty much stealing human beings and putting them on ships so there were these individuals who were known as crimps in san francisco in the 19th century whose job it was was to provide able-bodied seamen and so they would do that in all sorts of nefarious ways and there's just some famous lore sort of somewhat amusing to us today but it might not have been so amusing if it happened to you back then say you know you're a clerk in a some sort of processing office a law office whatever and you go out for a drink down on pacific avenue one night and you have a drink and along the whole next thing you know you're waking up and you're at sea and it's because somebody slips something into your drink they drop you through a trapped door behind the bar into a waiting rowboat they rode you out to the ship and put you on the ship and off you went and now you're at sea and you're a sailor you're somebody signed a document with an x that says you will agreed to do this and you really have no choice because there's no way to turn around and go back and you can assert yourself and your rights and i'm not a sailor and i never wanted to be here and it doesn't matter because at that point you really literally have no rights and the bucko mates the famously sadistic bucko mates the first mates of many of these ships would not hesitate to employ a very severe physical violence to keep you online and keep people working on ships and you have to remember the working on ships was the kind of cutting edge of industrial modern life at that time moving things around by sailing ships was the main source of all economic growth and development and that was a very front of the working class kind of job to be on the seas at that time so through the decades things don't really get much better there's a start to create a sailor's union of the pacific that comes up in the 1885 that begins at that time in san francisco the name is taken in the 1890s but as late as 1897 and this is worth reading too there's a supreme court decision 1897 three years before the 20th century begins called robertson versus Baldwin and in this decision the court excluded civilian sailors on merchant ships from the 13th amendment's protection against involuntary servitude i.e. slavery with the extraordinary rationale that seamen are deficient in that full and intelligent responsibility for their acts that is accredited to ordinary adults and therefore must be protected from themselves in the same sense in which minors and wards are entitled to the protection of their parents and guardians that's picked up from Bill Picklehoff's great brookshane hiding san francisco but that's a kind of example that i think is a very typical you know you realize how bad it was when you when you get this court decision it's like this is the kind of things that the courts were deciding routinely in the last part of the 20th under the 19th century was every time there was any kind of effort to free people or create progressive legislates or anything like that the united states supreme court threw it out and so uh we're probably faced with a little bit of a period of that going on again right now but we'll see how things unfold over the next little while so slavery then was a pretty wide phenomenon of the building of california you know without the slaves on ships doing that work without the indian labor without the coerced labor that is employed on african americans and of course you know the very underpaid contract labor that the chinese were put to work during that same period of time and you know that wasn't slavery but it was very exploitative so all that is what built california much more than anything else okay so we're going to jump ahead to 1934 famously the time of our general strike the very long story is going to be made very short by me right now and i will be the first one to tell you that you really should get into this in more depth that fully understand it all but very quickly there was a period in the 1920s known as the american plan when everything was open shop and the unions were basically broken they had a very bitter and violent strike in 1919 in san francisco that broke the waterfront unions and you had what was called the blue book union and it was run by the gang bosses in order to get a job you had to do what was known as the shape-up you go down to the waterfront and you hold your hand up hope they pick you every morning at the docks and the best way to make sure you got picked was to bribe the guy you know work it out within the head of time you're going to kick the packs into your wages to him or perhaps let him date your sister or your wife or these are the things that people reported is not uncommon so the level of rage and anger on the waterfront is pretty real but it got much worse after the depression begins in 1930 or 29 and by the time you get to the early 30s there's a great deal of planned dust and organizing going on up and down the west coast on the waterfront and as you can see in that photograph there it's actually much later in the 40s but the labor process was very labor intensive in the holds of ships you had a lot of time to talk and discuss and it wasn't that noisy most of the time and you know there's a quite a developed political and philosophical culture that developed there and so by the early by 1934 they had organized well enough to be able to call a convention of the rank and file up and down the west coast to come to san francisco where union officials could come and talk but they didn't have any special weight at this convention and the rank and file decided to call a big strike on the waterfront shut down entire west coast they had an independent union get a hiring hall where they would control the allocation of work raise wages and lower hours so they went out on strike in early may and after two months of being on strike the local business leader william procker who was one of the major is a grandson of the railroad there and uh was the head of the industrial association this large consortium of local businesses who had pulled their money to break strikes and break unions he's crawling in the past we've got labor licked they're right where we want on 19th you