Dumpville

Pulling out my three cans out on Monday nights I am often surprised at our household’s weekly waste, the offcuts of modern society in which almost anything you want is wrapped, bagged, and/or boxed.

It is a big but usually politely ignored story. Making goods makes waste; waste needs someplace to go.

In the 1870s, San Francisco felt that the place was Mission Bay. The city grew by 85,000 across that decade and the attendant debris of daily life increased with the population.

Since San Francisco wanted to fill up its wetlands to make ground for roads, lots, and other exemplars of capital-p Progress, “sanitary land-filling”—dumping garbage in the marsh and covering it with sand, dirt, and refuse—could kill two birds with one stone.

(Note that filling marshland with garbage kills a lot more than two birds, but you get the metaphor.)

Garbage was the gold that had already filled in the north cove around Meiggs’ Wharf and North Beach. On the south side of the city, 6th Street began being extending across Mission Bay thanks to more than 300 teams of trash wagons arriving daily to dump loads from across San Francisco.

Jealous property owners on 7th Street begged the city to share the wealth by moving the dump over a block so their “wet” lots would also be profitable land. Common people rejoiced that the avenue of garbage would soon extend to Potrero Point and save them paying toll on Mission Bay’s Long Bridge.

What was open water at the end of the 1860s became terra firma in the 1870s. Berry and Channel streets between 5th and 7th streets became the kingdom of a million flies. Once-wild Mission Creek was tamed into a channel for industrial effusion into the bay, its banks shored up by the sedimentary refuse of thousands of South of Market households.

In this landscape grew a community of pickers, bummers, tramps, and citizens on the margins of polite society, a Dickensian shantytown which the San Francisco Call named “Dumpville.”

Just as reporters today embed themselves with RV encampments and villages of the unhoused, in 1878 a Daily Evening Post writer produced a series of articles from playing hobo along Channel Street. 

“There could be found penniless humanity engaged in its Daily Struggle with Want and Privation. There could be seen the tramps, seeking to wrest from the loads of garbage continually arriving that sustenance which other more agreeable means failed to provide.”

It wasn’t all tramps in Dumpville, but also children seeking firewood or leavings to feed their chickens. Small-scale scavengers grabbed scrap metal or broken glass (some of which was sent as far as China for melting and reuse). Bone-collectors sourced for local sugar factories, and a minor syndicate of characters contracted by the city handled both the organization of Trashopolis and the slow creation of new city streets in what was Mission Bay.

One old man spent his days doing nothing but emptying out the remains of used or spoiled tomato, oyster, and vegetable cans so that the solder could be smelted out in a small onsite furnace.

“The veteran sits in front of a trough sloping down to the creek, and just as fast as he opens each can with a few blows of his ‘little hatchet’ a fresh stream is added to the thick slimy mass moving lava-like down the trough.”

Every few months or so a newspaper would send a reporter to hold his nose and find a story amid the pickers and the squatters. There were detailed descriptions made of Dumpville avenues:

“These [paths] led the investigating reporter by heaps of white rags, heaps of colored rags, heaps of glass, heaps of tins cans, heaps of bones, heaps of iron hoops and by a row of crockery crates. In one of these was stale bread and pieces of meat which had been recovered from recently dumped heaps, in another half decayed oranges and apples and in another potatoes, while close to these were small piles of brass, zinc, old shoes and pieces of carpet.” —San Francisco Call, April 10, 1892.

Sometimes readers would get an ironical sketch on a Dumpville “king” or a dispute between the shanty-dwellers. (There was a dust-up, pardon the expression, when some Finns flew a Russian flag over their shack and drew the ire of their patriotic dump neighbors.)

Sometimes it would be admiration for industry and organization among the society of recyclers; sometimes a commentary or allegory on the economic injustices of the world as played out in Dumpville.

Other times it was about the smell or the disease-carrying miasmas arising from the decaying heaps, and how someone had to do something about it.

By the mid 1890s, Mission Bay was a misnomer, conquered by garbage and covered by railroad tracks. Mission Creek was a dirty sewer outlet and the dumps, having done their wetland-filling work, were a rising embarrassment to a city that had gotten what it wanted and grew proud.

An economic depression had grown the population of Dumpville to a colony of 150 or so when the city police were given a task that won’t feel unfamiliar to us today. The cops arrived on the night of November 10, 1895, broke down the shanty-town, and chased off its inhabitants with the threat of arrest.

The official dumps were moved farther from the city’s center and Dumpville was theoretically no more. We like to hide our garbage, our cemeteries, and our struggling fellow human buildings. Out of site, out of mind.

But nothing really disappears. Here is Dianne Feinstein, mayor of San Francisco, touring an encampment at just about the exact same location as Dumpville more than 90 years later:

The site was her choice for a new baseball stadium for the Giants, one of many proposals before the park at China Basin was finally constructed.

Back in 1889, a Chronicle reporter visiting Dumpville thought that “a house [...] in decomposing refuse, with a sub-soil of Mission creek mud would not be a very desirable investment.”

Perhaps he just needed patience.

The Giants stadium, biotech campuses, and the new Chase Center have remade the area in the 21st Century. Along Mission Creek are apartment and condo buildings—and some affordable housing—with names like “Park Terrace” and “Edgewater” set among avenues of shady trees.

There is a pretty park promenade and even a beach volleyball court.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

Great thanks to Joel D. and Lenore A. (F.O.W.) for contributing to the Woody Beer and Coffee Fund, forcing me, positively forcing me to have a delightful beverage with someone nice like you. When are you free?

Sources 

The Illustrated Wasp, August 18, 1877, pg. 35.

“Trying Tramping,” San Francisco Daily Evening Post, August 10, 1878.

“The Dump Trust,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 22, 1889, pg. 8.

“Pestilence is Crouching There,” San Francisco Call, July 7, 1893, pg. 8.

“Trouble on the Dumps,” San Francisco Examiner, November 4, 1895, pg. 12.

“Dumpville is No More,” San Francisco Call, November 11, 1895, pg. 7.

Allen G. Pastron, Ph.D. ed., Archeo-Tec for the San Francisco Clean Water Program, “Behind the Seawall: Historical Archaeology Along the San Francisco Waterfront, Volume 1.,” 1981.