Wednesday, October 5, 2005

Re:  O & A Interview of Images of America

San Francisco Potrero Hill Book - Arcadia Books

 

Below is a special question and answer interview of Abigail Johnston and Peter Linenthal, authors of "San Francisco's Potrero Hill," the first book devoted exclusively to Potrero Hill.  It is published by Arcadia Books as part of its Images of America series.  Johnston is the Managing Editor of the Potrero View and Linenthal is the Director of the Potrero Hill Archives Project which has been in existence since 1986. The interview was conducted by Bruce B. Brugmann, Bay Guardian Editor and Publisher, as a special online feature for the paper's 39th anniversary special, published Oct. l9th, 2005 and as a prelude to Potrero Hill History night to be held Saturday, Oct. 22, at the Enola Maxwell School, 656 DeHaro Street @ 18^th Street, beginning at 7 p.m. with exhibit viewing beginning at 6 p.m.

 

 

Bay Guardian:  This is San Francisco's Potrero Hill Images of America by Peter Linenthal and Abigail Johnston from the Potrero Hill Archives Project.  Now from my point of view, the Potrero Hill Archives Project is the premier neighborhood research and historical project in the city and Peter that's you.

 

Peter Linenthal:  Thank you.

 

BG:  And Abigail works for what I consider the best neighborhood newspaper in town as the Managing Editor.

 

Abigail Johnston:  Thank you, thank you.

 

BG:  So we have the two key people here to explain and talk about Potrero Hill and their book and Potrero Hill History Night in San Francisco and the Archives Project.,  Sso why don't we start at the beginning where every good story starts.  Peter, how did you get started in the Archives Project?

 

PL:   Well, I moved to Potrero Hill in 1975 and by 1986  in 1986 I heard about the Potrero Hill Archives Archives Project which had been started by Julie Gilden originally as an oral history project to record oral histories with long time neighborhood residents.  She was particularly interested in the Molichan Molokan Russian community on the hill and as the archive Archives project Project developed, more and more historic photos from these interview subjects were discovered and that's what really got my excitement going.  I became involved in copying these old historic photos that families that grew up on the hill Hill had and so the collection of photos of the archive Archives project Project grew and grew and now a lot of those photos are storedcan be seen at the Potrero Branch Library at 1616 20^th Street.  Actually,As the Archives Project developed, and another change that we made was tapingwe started taping our interviews on video tape instead of the audio tape that we had been using and that made the interviews much more interesting to a broader audience.

 

BG: .  Now, you do these taped interviews?  I've been to a couple of History Nights, and the live interviews there are conducted by Phil De Andrade of Goat Hill Pizza The ones I've see are on history night           at Mr. Bill Hill's Pizza which are pretty good but he's playing to the audience.

 

PL:  Unfortunately, since we became involved in the book, I've been doing less of the person to one personnot done a one-on-one taped interviews.interview.

 

Abby Johnston:  When did you last do one?

 

PJ:  Oh, before we began the book, I think. It's been a few years now.

 

BG:  So Abby, when did you come into the viewView?  Have you been there from the beginning?

 

AJ:  No I haven't.  This The paper started in 1970 and Ruth Ruth Patson Passen who is the Ownerpublisher  and Editoreditor-in-Chief chief came to it about a year after that and I came to it inon board in 19841985.  At that time, we had an intense 3 or 4 daysan intense 3 or 4 day of production in the office, but we had a largewith a pretty big  staff of volunteers and they did things outside the office as well.  That started to change as people moved to Oregon . . . . or stuff, so I didn't keep going  or really start in.

 

 

BG:  On page 127, you have the staff all very 70's, subversive looking, and very Potrero looking. When was this picture taken?

 

AJ:  This picture was taken in 1979?.

 

BG:  Now this is pretty good size staff for a neighbor newspaper.  Do you have this many now?

 

AJ:  No, . But it's still an extremely hands-on newspaper, dependent on volunteers. but bBack then all the copy was done on typewriters and I remember when I came there we still hadall our display type was set on a headliner machine.  And use to enjoy the I used to enjoy the task of setting headliner headliner smachine because that meansit meant I could get out of all the arguments of thata bunch of other stuff over there.  If you ever y worked a headliner machine, you  know you can't be distracted at all because all inside there can be ruined, because it it's was a letter letter-by by-letter thing because each paper gets letter by letter photographed.  You don't see the whole thing until it come out at the end and if somebody interrupts you, you can have 18 feet of newspaper.

 

 

BG:  I always thought one of the best set of archives in the city and in the neighborhood were the bond copies was the binds of the Potrero Hill View - t.  The stuff there, the photographs, text, news, people, etc.

 

AJ:  It's good and, w wee have've got a lot of stuff.  Several years ago we started to bind all of our the issues.,   Iit was a big hunt to track down the issues because we hadn't been doing that.  So it was not until, oh, I think the early 90's when Ruth and I went out and to track down every single issue.  We have a set in our offices and there is a set  available public viewing in the neighborhood library.  Also, sort of surprised by this , we just found out a couple of years ago that the public main library has been collecting them on their own.

