Illustrated History 2: Underground sailroad
I grew up in a Los Angeles suburb and my childhood home wasn’t an entirely safe place to play in the front yard. In fact, every Halloween my parents would drive us 45 minutes to Laguna Beach for trick or treating. My family frequently traveled to a vast collection of cities to escape our own town.
On a birthday, my parents surprised me with a road trip to San Francisco and the attraction was immediate. It was a compact version of all the different cities my family traveled to in Southern California and accessible enough to study hidden history within its bounds. After many adult years of pining after the city by the bay, I packed up my two cats and my husband, and we booked a one way ticket. Lucky for me, San Francisco happens to be a treasure trove of hidden history. The first obscurity I learned when I reached the city has been written about numerous times and is a go-to secret to impress friends/family who visit.
44 gold rush-era ships are buried underneath the towering skyscrapers, honking cars, tourists, and local commuters in San Francisco’s downtown.
In fact, if you’ve traveled on any Muni Metro line headed towards Embarcadero, you’ve gone through the hull of a ship, called the Rome. The bow of another ship, called the Niantic, remains untouched beneath a parking lot near Clay and Montgomery streets. So how did these ships come to a halt beneath the cement?
To investigate the answer, you just have to walk around the city. There are a few neighborhood exceptions, but if you find yourself not huffing and puffing while walking, you’ve found the original shoreline. Pretty much any flat area near the coast means it’s human-made land. Between 1849 and 1852, the gold rush caused a huge influx of abandoned ships in the bay. We’re talking rush hour traffic packed—ships lined up like sardines in a can. In 1850, approximately 500 unclaimed ships were just too much to do anything with other than fill in the space with landfill (aka old trash); making a new shoreline. So next time you’re in San Francisco, pay attention to the ground you walk on and remember that there are still ships suspended in time and dirt. And who knows, you might see me walking around investigating more hidden histories of this grand city.