know end of june where they have no money they're broke they've been working for their that work for all this time and they're you know now they'll go back to work and we'll win our strike so on july 3rd 1934 they rolled a caravan of trucks out of pure 38 surrounded by trains and strikers attacked and it was this huge violent day that went on for hours and they took them seven hours to move a convoy of trucks from pure 38 about three blocks or equivalent of two blocks over to the carcia warehouse right across from today's giant stadium and uh then the next day is the fourth of july everybody kind of takes the day off but then the fifth of july was bloody thursday and that's when the police and some of the national garden town opened fire on strikers and they killed two and they sent 70 people to hospital gunshot wounds and the entire climate turns to in favor of the strikers the whole bay area starts to go out on strike it's a spontaneous general strike going on all over the place on july 9th there's this huge silent fuck general march of thousands of workers marching up the street in dead silence for the two men who are killed and that's still a whole week before the beginning of the official general strike which doesn't officially start until july 16th so all that time all these workers are downing tools and stopping working all over the bay area and hayward and richmond and perky and oakland and san francisco and union leaders don't like general strikes they're not in control you know the workers themselves reorganize everything and start controlling what's going on so when the union official general strike begins on july 16th the official strike committee is actually several hundred or a couple hundred union leaders elective into this committee and some of them are very conservative in fact francis perkins is the secretary of labor for franklin roswell first female secretary of labor and she cables them saying nothing to worry about strike under conservative union leadership which it was so it's a long story i won't go into all the details but the upshot of it is that they undercut the strike within a few days and by the fourth day they voted to end it and the longshoremen who and the seamen both had been out on strike together suddenly found themselves isolated once again and out on out on strike but with no more support and so they finally agreed to take arbitration which they had in their convention back in february so they would never do and they went back to work and they didn't feel like they'd won they felt like they maybe had lost but they had power over the work but that was the thing they had established incredible control over the everyday process of the work and that's where the real power of labor lies is at the workplace over the process of producing whatever it is you produce and so they go back to work and there's constant wildcat strikes and in a few months they get the labor the arbitrator's decision and it creates a hiring hall which allows the workers then finally to gain control over the allocation of work and they create an enormously democratic culture in which the low man the man who's had the least work has a right to the first job the next day and so this again much more to be said about this it's a much longer story but this next ensues the 25 year golden era of long-shoring in which the workers have incredible amount of control over their everyday lives and they could take time off they could travel up and down the coast they could work elsewhere they could take months off at a time if they felt like it it was one of the few examples where the working class really got to write its own ticket for quite a while but that came to an end for lots of different reasons and one of them was that the longshoremen themselves had been under duress they were not allowed to join the AFL-CIO in 1955 when they merged because they were a red union their leader Harry Bridges was being prosecuted and persecuted by the federal government on multiple occasions managed to stave that off but it wasn't easy and it took some appeals court decisions to save him from being deported but by the late 50s he and his other other leaders in the union decided they could see this changes were on the way and they thought well let's get ahead of this and make a deal and so they ultimately produced this agreement called the mechanization and modernization period of 1960 and out of that is containerization you could not have had the container you could not have had the modern world without the container so i'm going to read you a short little excerpt here about that the technological linchpin of the world economy is the shipping container without which production could not have been exported to the far reaches of the planet in 1960 Bridges and the leadership of the ilw provided over a bitter fight in the union that led to the mechanization and modernization agreement which allowed for the containerization of shipping and the division of the long-shrong workforce of the tears known as a b and casual followed six years later by the rise of the steadymen to operate the new high-tech frames in making this agreement the ilw was the first trade union in the united states to agree formally to trade control of technology work rules in the pace of work for money and pensions in so doing they struck a favorable financial deal for the workers that employed but also ushered in a process that has radically expanded the power of capital at the expense of workers worldwide and then it goes further because because they sort of established themselves as labor statesmen and then in the 60s you had jack shelly the head of the labor council had become mayor he begins he and aliotto after him are appointing all these union leaders to various capacities inside the city government as it becomes this rather intense merger of big capital and big labor in san francisco sharing a pro-growth agenda and so that's the long harry bridges memorial building there up at franklin and geary and that's their international headquarters building which was given to them as part of the redevelopment process that they were participants in in a very bad way the today's year but wayna