 

BG:  This is a splendid book and everyone I have shown it to and seen it has said so.  I looked at Arcadia Books a little bit and they specialize in this kind of publishing.and they do this kinds of things.  In San Francisco, this is the 4^th or 5^th neighborhood?

 

AJ:   Oh, no I think they've got maybe close to 30 titles about San Francisco and it is not just about the neighborhoods, its the expedition its the burning of the bridges, there's tons.

 

BG:  So this is like 31 or 32 - this obviously has a special quality to it and it's obvious that you folks are knowledgeable, put a lot of time in this and picked a lot of the right stuff.  What was your theme behind this?  Did they tell you what to do?  How did they do it? 

 

PL:  Well, when they came to us, the first thing we told them was that we really want to take our time and we gave ourselves one year.  We knew it would really take a long time and I am glad we took as long as we did because it took longer than I thought and there was really a lot of work involved.

 

AJ:  Yes, we were working on it for a long time.  Also, both of us were juggling.  Neither one of us could work at it just non-stop.  Peter had other assignments. He's a book illustrator and photographer and I had the View every two weeks.

 

PL:  We began by immersing ourselves in the collection and just looking at everything we had and seeing what themes emerged.  There was a lot of back and forth in the process of working on the book whether we would following a strictly a chronological theme. . . .

 

BG:  Speaking as a journalist myself, I can see that this is an interesting writer/editor process because you were both operating as writers and editors.

 

PL:  And photo editors and collectors.

 

BG:  So it was a real collaboration.

 

AJ:  We've We'd known either each other before because Peter's been in and out of the View, bringing in pictures and stuff, but we didn't have any idea that somehow our individual talents would just mesh the way they did.  I mean, he has areas of expertise that were his and his alone and I had areas that were mine.  It was such a perfect blend.

 

BG:  Well, it's good you had two of you.

 

PL:  I knew I needed someone to help from the beginning.  I knew I didn't want to do it on my own!

 

BG:  As you look through here, this really hangs together well.

 

PL:  Some of that I think is due to Abby's ability to group photographs thematically and really make them tell a story.

 

BG:  How do you do that?

 

AJ:  I've been a book designer most of my life and books that I've like liked best working on were books of historical photographs.  I have did worked on  a number of books on San Francisco and so that's just a little bit of my background.  One of the things that I we did noticenoticed  about in some of the Arcadia books that we looked at when we got started on ours was that there were quite a bit of differences on the spreadsthe handling of double-page spreads. .  It is not that I wanted our spreads to tell a story. I didn't want them to be to have pictures that are all  a disparate mush. blended together and look like mush, but somehow there was disparity between them.   Some books we saw had a spread with Like a picture of some businessman, and then a school, and then a church and then a fire station and they would have some kind of scribbledthe captions didn't connect the pictures to each other in any way.  caption and then didn't flow them one to another.

There was no flow.

 

BG:  Let's give an example. What illustrates that point ? What made it flow?

 

PJ:  Our solution to that problem . . .

 

AJ:  We would go back and forth between being thematic and being chronological.  Our editors first told us bluntly, cheerfully that virtually all of their office authors preferred to do it thematically.  So then we would start started off thinking it would be easier to do it thematically.  But then we We would struggled with this.  Remember that list of potential chapter titles?  But one of the rules was that you could have between 3-10 chapters and weWe wound up with a list of 7 themes.  And then I started working with some of our pictures, in trying to get them within these theme chapters.  Well, we have Bethlehem Steel here and Bethlehem Steel there.  See, Bethlehem [Union Iron Works] was such an important part to a particular part of Potrero Hill and to separate Bethlehem S that to separate it teel from the school that served the children, the church that served the working people, it just didn't feel right. TI.M. Scott o take an ordinary school and put it in a separate chapter apart from Bethlehem Steel because he was  was the manager of Bethlehem Steel Union Iron Works and the benefactor of the school and the whole neighborhood.  So to separate him into a different chapter from the school just didn't seem right.

UIW from its surrounding neighborhood just didn't seem the way to go.

 

PL:  A good example of the packing skill of balancing chronology with theme is on Page 58-59, where there are four pictures that relate to the Lim family.  We discovered they were a very early Chinese family living in Dogpatch.

 

BG:  12435 Minnesota.

 

PL:  I think having all of these together one spread gives an impact that they wouldn't have had if they were broken up by year.  It begins with Willie Wong's steps up the road to Grandma's house and that's from the 30's.

 

AJ:  But, also here's another thing.  Here's this combination of we did some chronological, what they would structure as chronological, but sometimes within the 3 chapters we ended up with even though we We went back and forth.  I would call Peter up and with have a brainstorm and say We're not doing it chronologically, we're doing it thematically.  He took it all quite well.  So what it the book really winds up is being is three chapters that are essentially chronological with a beginning, a middle and a now, but within them there are themes.

 

BG:  The book has With so many interesting things fromfor someone just coming onto the hill. late,  We just came into this Guardian location 3 1/2 years ago,.  Ffor example, on Page 52, the pictures of the tents and then the little shacks.  , housing refugees from the 1906 earthquake and fire. People associate that with Golden Gate Park and the Presidio and so forth, and none of us had any idea of thissuch a community was here on the hill.  It looks like there are hundreds of people here.

