Bayview–Hunters Point, San Francisco
Bayview–Hunters Point is the San Francisco, California, neighborhood combining the Bayview and Hunters Point neighborhoods in the southeastern corner of the city. The decommissioned Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is located within its boundaries and Candlestick Park, which was demolished in 2015, was on the southern edge. Due to the southeastern location, the two neighborhoods are often merged. Bayview–Hunters Point has been labeled as San Francisco's "Most Isolated Neighborhood".
Redevelopment projects for the neighborhood became the dominant issue of the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Efforts include the Bayview Redevelopment Plan for Area B, which includes approximately 1300 acres of existing residential, commercial and industrial lands. This plan identifies seven economic activity nodes within the area. The former Navy Shipyard waterfront property is also the target of redevelopment to include residential, commercial, and recreational areas.
Geography
The Bayview–Hunters Point districts are located in the southeastern part of San Francisco, strung along the main artery of Third Street from India Basin to Candlestick Point. The boundaries are Cesar Chavez Boulevard to the north, U.S. Highway 101 to the west, Bayview Hill to the south, and San Francisco Bay to the east. Neighborhoods within the district include Hunters Point, India Basin, Bayview, Silver Terrace, Bret Harte, Islais Creek Estuary and South Basin. The entire southern half of the neighborhood is the Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, including the site of the Candlestick Park stadium, which was demolished in 2015.History
The Ohlone people
Primarily composed of tidal wetlands with some small hills, the area was inhabited by the Yelamu and Ramaytush Ohlone people prior to the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the 1700s. The district consisted of what the Ohlone people called "shell mounds", which were sacred burial grounds. The Spanish called them Costanoans, or "coast dwellers". The land was later colonized in 1775 by Juan Bautista Aguirre, a ship pilot for Captain Juan Manuel de Ayala who named it La Punta Concha. Later explorers renamed it Beacon Point. For the next several decades it was used as pasture for cattle run by the Franciscan friars at Mission Dolores.In 1839, the area was part of the Rancho Rincon de las Salinas y Potrero Viejo Mexican land grant given to José Cornelio Bernal. Following the California Gold Rush, Bernal sold what later became the Bayview–Hunters Point area for real estate development in 1849. Little actual development occurred but Bernal's agents were three brothers, John, Phillip and Robert Hunter, who built their homes and dairy farm on the land and who gave rise to the name Hunters Point. In 1850, Hunter began trying to sell lots in an entirely new city called "South San Francisco" on the peninsula that now bears his name. Physically isolated from the rest of the city by both Mission Bay and the Islais Creek estuary, the only way to get to Hunters Point aside from sailing was via the San Bruno Road, completed in 1858.
The Bayview–Hunters Point district was labelled "Southern San Francisco" on some maps, not to be confused with the city of South San Francisco further to the south.
; Islais Creek and "Sacred Sites"
The Muwekma Ohlone held and still hold Islais Creek by 3rd Street and Marin in the Bayview as one of fifty, "sacred sites". Islais Creek and the adjoining bay has been heavily polluted. Of the original approximately 1500 people who inhabited the San Francisco Peninsula prior to the Portola Expedition in 1769, only one lineage is known to have survived. Their descendants form the four branches of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples today.
Industrial development
After a San Francisco ordinance in 1868 banned the slaughter and processing of animals within the city proper, a group of butchers established a "butchers reservation" on of tidal marshland in the Bayview district. Within ten years, 18 slaughterhouses were located in the area along with their associated production facilities for tanning, fertilizer, wool and tallow. The "reservation" and the surrounding houses and businesses became known as Butchertown. By 1888, the city cracked down on the slaughterhouse district due to a diphtheria outbreak and a need for better sanitation. The city inspectors found under the slaughterhouses a foul smell, the decay of animal parts, and live pigs. The butcher industry declined following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake until 1971 when the final slaughterhouse closed.From 1929 until 2006 the Bayview–Hunters Point district were home for the coal and oil-fired power plants which provided electricity to San Francisco. Smokestack effluvium and byproducts dumped in the vicinity have been cited for health and environmental problems in the neighborhood. In 1994, the San Francisco Energy Company proposed building another power plant in the neighborhood, but community activists protested and pushed to have the current facility shut down. In 2008, Pacific Gas and Electric Company demolished the Hunters Point Power Plant and began a two-year remediation project to restore the land for residential development. The area remains a hub of business along 3rd Street, represented by the Merchants of Butchertown.