gardens that we have we're not supposed to be there that was supposed to be a convention center with a 70,000 c football stadium and a bunch of high rises on it and the only reason we got all these gardens and martin Luther king memorial and museums and performing art centers is because the men who had fought and won the strikes in the 1930s had retired into the single-room occupancy hotels all around that area when it was then being derisively referred to in the press at skid row and they had to get rid of it all and get rid of all these men who were winos and bumps but they're actually dignified men who had retired into these hotels and felt pretty good about their lives and were living there and then suddenly they're under this incredible pressure to leave and they wrote to bridges and they asked them they had done grassroots work to support him in the 50s when he was being threatened with deportation and then he wrote back as i've heard redevelopment story and that's good enough for me i don't need to hear your side of the story and so deals were made and eventually because of that struggle by those men they successfully got a bunch of low-income senior housing built all around the yellow point area that's still there today and it's very affordable housing for very poor seniors so thank goodness but the role of the ilw and all this was not exactly admirable and so this kind of long-term role of the union is a typical arc you go from very radical moment where you really change the culture in the city completely and thanks to their unionization efforts very everybody else unionized too by 1941 you had 98 percent unionization of restaurants but after the war and after all the reorganization of the economy in the Bay Area regionalization it leads to globalization etc etc turns out that the Long Sherman played a vital role somewhat unwittingly perhaps and facilitating that process so that's part of what we like to talk about in in our longer view and deeper view into the labor history of this area a lot more to be said about all that it's a very very oversimplified version i just gave you but at least to get you going on it just a quick opening paragraph from the transit section rails trails etc trails sails rails and wheels walking riding sailing driving how people made their way to san francisco and once here how they moved around is the focus of this transit history looking at transportation through time reveals san franciscans continually reshaping the landscape and the short line to accommodate deep water sailing ships flat bottom scout schooners horse drawn carriages cable cars electric trolleys railroads trucks cars buses and even bicycles together labor and nature shape and are shaped by decisions made about moving people and goods at the beginning of san francisco's urban history no one could know how completely the peninsula's hills and swamps would be reorganized how rail travel would go from horses to steam to cables and electricity and eventually give way to gasoline powered cars and trucks no one could imagine the improvements and roads would be demanded by bicycle riders only to be overrun themselves a decade later by the sudden and dramatic rise of the private automobile the 21st century bay area is covered in asphalt highways and bridges the inexorable expansion of car ownership and car dependency for over a century has produced the paradoxical reality that the personal autonomy and mobility promised by the privately owned car has been overwhelmed by the impossibility of using enough land for roads and parking to make using autos convenient speedy or comfortable san francisco shares a predicament with the rest of the nation the supposed popular preference for cars disguises a puzzling and paralyzing chokehold on public policy and resources by the automobile oil and rubber industries how did a region that was once criss-crossed by inter-urban trains and intra-urban electric streetcars along with a booming ferry service reaching all parts of the bay area providing transportation to more than 90 of the local population come to this strange dysfunctional impasse not surprisingly it didn't happen all at once and so when we get into the transit stories you know there's quite a lot of different things to say about all this but i like to go to the bicycling thing i was one of the people who helped start critical mass some of you will loathe me for that some of you will be thrilled to buy it but whatever but as we were riding that starts back in 1992 and it was basically you know an informal group of a few dozen people who had been meeting and discussing politics and bicycling and ecology and war and all this stuff for quite a while and we just thought let's just meet up once a month and ride home together that was what critical mass really was but back in the 19th century we found out some years later when some of our friends Hank Chippew did this rather wonderful research into it is that there have been giant critical masses in San Francisco in the 1890s in 1896 you can see right there there was a mass ride of cyclists with fire you know slain all sorts of things burning on their bikes and you know bombs going off and all that all this and they were demanding asphalt and good roads that was the good roads movement and it was not just here but all across the country and so you know sometimes you get asked for and it doesn't quite work out the way you plant and so this was a good example of that in the 1890s with the bicycling movement you know it's important to really emphasize because people do get I understand upset with sort of the self-righteousness of bicyclists sometimes and bicyclists need to check that because not only is it just stupid on its own merits but it's also must be said that the bicycle itself is an industrial device it doesn't exist without modern technologies modern industry petroleum all the things we don't like that's part of the bike too and when we get back to the 19th century origins of the bicycle the safety bicycle when that comes along with the braking ability to brake and move air filled rubber twos etc well guess where all that rubber came from you know if you haven't read our local historian Adam