666 Folsom Street – an early view
31 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted 666 Folsom
in31 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted 666 Folsom
in29 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted Natoma Street Blues
in29 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted 140 New Montgomery
in29 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted Demolition
inThis obstacle was uncovered down in the corner right outside Anchor & Hope. I wonder what was on this lot before ? I asked Mr. James Patrick, who I often see in the neighborhood and sometimes at TJPA meetings, but he does not know the history of this lot prior to its years as a street-level parking lot.
They use one of their excavation machines with a special attachment to smooth out the shoring wall. Very smooth !
Smoothing out the tops of the i-beams as well.
I believe these beams are going to be part of the trestle bridge that will be support the trucks and equipment as the excavation goes deeper.
Some of the interesting stuff found in the excavation. I know it is stupid, but I love to see what is found in the pit !
This is what is between the old terminal wall and the newly excavated shoring wall. I wonder what this conduit was used for.
This is the far corner of the site by the gate on Howard Street, close to the Dahl-Beck Building. The curved shape represents where the train tunnel will enter the terminal site.
Don’t know what they reflector-like things are for — I think perhaps they are used to focus or measure with the surveyor’s tripod pointed at them ?
29 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted 666 Folsom
inI have been soooo remiss in not walking over to check out what (if anything) is happening with 666 Folsom (I will forever call it that, despite the fact that they changed it to 680 Folsom a few years ago).
And a lot is happening ! Plant Construction ALSO has the contract for the refurbishment of this building also. And the plans are quite extensive. They will remove that horrible old pebbly skin of the building, remove the roof, add two floors, and expand outward the walls of the building to include much of the “courtyard” area around the building. When they are finished, the project will add something like 100,000 additional square footage to the building, and it will have a glass curtain wall exterior. No more “brutalism” !
This ALMOST looks like they were experimenting with different replacement window styles (a la 140 New Montgomery), and I think this is not part of the current project, but part of the remodel that originally started back in 2008 before the financial crisis.
I love this almost antique-looking ornamental work on the old Pacific Bell garage at 690 Folsom, right at the corner of Folsom and Third Street. This one-story garage was always part of the 666 Folsom complex, along with the “annex” building behind 666 along Hawthorne Street. Everyone hates that building, and I admit it is ugly, but as usual I kind of like it. But its days are numbered. It will be torn down, and a retail space and some open space will be built here.
29 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted Around the neighborhood
in25 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted Archaeology
inThe Huffington Post had a nice article about the archaeological exhibit in their San Francisco Around Town section.
Transbay Transit Center Construction Unveils Gold Rush-Era Artifacts
The 70 artifacts have city archeologists eager for more and local residents pondering the ground beneath their feet.
“It’s not often that you get a chance to stop for a moment and have a window into what used to be,” said James M. Allan, an archeologist with William Self Associates, the firm ensuring the items are unearthed and preserved. “It gives you pause.”
The $4 billion Transbay Transit Center under construction in the South of Market financial district is billed as the “Grand Central Station of the West.” The 1 million-square-foot bus and train station will serve as the northern end of California’s planned high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles; the West Coast’s tallest skyscraper is slated to rise above the center.
It’s all sleek and modern – and on the same blocks once inhabited by working-class Irish immigrants and Chinese laborers who lived back to back on the sand dunes of the busy Gold Rush port known as Yerba Buena Cove.
They were the Donahues and the Dollivers, the Wings and the Lings, and the now-seemingly quaint accoutrements of their lives are being unearthed: clay opium pipes and ceramic tea pots from China; French perfume bottles; dainty English serving dishes, apothecary jars and the heads of hand-painted porcelain dolls; as well as animal bone toothbrushes and abandoned chamber pots.
They all date back to the mid-to-late 1880s, when the cove was reclaimed and clapboard houses went up on Mission, Natoma and Minna streets, between First and Beale. They were filled with Irish, Swedish, German and Italian immigrants, as well as the Chinese who had come during the Gold Rush and then stayed on to help build the railroads and bridges.
Today’s residents and workers can see the exhibit in the lobby of the building that houses the Transbay Joint Powers Authority.
“I live and work in the neighborhood so I’ve been walking by the excavation site for a while and resisting the temptation to sneak in and see what might be lying around,” said Tom Pagel, an investment adviser. “The neighborhood has changed so much in a relatively short period of time. It’s a big evolution and gives you a glimpse into how the world has changed in those years.”
The artifacts are accompanied by historic photos and documents, including an 1885 article from the San Francisco Chronicle in which Irish landlords – J.S. and Mary W. Dolliver – were seeking $500 in damages from Ah Wing and 11 Chinese tenants for the “offensive smells from the laundry that have injured the rental value of the plaintiff’s premises.”
Today, Ming Ng is a Chinese engineer with a firm that hopes to work on bus storage for the new terminal. He had just held a meeting with Transbay officials upstairs and checked out the exhibit as he was leaving the building.
“It’s very interesting to see the pottery compared to the metal things that are all rusted and ruined,” the engineer said, looking at a pristine blue-and-white Chinese tea pot, then pointing toward a rope pulley and iron chisel found in the back yard of a brick mason.
“The pottery looks almost new,” he said. He then smiled and noted, “That’s the Chinese character for longevity.”
Allan said the artifacts were not necessarily unique and that they expect to unearth hundreds more.
“What is unusual is that we were able to identify the people and occupations of the early Gold Rush,” he said. “When the Gold Rush started in the 1850s, the miners came here and there was no place for them to live, so they lived in the sand dunes and then tent camps. We found the evidence: a wooden floor and a lot of bottles, barrels, a privy, leather shoes and boots.”
They would have worked in the Risdon Iron Works – which built pipes for Hawaiian plantations – the Selby Smelting Works, Miners Foundry or the San Francisco Gas and Light Co.
Allan said his favorite find was an oblong, earthen storage jar found fully intact. The unglazed pot with a thin neck and bulbous belly was used to store grain, olives or water.
“It’s the equivalent of today’s plastic water bottle in that they were used, and used, and then thrown away,” Allan said.
He also likes a porcelain chamber pot found at the bottom of an outhouse. It might have been part of a toiletry set sold by Sears back then for $2.25.
“Typically that goes under the bed and you use it at night so you don’t have to go out and use the privy,” Allan said. “I found it sort of ironic that we would find a chamber pot in the privy.”
Ellen Joslin Johnck, an archeologist who ducked in to see the exhibit, said the items should give San Franciscans “pride and ownership” of their city.
“To me, this lends more understanding and a greater appreciation for what it took to build this great city,” she said.
16 Friday Dec 2011
Posted Archaeology
inAlthough the Transbay Archaeology Exhibit is currently on display at 201 Mission Street, the archaeologists were back at it, digging around and (hopefully) finding more artifacts at some newly unearthed “privies” down at the west end of the site. These are additional sites that were once backyards of houses along Minna and Natoma Streets in the old days.
16 Friday Dec 2011
Posted 140 New Montgomery
in16 Friday Dec 2011
Posted Demolition
in