Shrimping industry
From 1870 to the 1930s, shrimping industries developed as Chinese immigrants begin to operate most of the shrimp companies. By the 1930s, there were a dozen shrimp operations in Bayview. In 1939 when the U.S. Navy took over the land under eminent domain for the Naval Shipyard. The Health Department came in and burned the shacks and docks that once provided a small village of fishermen and their families a steady living in the abundant shrimp harvest from the San Francisco Bay.Shipyard
Shipbuilding became integral to Bayview–Hunters Point in 1867 with the construction there of the first permanent drydock on the Pacific coast. The Hunters Point Dry Docks were greatly expanded by Union Iron Works and Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation and were capable of housing the largest ships that could pass through the locks of the Panama Canal. World War I increased the contracts there for building Naval vessels and, in 1940, the United States Navy purchased a section of property to develop the San Francisco Naval Shipyard. Beginning in the 1920s, a strong presence of Maltese American immigrants, along with Italian Americans, began populating the Bayview, focused on the local Catholic St. Paul of the Shipwreck Church and the Maltese American Social Club. They were a presence until the 1960s when they began moving into the suburbs.The shipbuilding industry saw a large influx of blue collar workers into the neighborhood, many of them African Americans taking part in the Great Migration. This migration into Bayview increased substantially after World War II due to racial segregation and eviction of African Americans from homes elsewhere in the city. Between 1940 and 1950, the population of Bayview saw a fourfold increase to 51,000 residents. The Hunter's Point shipyard at its peak employed 17,000 people. One function of HPS was the loading of components of the atomic weapon "Little Boy" that was eventually used on Hiroshima. "Little Boy" was loaded on the USS Indianapolis on July 15, 1945, and is reported to have contained half of the uranium-235 available in the United States, valued at the time at $300 million. The USS Indianapolis left Hunters Point at 6:30 am on July 16, 1945, but was not allowed to leave San Francisco's harbor until 8:30 am, after the first atomic weapon test "Trinity" had been confirmed successful in the New Mexico desert. In 1947, the Hunter's Point crane was constructed at the shipyard to repair battleships. It was the largest crane in the world at the time. The crane still looms large over the neighborhood today.
Until 1969, the Hunters Point shipyard was the site of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. The NRDL decontaminated ships exposed to atomic weapons testing and also researched the effects of radiation on materials and living organisms. This caused widespread radiological contamination and, in 1989, the base was declared a Superfund site requiring long-term clean-up. The Navy closed the shipyard and Naval base in 1994. The Base Realignment and Closure program manages various pollution remediation projects.
Environmental impact report
On January 10, 2010, Ohlone representatives, Ann Marie Sayers, Corrina Gould, Charlene Sul, and Carmen Sandoval, Ohlone Profiles Project, American Indian Movement West and International Indian Treaty Council penned a letter to then mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, about preserving the Ohlone historical sites at the Candlestick Point–Hunters Point shipyard stating "This is an important opportunity to work together to protect these ancient historical sites, honor our ancestors and insure that development pressures do not further damage critical Ohlone Indigenous sites, the sites affected by the development are extremely significant and are believed to be burial or ceremonial sites, in addition to protecting these sites, we also want to work with the local community to protect their health, the land and the fragile Bay marine environment."On June 12, 2014, Vice published an article on the history, environmental bigotry and radiation effects on the residents of the neighborhood.
Italian, Portuguese, and Maltese community development
Upon late 1800s settlement, there were many Italian, Maltese, and Portuguese home-builders, ranchers and truck farmers in the Bayview from 1890 to 1910. The growing population of Italian, Maltese, and Portuguese residents seemingly pushed out the early Chinese community that was located in the Bayview.African-American community development
Redlining reports
In the 1930s, the distribution of race and income in the neighborhood was fairly even. Two redlining reports from this time characterize the residential makeup of the area as lower-income: that is, residents were either "white collar" workers or factory laborers who had jobs in the vicinity. While "many of the inhabitants from foreign extraction, no racial problem presented." Poverty in the neighborhood was widely attributed to the depression. In 1937, the Home Owner's Loan Corporation made a redlining map to determine which San Francisco neighborhoods should receive loans for mortgages and general housing investment. Two districts in the Bayview Hunters Point received the two lowest possible grades. This lack of investment made it much harder for the area to rebound from the depression, and also made it very difficult for people trying to purchase new homes in the area. In 1942, to address the housing shortage issue, the federal government built 5,500 'temporary' housing units in the area for the families of shipyard workers. As a result, Hunters Point began as one of the most integrated areas in the city. Toward the end of WWII, the San Francisco Housing Authority pushed for the hiring of an all-white police force to govern the neighborhood. Many of the officers were recruited from the segregated south. From this point onwards, racial discrimination – in terms of the environment, housing, employment, and policing – shaped the development of the Bayview Hunters Point and further contributed to its segregation from the rest of the city.By the 1950s and 1960s, the Bayview was a predominantly African-American neighborhood that housed a movie theater along the Third Street corridor, as well as a library, a gymnasium at the time, Cub scouts through "Rec and Park" as well as youth baseball teams such as "The Blue Diamonds" of Innes .