Hoekschild's book King Leopold's Ghost it's worth checking into it's from the Congo and also the Amazon and in both cases the people who are producing rubber the people who are actually doing the work were indigenous people of those parts of the world and they were under duress from the Belgian military in the case of the Congo and just brutal kind of commercial warlords in northern Peru and Brazil uh who would just threaten these indigenous people like come back with 25 pounds of rubber from these rubber trees by Friday or i'm killing your family and they did that routinely so you know some of the one and two million people were were killed or maimed in the Congo during the 20 year of the rubber boom boom in the 19th century so bicycling was the demand that's what set all that in motion and it's not the nobody's skill guilty about it it's a cyclist it's just the truth of it so then you want to wrap yourself up in something about how ecologically great it is and uh all it's certainly better than the automobile no doubt but let's be honest about where it comes from and what it's been of course the freeway revolt we all stand on the shoulders of the people who fought and maybe some of you watching this who are amongst that group who fought back in the late 50s and early 60s to save us from having the city crisscross with all those freeways that you can see on that map there some of them were built not for many and then some of them of course have disappeared since then thanks to the 89 quake and uh you know the fact is is that there were 70,000 people signing petitions in the late 50s the board of supervisors killed up about 17 or 20 different segments of freeways that were planned but everybody always thought for sure eventually the bridges are going to connect to freeways that are going to connect to the southern exits from the city and they should never have to go onto surface streets to right to drive around in San Francisco that was the goal and the two epic battles that happened were around the embarking area freeway continuing all the way around the waterfront to the golden gate bridge the golden gate expressway and there was even a plan to build another bridge off of telegraph hill up through over Angel Island into the Tiberon Peninsula and carrying on up north from there and many other crackpot ideas like this the Caltrans back then the Department of Highways had unbelievable numbers of dumb ideas some of which they did and that took a long time to undo and some of them we still live with but the biggest biggest fight so famously was around the panhandle golden gate park freeway that you can see on that map there and Sue Bierman and the Haydashbury neighborhood council was the sort of emergent force in that part of town back in Glen Canyon the gum tree girls the women who organized were house wise this is actually what was going on is a very gendered fight because you had essentially a bunch of men who were engineers wearing their very thin ties and the white shirts and the big horn room glasses with their slide rules in their pockets plotting highways everywhere because that was efficient and then you had all these women who were taking care of their kids and playing in neighborhood parks and panhandle or Glen Park or wherever were many other locations or just had a kind of normal bucolic life thinking wait a minute i don't want this massive intrusion to come in here and destroy the quality of life that i have and i'm going to fight against it and so they mobilized and organized and they had time some of them because they were essentially one single wage family still in those days was not in common and uh this huge mobilization many of the neighborhood associates is around town the telegraph hill dwellers another one that comes to mind people on Petro Hill they all fought really hard against this happening and they finally succeeded and there's this climactic moment when the first black supervisor in San Francisco Terry Francois cast the deciding vote in 1964 in october against the panhandle golden day park freeway six to five against it it comes up again twice more after that but that was the one that kind of shocked the nation because it was the first time a city that voted no on a freeway system in its you know city limits and turned down all that money and jobs and cement and etc and nowadays you can go down south of the ballpark and ride around on the waterfront uh and you'll you'll be on Terry Francois Boulevard and then we'll be kind of wondering who was that guy now you'll know uh taren i see you are am i running out of time here is that a signal well we're bumping up to an hour so okay we're coming to an hour well i'm gonna just i'm just coming to the end of it which is the last really fast dash through some of the uh dissenting area so you know dissents a long and complicated story there's a lot dissent depends a lot on context but the dissent that we're interested in for the most part you know i talked about the anti-war movements earlier i'm just going to quickly touch on a few and i'm going to give you an extremely short and schematic version of this because i'd rather hear some of your questions and thoughts and we can always elaborate on some of this in that q and a so let me just dash through here the hunters point up rising people have forgotten about that to a great extent uh in that period of time in the late 60s there was a young black man running away from a stolen car a white police officer shot and killed him led to three days of rock throwing and and setting things on fire on third street but it also led to the declaration of martial law by pat brown the governor of the time brought in national guard troops who were patrolling just the black neighborhoods of town so that was the baby hunter's point uh at that point the hate ash were in the film bar and so that led in its own turn the emergence of the diggers that came along in the wake of that they started to appear the folks who did a lot of the interesting radical activism in terms of broadsides on city streets and giving away free food and all kinds of things that came out of that but this was a moment where the black community really asserted itself in