Due to the location of my new job, I find myself in Dogpatch on a regular basis. Often, I have been asked the history. Embarrassed at my ignorance, I decided to do my homework.
The nine block San Francisco neighborhood in the Waterfront District, is revered by the National Register under two Criterion: A- Industrial and C- Exploration and Settlement. It's considered significant as a "rare surviving example of an era: a Victorian-era mixed-use industrial and residential district," a style largely destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, and, outside of West Oakland, a rare example of a "company town" founded outside of the east coast.
Most of the buildings here date from 1870-1910, but before that, this area has long been a human settlement, of course beginning with the Native Americans.
From 1776-1821, under the Spanish rule, the area was used to graze the animals of the wealthy who lived in the Mission.
1833 brought Mexican control and a major development of ranches. Potrero Hill and Point were once Rancho Potrero de San Francisco, or Potrero Nuevo, a huge piece of property granted to the sons of Francisco de Haro.
1846 Brought US control, and by 1850, this area became a major gun-powder producer, having reached a large demand for the mining going on in the Sierras.
In 1867 the Long Bridge was created, connecting Dogpatch to downtown (a bridge which closed in the early 1900s when Mission Bay was filled).
But with the Transcontinental Railroad bringing in cheaper products from further away, the city faced a major economic slump, ceasing development here from 1869-1883.
Nevertheless, the main employers during this critical time included Tubbs Cordage Company (rope manufacture), Union Iron Works and Bethlehem Steel.
Lately, I've been watching this silly show on Netflix called Copper and it's about this detective working in Five Points in NYC back around the time of the Civil War. It is impossible to fathom what any place may have looked like in different times, but this television show seems to come closest to what I would have suspected Dogpatch to resemble.
The massive transforming elements the industrial revolution brought to urban areas is mind-boggling by today's standards, though we find ourselves in our own historical cultural change with the internet revolution. And again, the massive discrepancy of wage-worker versus the wealthy.
To take a more poignant cultural reference, (though I am certainly not taking this down the political rabbit hole), Upton Sinclair wrote, in The Jungle, "So long as we have wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down— it will be cheaper to build new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking machinery , and so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly the same way, as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing— and how long do you think the custom would survive then?"
Before Dogpatch got its name, it was referred to as Irish Hill and Dutchman's Flat, and even before that, the area was so rugged as to be almost unlivable.
According to this great article Pier70sf.org, "Perhaps no other district was transformed to such a high degree as the Potrero District. Massive earth moving projects undertaken by the railroads and other industries gradually blasted away the eastern rampart of Potrero Hill and used the rubble to extend the industrial lands."
The San Francisco Examiner in 1889, said, "Great stretches of craggy bluffs have disappeared. Vast masses of rock have been blasted away from the hillsides and thrown upon the marshes. Thousands and thousands sunk into the depths and left no trace, but a time came at last when the vast dumping process had its effect, and the solid earth appeared above the surface. The mountain had perished and that portion it was necessary to remove so that the great manufacturers could take root and with the mountain had gone the marshes."
Working in Dogpatch and without my bicycle (thanks you lousy thief), I have to admit that even today it is a complete and utter pain to get to. I try to time it to avoid the majority of the crazies on the 48 Quintara in the morning, but then I either walk all the way home or cab it. That damned mountain is still so huge.
A largely immigrant population, each ethnicity remained somewhat segregated. The Irish worked at Pacific Rolling Mill; The Dutchmen at Western Sugar Refinery and the Scotchmen at the Union Iron Works.
Irish Hill consisted mainly of hotels: Green House, White House, Cash's Hotel, San Quentin House (run by Jim Gately who took in parolees and got them jobs), Paddy Kearns Hotel, Mike Boy's Steam Beer Dump.
According to the Sheriff Deputy Billy Carr in 1946, "In them days we never went to Morosco's (a vaudeville house on Mission Street)... the shows were much better on Irish Hill, where the boys from one hotel would challenge the boys from another hotel and fight all Saturday afternoon in a hay-rope ring outside Gatelys Hotel. Then we'd all go in and knock off steam beers for a nickel a piece."
He went on to describe the beginning of residential displacement. "In them days, there was never a street paved. You went through the mud to school. If you wanted to go to Butchertown you walked a plank from 23rd Street to Arthur Avenue... But the war (WWII) came along and the Government drove us off Irish Hill. Eight or nine hundred people used to live here."
This wasn't the first or last time residents have been pushed out. Directly after the dot com boom, people were flooding the area. In 2013, due to even more draw, artists were being kicked out, as rents were suddenly being raised 50%. As the city currently talks about creating more affordable housing, it reminds me of why half of the surviving structures in Dogpatch date from 1890-1900.
John Cotter Pelton, chief architect (and one who shares my birthday!) created "Cheap Dwellings" here. At the industrial peak, wage workers were making a tiny bit more, enough to start contemplating buying houses. Ranging from $500-800, depending on amenities and the amount of rooms, workers could buy seemingly identical homes, many of which still dot Tennessee Street.
"Pelton's 'Cheap Dwellings' series represented the first and only known instance in which a California architect published free plans for workers' dwellings in a daily newspaper."
According to Wikipedia, Dogpatch got it's name right around WWII as a reference to the large packs of dogs that would eat the scraps from Butchertown (now Bayview) and from a Li'l Abner term, referring to underdeveloped backwater, "nestled in a bleak valley, between two cheap and uninteresting hills somewhere."
Al Capp, writer of Li'l Abner describes the residents of his Dogpatch: "Most Dogpatchers were shiftless and ignorant, the remainder were scoundrels and thieves. The menfolk were too lazy to work, yet Dogpatch gals were desperate enough to chase them."
Famous residents of this strange place include the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels.
Before I leave you with pictures, I wanted to share some more information I stumbled upon regarding my last entry.
During the plans for the Midwinter Fair, the planners were trying to come up with some kind of transportation for the masses. George Marsh announced the plan to have 75 rickshaws, called 'jinrikshas'. "...San Francisco's outraged Japanese community formed an Anti-Jinrikisha Society. It pronounced that it was acceptable for Japanese to pull people around in Japan, but in America such a job was suitable only for horses and was an insult to the emperor.
"The society said that any Japanese who pulled a rickshaw would be killed. Marsh got around the problem by hiring Germans, darkening their faces and dressing them in Oriental garb."
Dogpatch Photos
So happy to finally learn more this area!
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