Two 1906 Earthquake Cottages, which were earmarked for demolition, have been saved! Moved last month from Kirkham Street near Ocean Beach to a site near the San Francisco Zoo, the cottages will be restored and preserved.
Annual SFT Dinner May 18 Will Honor Heroes
GeeGee Platt, Charles Marsteller and Chris Duderstadt
San Francisco Tomorrow invites you to join in celebrating the accomplishments
and dedication of three of the City’s grassroots leaders at its 34th annual
awards dinner on Wednesday, May 18, at Castagnola’s Restaurant, 286 Jefferson,
on Fisherman’s Wharf.
Jack Morrison Lifetime Achievement Award
The Jack Morrison Lifetime Achievement Award will go to Gee Gee Platt, who has
worked tirelessly and largely behind the scenes for decades to preserve San
Francisco’s architectural heritage. She led the effort to get Ghirardelli Square
on the National Historic Register, worked to save historic mansions, such as
the Sherman House and the Spreckels and Lilienthal-Orville Platt residences,
and joined others to preserve historic elements of the Ferry Building. Recently
she spearheaded the effort to save some historic portions of the old Emporium
building on Market, while demanding that the City Planning Code be upheld there
and in future work on historic buildings.
SFT will also honor two Unsung Heroes:
Charles Marsteller, former head of Common Cause, is best known for his demands that the public ethics code be observed – and he applies the ethics test in fighting to see that the integrity of the Van Ness Corridor Plan is maintained – a plan to replace auto dealers with housing on a major transit street. He and former senior city planner, Nancy Gin, blew the whistle on developers who got City permits by saying they would build small affordable housing units for students, government clerks and artists who depend on public transit, then switched to plans for high-rise, market-rate condos. .
Chris Duderstadt’s business is to design machines for high-tech companies but
he has devoted many hours in the past 15 years as a leader in the fight to protect
and improve the City’s parks for all park users. Currently his major effort
is to reduce auto traffic in Golden Gate Park and to block plans to widen the
Lincoln-Ninth Avenue entrance to four lanes to serve the new underground museum
garage. Also his efforts have led to shortening the DeYoung’s new tower by 16
feet and replacement of the two pedestrian tunnels under the Music Concourse.
Chris, vice president of San Francisco Tomorrow, is a member of the Kezar Advisory
Committee and the Alliance for Golden Gate Park.
The May 18 event will start with a reception at 6:00 PM, with dinner at 7:15
and the awards program at 8:00. Donations for the event support SFT’s work to
protect the urban environment, fight for strong public transportation, and support
responsible and responsive public officials.
Dinner tickets are $50 each, with Sponsors asked for $75 with dinner and Patrons
for $120 with two dinner guests. Advanced reservations are requested, with checks
mailed to San Francisco Tomorrow, 41 Sutter Street. No. 1579, San Francisco
CA 94104-4903. Please invite your friends to come.
Questions: Call SFT President
Jennifer Clary at 585-9489 or Dinner Chair Jane Morrison at 564-1482.
SAVING TWO EARTHQUAKE COTTAGES
Two 1906 Earthquake Cottages, which were earmarked for demolition, have been
saved! Moved last month from Kirkham Street near Ocean Beach to a site near
the San Francisco Zoo, the cottages will be restored and preserved.
When she received notice three years ago from the Planning Department that the
two cottages across from her house on Kirkham Street might be demolished, a
nearby resident had no objection. "I've lived here since 1963 and they've
always been rented out. The back one didn't even have heat and they're pretty
beat up."
No wonder. These humble structures on outer Kirkham Street turned out to be
refugee shacks that were originally built to shelter homeless San Franciscans
after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, which deprived half of San Francisco dwellers
of their homes. The thousands displaced found themselves living in tent cities.
Some months later, the San Francisco Relief Corporation began building rows
of small shacks at refugee camps in such places as Golden Gate Park and the
Presidio. Union carpenters erected 5,610 homes of California redwood with fir
floors and cedar-shingled roofs---all painted a park-bench green.
Residents paid $2 a month rent for the simple dwellings which cost $100-$135
to build. By August of 1907, the Relief Corporation had started selling the
shacks to residents who carted them to empty lots as "starter" homes.
Thousands of shacks dotted the city, and some were hauled as far as the Central
Valley. Many owners connected two or three shacks together per lot to form larger
residences. Four of these structures found their way to the 4200 block of Kirkham
Street. Jane Cryan, founder of the Society for the Preservation and Appreciation
of San Francisco's Refugee Shacks says that the two cottages were actually
four refugee shacks cobbled together: three 10' by 14' 'Type A' shacks and one
bigger 'Type B.'"
In 1984, Cryan succeeded in getting the Sunset District's other remaining refugee
shack site at 1227 24th Avenue designated an official San Francisco landmark.
In late 2002, these four on Kirkham Street were put on the market and the new
owner applied for a permit to demolish them. The Western Neighborhoods Project,
led by Woody LaBounty,which takes great pride in the history to be found west
of Twin Peaks, found a way to save them by persuading the San Francisco Zoo
to accept the shacks for as long as it takes to restore them and get them a
permanent home. (The two photographs above were taken March 6, 2005, a joyous
moving day as volunteer labor and equipment got the cottages ready for safe
passage to the San Francisco Zoo. Portions of this article were written by Woody
LaBounty and originally published in the Sunset Beacon)
All Mission Dolores Park needed was a little TLC
All
Mission Dolores Park needed was a little TLC
For decades the western slopes of Mission Dolores Park essentially had been
abandoned by the City; dispute among City agencies about jurisdiction provided
sufficient excuse for doing nothing there.