opposition to white police violence so this is an endless story and we're still living through it right up to the moment so i'm just going to quickly flash you that but check it out we have good coverage of that on our website as well as in our in the book there's a pretty decent account of that uh funny story here is that you know the island of alcatraz was sold to uh texas oilman before the indians occupied it and that's a story that's been completely lost and forgotten and so we got that story that it's here in the book about how that happened and then once the other city had agreed to sell it to the hunt brothers then folks put up a big fight about it they had coupons people equipped in coupons and sending to city hall they had to rescind it they got sued eventually it was revealed that they wanted to build an oil terminal on there not the apollo uh memorial and a gaslight san francisco and then of course this is a galvanizing moment in american indian politics where they occupied alcatraz for better part of 18 months and it led to a tremendous number of changes in federal law and the returning of lands to indian tribes and a great deal of interesting things happened out of that well worth looking into uh the white knight ride was part of my life i was right there on those steps at a certain moment in that night uh may 21st 1979 after the dan white verdict came in as voluntary manslaughter 16 squad cars were set on fire people had the cops on the run for hours and it was quite a dramatic night i was 22 i thought oh this is the revolution for sure everything's going to be different after this and i woke up the next morning things were not different at all they went right back to the way they were and it was a useful moment for me but it was uh you know kind of gone down in the memory banks is a really big moment in politics of the gay community but there was a lot more than gay people out there that night the black community came out in huge numbers the young young men from uh western addition right next door here to city hall where saw this as a great opportunity to get a little bit of vengeance from their everyday harassment with police so that was a real night to interesting night to live through and then my last stop for just to quickly end here is you know the anti-war anti-militarism theme that i think is so important to the city you know the peace navy you can see there in that photograph blocking the way of the uss missouri uh feinstein we could thank her for resuscitating fleet week and you know basically forcing us to deal with the blue angels every year which is to me one of the great insults that i have to live through every year but the saying no to big moes was kind of with the culmination of feinstein's campaign which was to save the port of san francisco by home porting uss missouri here and restarting a whole navy navy presence and because of the well organized campaigns against that at the peak of the anti-nuclear movement and the anti-war movements of central america in 1980s rakentine uh they successfully blocked it and uh and then in a peak of fit the pentagon decided okay you guys don't want the missouri well you can't have anything and then within a few years of that and of course delams was the head of the on-store services committee and was in favor of decommissioning military bases uh nearly every military base in the bay area was shut down by the 1990s and so i'd say great but there are people who made a living from that and they haven't been so well in the wake of that loss of employment so that's a whole other story to deal with but on that note i'm going to stop and open it up to questions um there's i'll just throw this little list up here which are just sort of unsung heroes that i think are people that we ought to know more about they're all part of our history and i've touched on some of those names but many of them i haven't if you want to ask me about them i can do that but meanwhile there's all of these things are in the book and well well documented and holy flesh down there's a very extensive bibliography in the book as well so you wonder where i get all this information from it's in the book and it's a very thorough book as well all right why don't we go ahead and start with some questions looks like joleen um asked this a while ago maybe the first third of your presentation she asks is that the reason why it floods on fulsome street yeah that's there's a deep if you look at the maps of san francisco from the the u.s coastal survey map from 1853 and also 1857 it's very obvious that there's this huge tidal inlet and people you know used to be they'd come in and out of the san francisco uh the mission district from the city which is way the heck over there and you're going to come by boat and they go around steamboat point which is about where the giant city and is now it's actually out in the water and then up through this big huge shallow bay called mission bay and then into the deep water channel which is around eighth and towns and it then went right up into the into the mission district and then turns around harrison and goes into the heart of the of the mission district and if you know where the odc dance commons is today and the question clearly does because that's where it floods over here they've done a lot of work to save that block of shot well but meanwhile the 18th and fulsome intersection still floods quite dramatically every time there's a major rain and now the city's going to spend millions of dollars fixing the underneath the plumbing underneath to try to get the movement of the water through there but that's the low point it's the logical place and forever it was actually a permanent tidal inlet tidal slew that uh it was an incredibly abundant place that's why the mission was built where it was it was not very far to the west of there and they had fresh water streams running under 18th street and down under 14th street running right into that whole tidal that one uh so yeah it backs up to this day and it always will because you can't defeat nature by paving it over and uh it might be who blessed to reorganize how we use our urban space and start thinking about the massive flooding