Climate Change: A Not-So-Distant Threat to San Francisco (Nineth in a series of stories supplementing the upcoming public television documentary) Climate change poses an immediate and growing threat to the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco’s water storage was built nearly 100 years ago, to accommodate the fresh water needs of a growing population. Now […]
Five Thousand Years in the Valley (Eighth in a series of stories supplementing the upcoming public television documentary) Paiute Indians of the Hetch Hetchy Valley It is believed that beginning as early as 2500 B. C., the Tuolumne Meadows remained largely undisturbed, serving as the summer gathering spot of the south Sierra Miwok Indians and […]
The Roar Of Ten Thousand Lions (Seventh in a series of stories supplementing the upcoming public television documentary) On April 18, 1906, at 5:12 AM a 7.9 magnitude earthquake dismantled the City of San Francisco. It was said, by some, to sound like the roar of 10,000 lions as the City crumbled and exploded into […]
The Sad Truth of Happy Valley (Sixth in a series of stories supplementing the upcoming public television documentary) In 1849, with the influx of the fortune seekers arrived in San Francisco hoping to strike it rich. The area along what is now Mission Street from First Street to Third. It had once been a part […]
The Captain and the Water Nixie Photo of Capital Richardson: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library, San Francisco, CA (Fifth in a series of stories supplementing the upcoming public television documentary) In the early 1800’s the Brothers Grimm wrote a couple of fairy tales about a Water Nixie. But this is not the story […]
Panoramic view across Richmond district 1901 San Francisco History Collection From Sand Dunes to the City by the Bay (Fourth in series of stories supplementing the upcoming public television documentary) San Francisco, with its Mediterranean climate, and annual rainfall of about 22 inches, was once over 7 miles of sand dunes that stretched from Ocean […]
(Third in series of stories supplementing the upcoming public television documentary) Water and the Wilderness: Two Engineers who shaped San Francisco In the 1830’s, before the discovery of gold in the Sierras, San Francisco was little more than a vast sand dune sparsely populated, with less than 800 traders, explorers and adventurers mostly from the Boston […]
(Second in Series of stories supplementing the upcoming public television documentary) All That Glitter’s Ain’t Gold – Sometimes It’s Something Far More Valuable The Gold Rush of 1849 created a need in San Francisco more valuable than the nuggets being extracted from the Sierras. In less than one year the population of the city swelled from […]
(First in Series of stories supplementing the upcoming public television documentary) Every drop of water we use in the San Francisco Bay Area, to shower, bathe, or quench our thirst, travels to our faucets through one of the most amazing systems of engineering known to man. Have you ever wondered how it gets from Hetch […]