The WPA Guide to California by Federal Writers' Project

Author:Federal Writers' Project
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595342041
Publisher: Trinity University Press

Section b. SAN FRANCISCO to SAN LUIS OBISPO, 243.3 m. US 101

South of San Francisco US 101 follows California’s oldest road—El Camino Real (the king’s highway), the life line that linked Spanish California’s 21 missions, her straggling pueblos, and isolated presidios. In the days when it was just wide enough for an oxcart, it was used by the soldiers of the Spanish king, clad in leather cuirasses and helmets and armed with swords and smoothbore muskets. Brown-robed Franciscans plodded along it on their way between the missions, spaced a day’s journey apart.

“Down the peninsula”—as local inhabitants say—the way is now a tree-lined boulevard in a country-club domain populated largely by San Francisco commuters. Here latter-day millionaires following in the steps of the mid-Victorian “bonanza kings” have laid out estates, golf links, racetracks, and polo fields. US 101 cuts across saucer-like Santa Clara Valley’s prune and apricot orchards—in early spring a fragrant sea of white blossoms—dotted with fruit canneries and packing plants. It winds into Salinas Valley, a narrow trough checkered with lettuce fields and orchards and dairy farm alfalfa patches, stretching southeastward a hundred miles between bare rolling hills where cattle have ranged since the Mexican rancho era. From the southern tip of the valley the highway crosses the oak-dappled Santa Lucia Mountains.

Van Ness Ave. and Fell St., 0 m., in SAN FRANCISCO, is the junction with US 101-Alt.

East from Van Ness Ave. on Fell St., which curves (R) into Tenth St.; R. on Potrero Ave. and L. on Bayshore Highway (US 101-Alt.), a speed road skirting the marshy flats along San Francisco Bay.

The LIVESTOCK PAVILION of Agricultural District No. 1-A, 8 m.—in local parlance the “Cow Palace”—stands (R) in a 15-acre tract beside a trotting track and grandstand. The vast rounded roof rests on rockers greased every ten days so that it can be moved back.

At the southern edge of hills that wall San Francisco’s outskirts is SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, 10.5 m. (11 alt., 6,166 pop.), “The Industrial City,” as it calls itself, a closely built conglomeration of steel mills, foundries, smelters and refineries, machine shops and lumber yards, stockyards and packing plants.

On the Bay shore (L) is MILLS FIELD, 13 m., San Francisco’s municipal airport.

Overlooking the water is a PACIFIC PORTLAND CEMENT PLANT, 25 m., that converts oyster shells dredged from the Bay bottom into cement. The industry took over holdings of the unsuccessful Morgan Oyster Company, formed in 1887 to grow transplanted Washington oysters in the Bay. The oyster shells are unloaded by crane from barges, pulverized in steel cylinders partly filled with steel balls, and subjected to heat above temperatures required to melt steel.

MOFFETT FIELD, 36 m. (visitors 7-5), a U. S. Army aviation base (acquired from the Navy in 1935 in exchange for three Army air fields), has a dirigible hangar almost a quarter of a mile long that housed the ill-fated Macon, a mooring mast, helium tank, airplane runway, barracks, and shops.

In SAN JOSE (see below), 46.9 m. US 101-Alt. rejoins US 101.

South of Van Ness Ave.

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