ahead and and think about building some tidal flooding areas for that before i mean i'm in favor of deconstruction to some extent like we need to start removing proper buildings from places and returning it to natural functions so let's get on with that i just wanted to mention that the mechanics institute has a giant copy of the 1853 coast survey map so if we ever reopen which we will but um it's it's viewable to the public you're welcome to come anytime during normal business hours and it's on the second floor um all righty we have a question here from priscilla that says she heard or she noticed alvin duskin's name on the list can you talk about him briefly and his contributions to san francisco sure well i mean alvin duskin is actually the guy half of the storytellers of him and jerry mandor they were good friends jerry mandor wrote the four arguments for the elimination of television and in the absence of the sacred and a few other great things and works for the international forum on globalization and he and duskin were pals back in the 60s and uh they are the ones who organized the campaign against the selling of alcatraz and it was a funny moment because duskin wasn't really that politically engaged although he'd been friends he told me in an interview with uh with sololinsky so he knew a lot about grassroots organizing and had some sort of foot in that world but he was by then a successful dressmaker he had a business making very fashionable dresses his brand was very popular in that period 67 68 was kind of well known for that and so then uh basically jerry mandor and warren hinkle are hanging out in ricos and they've realized that the city sold the island they're so mad about it and they look at duskin say hey do you want to be famous sign on pay five thousand dollars for a chronicle ad that says we're against the selling of alcatraz for the equivalent of less than what they paid for manhattan with beads and glass back in the day and uh and you'll be famous and he's like well let me think about it and so he spends 24 hours thinking like okay i'll do it and so they publish the ad he signs it as the person behind it and then uh the next morning the news meet is on his doorstep saying oh my god well who are you what is going on and then he's gonna got ali odo who's the mayor saying who's this duskin guy he's a dressmaker from new york and truth is he grew up in the mission they grew up around 20s and Folsom so he's a very much of a san francisco and he's laughing as as they say they cut to him he just can't stop laughing because he says what's what difference does it make who i am or where i'm from let's talk about the issue which is selling the alcatraz for nothing to somebody who shouldn't even have it and then it was actually months later after it got delayed and then rescinded uh that he got a special got a call from somebody in the inland boat museum who explained that the secret agenda of the hunt brothers was to botch their plans for this um apollo idea in the gaslight san francisco and then put it as an oil terminal because the deepest channel coming into the bay goes right next to alcatraz and then they could have put deep oil tankers there and run an oil uh pipelines across to richmond from alcatraz imagine how much worse the bay would have been so that was the first thing he did and then having gained quite a bit of notoriety and gotten quite involved in local politics he became sort of the main financier of a series of propositions to stop high rises he was famously the guy behind the high rise revolt and he was also one of the major funders of the 1975 anti-nuclear initiative that lost at the ballot box but they won the case because it just stayed in california passed a law that said you can't build any more nuclear plants until the waste problem is solved and of course that has still not been solved to this day and it never will be so we'd never built another nuclear plant and now we're decommissioning all of them as well so that's all to the good and deskin actually has a pretty important role in all that of course the high rise revolt sadly is something that we kind of forgotten about entirely at this point but it was very important in the early 70s well that was a marvelous essay no that's fantastic um dana has a question she says uh america buried a lot of its german heritage after the world wars but i've always been curious about it and understand there was a lot of german heritage and societies in early san francisco can you speak to that at all you know that's not an area of expertise for me so i will beg off on that question i will say i just read a really brilliant book called the broken heart of america by walter johnson about sort of deep racial capitalism origins in st lewis and it turns out the developments in st lewis are directly connected to here and one of the big interesting things that i learned about that was the german community in missouri was very much a abolitionist community for the most part up until the end of the civil war in which case they sort of fell into the same trap that a lot of white folks did around the post-war reconstruction era where they sort of decided they were more interested in land for themselves and they were in defending the rights of black folks but uh there was a few of them one guy named joseph wiedemeyer who was a very important character in the union army and in the german community in st lewis who was a communist he was very close to carl marx and prager fingles and was in regular communication with them and who knew he was going to become the chief assessor of st lewis but i don't know about analogous stories in san francisco of the german community i know there's a strong german jewish community here and they were different than the eastern european polls that came and there were some class differences again there's a little bit of that in our website but there's nothing about that in our book in my book and uh i'm afraid that's just not area i could speak about with a great deal of intelligence i think in the early days there are a lot of ethnic societies and then by the by world war one world war two it became more fashionable to be american and so yeah i