Spirits of San Francisco by Gary Kamiya

Author:Gary Kamiya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Harbor View Park was seized by city officials after the 1906 earthquake and converted into a refugee camp. It reopened briefly after the camp was closed in 1907 but closed for good in 1909, when the city decided to incorporate the area into a tax assessment district. In 1913, the city acquired the defunct park and demolished it to make room for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

The one remaining feature from the old baths was a stand of cypress trees, which adorned the grounds of the fair’s California Hall. But soon they, too, were cut down. With their disappearance, Harbor View Park had vanished as completely as old Strawberry Island, the sandy, tide-swept spit on which it was built.

THE EARTHQUAKE SHACKS OF HARBOR VIEW

After the April 1906 catastrophe, the second-largest earthquake refugee camp in the city was located at Harbor View Park, just north of the present-day Palace of Fine Arts. Its twenty-five hundred residents initially lived in tents, but by the fall and winter those refugees who still remained in the camps, most of them poor, had moved into several hundred of the 5,610 small earthquake cottages the city constructed to provide homes for working-class San Franciscans.

Thanks to an enlightened relief policy, the cottages were essentially given free to their residents, who had only to buy or lease land (cheap at the time) onto which to move them. After the Harbor View refugee camp closed in 1907, hundreds of earthquake cottages ended up being moved into the Harbor View neighborhood—probably the largest number in any neighborhood in the city.

At the time, Harbor View was not the wealthy enclave it would become after it was developed in the 1920s and 1930s and changed its name to the Marina. Heavy industries, including factories and shipyards, rubbed shoulders with modest stores and other businesses, a few middle-class homes, and lots of working-class housing, including the earthquake shacks. But when the PPIE decided to hold the fair in Harbor View, it needed to clear the whole area—shacks and all.

The Exposition Company, the entity charged with acquiring the land for the PPIE, purchased some of the shacks and sold them to the highest bidder, on the condition they be removed within thirty days of the sale. But the Exposition Company also leaned on the San Francisco Board of Health to have most of the shacks simply condemned. In 1911 and early 1912, no fewer than 415 homes in Harbor View, mostly refugee shacks and other earthquake housing, were condemned as unsanitary. Those not promptly taken down by their owners were torn down. It was a foreshadowing of the city’s removal of homeless tent encampments a century later, with one difference: the tent encampments keep coming back.

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