Nine years ago, volunteers from the neighborhood began transforming the western
slopes of Mission Dolores Park into a safe, clean, green park environment. Over
the decades of abandonment, the western slopes had become a garbage-strewn,
overgrown, rival-gang-drug-dealing black hole. The volunteers accomplished the
transformation through group work days and individual daily volunteer efforts
with Recreation and Park Department’s permission through a detailed work plan.
Only after volunteers had begun to transform the area, did the Recreation and
Park Department acknowledge jurisdiction and park gardeners begin to do some
work there. Volunteers continued with their efforts in conjunction with, and
support from, the park gardeners and their supervisors.
Not only did the volunteers’ efforts NOT take over any work the gardeners were
doing, but the volunteers’ efforts created the opportunity for MORE gardeners
to work. Additionally, through grant applications made by the volunteers, a
$50,000 grant was used by the Department to construct an irrigation system for
the western slopes.
After volunteers completed most items of the 2003 work plan, park gardeners
refused to agree to a new one; they demanded that volunteers no longer work
in the western slopes area; and, due to diminishing resources, the park gardeners
would not be able to maintain the area. The western slopes area then deteriorated
greatly. The volunteer coordinator made known to the Department’s superintendents,
the Recreation and Park Commission, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors,
the Mayor, and the San Francisco Controller that gardeners were seldom in the
park, and when they were, little was accomplished.
Park gardeners responded by having their union write a letter that disallowed
volunteers from working in the park. When the acting general manager made the
union action, and his acquiescence, known to the volunteer coordinators, the
volunteers appealed to ABC7 News. A producer assigned to the story spent six
months documenting the gardeners’ performance.
The December 1, 2004, ABC7 News exposé depicted gardeners goofing-off on the
job: running errands; giving away the Department’s plants; taking home plants
and soil amendments; one gardener never working even an hour a day; another
gardener working on average an hour and a half a day; driving the Department’s
motorized carts to neighboring restaurants for hour-long breakfasts; spending
endless hours talking on their cell phones or visiting with neighbors; even
giving shovels and brooms to the homeless who performed the gardeners’ work
as the gardeners sat watching; and more.
Following the exposé, the gardeners were put on 10-day unpaid leaves and then
returned to work on mobile crews for the Department. The San Francisco City
Attorney’s office began an investigation. An investigator has interviewed neighbors
and many Recreation and Park Department employees. The acting general manager
will determine outcomes for the gardeners when the investigation is concluded.
In the meantime, Mission Dolores Park’s needs are being met by a mobile crew
under the direction of Robert Watkins: fifteen new trees have been planted;
the park is made litter-free every morning; when neighbors call in concerns,
response is immediate; the lawns are green, mowed and edged; tall grasses have
been string-trimmed; the park has never looked better.
The coyote that has been hanging out on Bernal Heights
is still there. Check it out at: www.stillwildatheart.com
CHERT: FROM OCEAN BOTTOM TO HILL TOP
by Suzanna Buehl & Jon Campo, SFRPD Natural Areas Program
The rocks underlying San Francisco, collectively known as the Franciscan Formation,
are more than 165 million years old. Many of our hilltop parks feature outcrops
of chert, a fine-grained sedimentary rock made up of the shells of single-celled
microscopic sea organisms (radiolarians) which died millions of years ago.
In most ocean waters, carbonate shells dissolve before they reach the bottom,
but radiolarian shells are silicon-based and do not dissolve. Millions of years
ago, countless radiolarians, together with mineral dust blown from inland deserts
(usually red in color), combined to form a muddy substrate on the ocean floor.
Through time, pressure, and heat this red ooze compressed to form layers of
chert which were later uplifted to land.
Chert can be identified by its brownish-red or pale green color, which, when
exposed to air, oxidizes into an orange brown. The surface is smooth and occurs
in layers one to four inches thick. A thin slice of rock under a microscope
will reveal the star-shaped radiolarians.
One of the most striking examples of a chert formation occurs along the way
to Glen Canyon on the western side of O'Shaughnessy Boulevard between Malta
and Del Vale avenues. The layers are folded and fractured in a spectacular record
of geologic forces that long-ago uplifted the chert from the ocean floor.
I yam To the irritation of botanists, what is sold as
yams are often sweet potatoes. The yam is a member of the Dioscoraceae, which
is closely related to the lily family, and originates in southeast Asia--although
it has been introduced elsewhere. The sweet potato, grown by the Incas and Mayas,
is a member of the morning glory family, not even remotely related. Nevertheless,
the two plants produce similar root tubers. Both are full of starch, but the
sweet potato is more nutritious, being loaded with beta carotenes and vitamins
A and C. If it’s dark red, it’s called a garnet yam but beyond that, nearly
everything sold here as either yam or sweet potato is probably sweet potato,
which is easier to grow and harvest.
Presidio Hike Saturday May 7, 1 – 5 p.m. A magical
tour of the biological treasures of the Presidio will be led by Peter Brastow,
beginning at the WWII Memorial on Washington Boulevard at Kobbe Street (meet
in parking lot). We will amble through many of the natural and historical features
of our amazing National Park, concluding our walk upstream from Crissy Field
in Tennessee Hollow, where there is an active remediation site at which toxics
left behind by the army are being removed. (Shuttle bus return.)