could say you could i will say that we're stuck with the star spangled banner at the front of ball games because the german owner of the yankees we didn't want his brand of the new york yankees to be tainted by his german nationality so he decided he'd become hyperpatriotic and force everybody to sing the national anthem in the front of each ball game and here we are stuck with it still that's going to be a hard one to get to get rid of i suspect that's true dana has another question about mary ellen pleasant she says there's a memorial to her on the sidewalk on octavia but i don't know much about her she's a fascinating character she's arrived in 1851 with a guy named tomas bell she's a mixed race woman who was born on nantucket island and made her way through a lot of abolitionist politics eventually out of new england and down to new orleans and across the isthmus and up to castan francisco in 1851 having about 15 000 cash with her when she arrived now this is a period time when black people have zero rights and white women have almost no rights either and here yet here she is a relatively independent woman black woman with money and she arrives and she's in much demand as a cook because there are very few people here who apparently can cook so she's getting paid extremely well to cook but meanwhile she's also meeting as a you know kind of informal conductor of the underground railroad here anybody who's an escaping slave or a fugitive from anywhere else you know black folks as they arrive she meets them at the boat and says hey come with me i'll give you a place to stay and i'll set you up with a job which is usually going to be a maid or a butler in a local wealthy person's house because she knows them all and so these she has all these people who are she's befriended who are her ears and eyes on the wealth in san francisco which helps her speculating on properties and buying and selling restaurants and brothels and laundromats and various things and by the time the 1850s has rolled along she's actually raised so much money she goes back to chatham ontario in 1859 and meets with john brown and frederick douglas and gives john brown 30 000 cash to organize the assault on harper's ferry which is like having an assault on laurence livamore labs now or something like that i mean it was the state of the art arsenal at the time of the united states and of course that fails but uh she's there's a great novel about this if there's two ways to really dig into the her story one is a book by lynn hudson called the making of mammy pleasant and it's a very long interesting story about how we know what we know historiographically so if you're interested in sort of like looking at the meta level of history and then the specific story of her her how we come to know her and what she did and didn't do lynn hudson's books great otherwise i'd read the novel by michelle cliff a jamaican writer called free enterprise which tells this whole story about mariel and pleasant and her arrival in san francisco and her role in abolitionist politics and then going back and actually portrays her as being like a jockey with a with a cart full of rifles going towards virginia to help the slave uprising to correspond with the seizure of harpers ferry and then here's that the harpers ferry raid went off four days too soon they started they're impatient they did it too early so it fails and then she just ditches the cart off the side of the road and makes her way back to california she actually also uh did file lawsuit in 1863 against one of our streetcar companies for discriminating against african americans wouldn't let her get on and she set it up with a white friend on the streetcar and said yeah i haven't you know hail the driver and tell him to stop for me and they wouldn't do it so she had a white witness to test testify on her behalf in court that she'd been needlessly discriminated against and the judge found it in her favor she was the second person to do this the first was a woman named charlotte brown and uh when charlotte brown won her case there was no monetary damages but when mariel and pleasant won her case there's a five hundred dollar finding against the company and that led them to change their policies and start letting everybody ride freely so you could kind of give her a little oblique credit as a san francisco version of her early rosa parks she died in 1902 in poverty up in napa and on her headstone it says only one thing she was a friend of john brown wow there mariel and pleasant was one of the first people to rent the meeting room space at the mechanics institute's brand new building that it finished in 1866 that's awesome she held a lady's soiree wow but that's all i know i wonder if they were discussing suffrage at that time it would have been the really the right moment to start thinking seriously about suffrage for women because there was a lot of debate right when they were giving the you know 13th 14th and 15th amendments and providing the right for black men to vote like what about women and it was a big conflict at that moment interesting i don't know um uh let's see i don't have any more questions i do want to make a public announcement that this video i mean chris went over a great deal of content so if you want to revisit some of the uh sections that he some of the things that he talked about if the stars align this video will be available on the mechanics institute's youtube channel tomorrow or if you would like to send me a direct email and i will send you a link to it i'll put that in the chat space or it's in the chat space now my email address i'll probably if i if my recording worked at this end i'll probably just put it on my personal website chriscarlsson.com with two s's and carlsson where you can also go and find a direct link to buy the book directly from me which of course is always good for me uh it helps shaping san francisco too since all the profits go to shaping san francisco and keeps us going doing all of our crazy grassroots history work and thanks taren also for bringing up the department of memory one of our our shared cosponsors for this evening's presentation the department of memory has been our effort to