The Beach at North Beach

About 1850, a Frenchman named Fritz Wikersheim caught gold fever, jumped on a ship, and came to California.

Fritz probably didn’t make his fortune in the mines. We don’t know much about him, but a travel sketchbook he kept has survived. While in San Francisco, he climbed Telegraph Hill and made a charming sketch looking west.

His proportions are a bit off, making Russian Hill on the left look like something out of the Alps, but he captured a pretty shed-lined cove on the bay between what was called Point San Jose and North Point.

If you’re new in town, you may have wondered.

If you have lived here your whole life and known San Francisco since you were a babe, you may never have thought about it.

But there used to be a real North Beach, with sand and all. That’s what Fritz sketched along that pretty cove.

There are hints to be found in today’s street names such as Beach and Bay. Water Street, a one-block alley a tad south of Francisco Street between Mason and Taylor streets, once indeed had water lapping along its line.

Let us add a bit of rough way-finding to the Lawrence and Houseworth photo above. That curving path along the beach below was a good four blocks from where the bay’s edge is today.

Lawrence or Houseworth, or maybe both, set up their tripod on a wrinkle of Russian Hill’s side, roughly near today’s Leavenworth Street between Francisco and Bay streets. We can almost get to the same spot standing on today’s Bret Harte Terrace:

In many San Francisco maps, even some of the earliest, the North Beach cove was superimposed with streets. (You could buy “water lots” years before the property could be walked upon.) U.S Coast Survey maps, however, generally reflected reality. Here is detail of the area from an 1858 version with my added notations.

At the time, North Beach ran between a sandy bluff east of Point San Jose commonly called “White Point” (more on that in a sec) and a prodigious wharf running more than a thousand feet into the bay between Powell and Mason streets.

Meiggs’ Boondoggle

The trek from downtown to North Beach wasn’t easy in the early 1850s. The path between Russian and Telegraph hills was full of sand banks and gullies.

The muddy northern shore was remote, isolated, and officially the outskirts. So, it was employed for outskirts-type of uses: a city dump, a prison/asylum ship in the cove (a good story for another time), a Roman Catholic convent, a “Home for Inebriates,” and a cemetery.

There were so many robberies and stick-ups on the road and at the beach in 1850 that one exasperated newspaper asked “Do the police ever visit this quarter?”

But Henry “Honest Harry” Meiggs saw North Beach’s proximity to the Golden Gate as a big-time money-making opportunity.

Meiggs’ thinking:

“Each year thousands of ships entering the bay passed right by the beach. Why not lure them to stop at North Beach first? Lumber delivered from the great northern forests to build up the growing city would have a shorter passage. My wharf, reaching out from my warehouses, could capture a good chunk of the business crowding the bustling piers of Yerba Buena Cove.”

Meiggs finished his L-shaped wharf in late 1853. (Abe Warner’s Cobweb Palace bar, focus of a previous San Francisco Story, later opened at its foot.)

There ended up being problems.

While North Beach was closer to the Pacific Ocean, its greater exposure to winds, swells, and powerful tides made it a challenging place to dock a ship. Any advantage of tying up quicker was lost in transporting people and goods between the hills to downtown merchant houses or South of Market warehouses.

Yerba Buena Cove and the rest of the docks around the corner were better sheltered and adjacent to the city’s core, so duh…

Meiggs’ Wharf was a boondoggle. Its creator resorted to defrauding the city to balance his books. When he was about to be found out in 1854, Meiggs took a powder to South America.

White Point

The other side of the North Beach cove was the northern reach of Russian Hill where it descended gracefully into the bay as a dune bank. Originally it had some vegetation at its tip:

The bayside flora was lost pretty fast to “improvements” and Russian Hill’s termination at the bay became a sandy stub.

The sandy arm’s brightness was contrasted by the thick oak and vegetation on Point San Jose to the west. Vernacular names for the two were White Point and Black Point. The latter is still used for the old Point San Jose, now the site of the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.

If in the 1860s you climbed up and peeked over the dunes of White Point you’d see the Pioneer Woolen Mills factory, today’s Ghirardelli Square, perched along the water line: 

In late 1867, Thomas Selby and his partners constructed a lead smelting factory complex on the end of White Point.

With mills and smelting works spewing smoke, the promise of a great north-shore industrial zone spurred some entrepreneurial spirits to push for a direct line to and from North Beach.

The city bit on the idea. Years of grading, assessments, and property-owner-griping followed. A corner of Washington Square was snipped off, but by the 1880s what we call Columbus Avenue connected downtown at a diagonal from Washington and Montgomery streets to the north beach.

While these enterprises sped up the filling in of the old water lots, in 1887 San Francisco still had a cove, even if the beach-y aspects had been essentially erased. 

The old Selby smelting works site was occupied by a cannery. The Embarcadero seawall, being built north from the Ferry Building, reached the “L” of Meiggs Wharf in the 1890s. The captured bay front was filled in with a landscape of warehouses and sheds as far west as Taylor Street.

Then, in 1900, the state of California reserved the waterfront between the seawall’s end at Taylor Street west to Leavenworth Street for the city’s commercial fishing fleet. Marinas were established and land filled out to Jefferson Street.

Today, we somehow give everything from the Transamerica Pyramid, to Grant and Green, to Washington Square, to the site of the old Tower Records at Bay and Columbus (R.I.P.) the name of a sandy cove that’s been gone for a century.

Ironically, few people I know would identify the neighborhood north of Francisco Street as “North Beach.”

Ten million souvenir t-shirts after the beach’s demise, we generally lump in those blocks where the water once hit the sand as part of Fisherman’s Wharf.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

I am about to take off for a vacation to foreign lands. I will be back around-ish July 16. But that does not mean we can not do some advance scheduling. The Woody Beer and Coffee Fund is flush thanks to the donations of Dick M., John A., Keith D., and Bruce M., the last three proud (I assume) F.O.W.s.

Let me know when works for you!

Sources

“Theft,” Daily Pacific News, October 9, 1850, pg. 1