move into a consortium with all the other local history group shaping san francisco the western neighborhoods and bernel heights history project the trara hill archives mechanics institute california historical site all of us have been in this conversation for several years kind of coming out of history days originally and realizing that we really should be identified as a as a sort of an entity within the city that it gets not only a recognition as doing the work of a vital work of remembering on behalf of everybody in san francisco past president feature but also we should be funded by the city it's a public history by the public for the public and there should be a source of funding for like annual awards to book writers there should be sustainable money for the programming that we do the public events etc etc and we were on the cusp of getting that when the covet hit and that's obviously not going to happen anytime soon for the budget crises that will ensue but it's an idea that that goes on and the department of memory is a real function and in many respects all of you are already part of it you know it's a kind of it's an informal association of people who care about not living in an amnesiac culture and wanting to live in a society that really debates and discusses and and continues to reflect on what it means what we know about the past and how we know it and how it might be how it has an ongoing influence on our sense of our own agency and possibilities for changing the world that we live in and moving towards one that's quite a bit more humane than the one we're in today i couldn't have said it better you know chris i wonder if you are still hosting the boat tours i am in fact and we have one that's already sold out for july 24th but then there's another one on august 28th friday august 28th at five o'clock it's really finally from pier 52 emission bay it's on a pacific pearl is a sports fishing boat out of emoryville and uh there's only 20 people allowed now the first one we did we had a cap of 35 people so we've short we've reduced the number of people we're letting on the boat in order to make sure everybody has plenty of space we don't want anybody to feel uncomfortable or too crowded so and it's you know nothing but fresh air blowing your face the whole time out of the boat and it's really finally from pier 52 we go up along the coast along past the giant stadium inside of mission mission bay cove or a cubby cove as the giants like to call it and then along the waterfront and deal with a bunch of the histories all the way up to telegraph hill and then we turn around and blast all the way down south of candlestick point and then slowly come back up past candlestick point the naval shipyards and then into eastless creek i'm sorry india basin around some of the great stories in that area and then we go right up into eastless creek up to the bridge and come back out and then around pier 70 from the water and so you get to see parts of san francisco that you probably haven't seen ever from the bay and that very few people are really fully grasper understand how how interesting that whole long experiences of this are industrialized shoreline that's slowly becoming much more accessible on foot and bike also they're starting to open up large swabs of it eventually all of it will be open and then it'll go under water so come out and see it before that happens i highly recommend the boat tour but here's a pro tip do not sit at the very front of the boat it's really exciting it's like a roller coaster at first but you will get wet at least for the ride to candlestick yeah the long or fast ride down the down the shore it's a bit bouncy yeah there is a question how much is the boat trip it's 55 bucks and it goes through them it's their business actually the the boat company and then they hire me as a historian to tell the stories along the way and that some of that money goes to shaping centers just going someone that actually goes to me unbelievable you're the entertainment then yeah i'm the entertainer all right well i want to thank everyone for coming this evening and i hope you learned something and thank you chris for sharing your knowledge every time i hear you i learn something new oh well i'm really pleased and thank you so much everybody for coming along and i hope you got some fun out of it i've been drawn on too long and please buy a book that really helps me helps the publisher stay in business and helps all of us keep doing what we're doing so go out and buy a book absolutely it's a great gift if there's a what's what holidays coming up for fourth of july just went by you have to do it for uh the not burning man i guess labor day is coming pretty soon but the other thing you can do with the book though is it does have all these organized tours so you don't you can do them by car i mean i generally say you should do them by bicycle or on foot but you could do them by car if you're more inclined to do that and there are maps that show you the routes and it takes you from place to place and once you get to the place you can open the book up and read some of the things that i did tonight that i talked about tonight very quickly but there's a more in-depth view of those i should mention also in as a last thought is that i i told taren this earlier i just started to release a series of a baker's dozen of short videos which you can find also on chriscarlsson.com hidden san francisco virtual tour and they're going to be based they're based on you know 13 different stops out of the 120 some stops that are available in the book and so you can have a little taste of some of the content and more depth by that and the first one's up already on chula alley and indian slavery and then there's going to be one on thursday on mary ellen pleasant in the underground railroad that's going up on thursday so i'm gonna do one on monday and one on thursday for the next six weeks until they're all up there so check that out too all right well thank you very much christ and i hope you have a wonderful evening thank you and we'll have the video up shortly tomorrow on our website sounds good all right thanks again and have a nice evening everyone bye