 

AJ:  And we have photographs of the tents extending all the way down 3^rd street and Mission Bay

 

BG:  And is this were 3^rd Street is?  Were these along the sides?  Was there a 3^rd Street at that time?

 

AJ:  It was called Kentucky then. Yes, they were there?

 

BG:  How long were they there?

 

AJ:  The tents weren't there all that long but the shacks were there a while.

 

BG:  The shacks replaced the tents, because that was how you illustrated it?

 

AJ:  The tents came first for sure and then the government built the shacks.

 

BG:  What felt more comfortable of the two room shacks?

 

PL:  I remember someone telling us that what was frustrating was the spaces were actually really small and I remember there was a story of a little girl who when she got her first job she worked in a brush factory that was in one of these shacks that had been dragged to some other location on the hillHill.  After they were returned at the relocation center, they were sold off and people would turn them into houses.

 

 

AJ:  And there are still several of themAJ:  And there are still a number of those earthquake shacks..  Ralph Helson Wilson who knows of several of the shacks that have been combined and that are still down there, still down on the flats .  there.  And then Oothers people were moved up to other parts of the hill Hill and there are a couple up on Carolina Street.

 

BG:  Is this the real start of Potrero Hill becoming a populous.  These people were not people who lived up here.

 

AJ:  A lot of them were from the South of Market area.  So many Many of the people there were the Slovarians Slovanians, who didwho  moved to the hill Hill after the 1906 earthquake were from the south of Market area.

 

BG:  Did they then go back to where they originally lived or did they go back tostay on the hillHill?

 

PL:  A lot of them stayed.

 

BG:  Did they rent or buy?

 

PL:  Well, a lot of the hill at that point was unbuilt up on.  There was lot of fill.

 

BG:  Was it owned by somebody?  Back where I am from in Iowa, we have the Hompestead Law.  My great grandfather got a piece of land _____________and then that's it.

 

PL:  I think it was owned by that point.  It really got bought up and built upon. 

 

BG:  To see all these people if they had a little piece of land there they could really populate the hill.

 

PL:  The picture on the cover is from 1908 just a couple of years after the earthquake and I think you can see construction happening, at least in several places and then here's the point where a lot of the hill really gets built up and much more filled in.

 

BG:  Alright now, the most enduring name of Potrero Hill is Goat Hill.  What's the history of the goats?  Are there any goats in the back of those houses and are there any goats today?  Bill AntradiPhil De Andrade  claims there are goats back there.

 

AJ:  I don't know if there are any goats today.  Bill Phil himself might have been the last person on the Hill with goats.  He had aHis goat, Hilda, goat and you lived where the pizza parlor now has its back dining room.

 

BG:  Is that where they got the name?  Did the goat come before the name?

 

PL:  I think pizza came before they got Hilda. 

 

AJ: Then they got Hilda and then Hilda had a couple of kids.  By the way, my husband took that photograph. 

 

PJ:  It's kind of cool.  In the backyard there they would give Hilda the leftovers.

 

BG:  Do both of you go back to the days when there was a goat there?  You can personally verify that there was a goat there?

 

AJ:  Oh, yes.  As I said, my husband took this photograph.  W, and my husband when we just lived maybe just a block away.

 

PL:  I tried to take Hilda to a class I was giving.  I was working at a preschool and I tried to get her in VolkswagonVolkswagen Rabbit and it was really tough, so they had to bring her in a Volkswagan VolkswagonVolkswagen bus later that day.

 

AJ:  It was really funny to pass by the hillAJ: It was really funny to come up 18th and see this goat head pop over the fence.  It was very sad actually when Hilda and her kids had to move on -- there was a parade down the street with signs: saying Save the Goats.

 

PL:  I didn't know though until we worked on the book that a Russian man said that when the houses were torn down to due to the public housing projects, that a lot of those houses belonged to the Molichan MolakanMolokan community and there were a lot of goats that belonged to that Molichan MolakanMolokan community where Potrero Terrace is now.

 

BG:  I was delighted to see _Connecticut_________ Yankee here.  It looks to me like is pretty much the same building.

 

AJ: 

 

PJ:  It pretty much is. It was built by the Salvotti family out of wood that had been  a ________ Red Cross shelter for refugees of the 1906 earthquake and fire.  ______________ refugees from the 1906 fire earthquake.

 

BG:  One of the difficult things in San Francisco is you see a building, you see it for years, then someone tears it down and you go by it the next day and you wonder what was there and what did it look like it's a horrible feeling.  I had that feeling just the other day.  How many of buildings that you have in here are still standing?  About half?

 

PL:  I would say probably more about 75% .%.would say.  There are a lot that are still there.

 

BG:  Now the Neighborhood House goes back to 1925.   and that is a house by the sea over viewing ____________. How did that come to be?  Is it associated with Hearst Castle one of those big things?

 

AJ:  Julia Morgan, the architect.She wasn't actually on the hill.  Not sure how they got in touch with her, but it was the Presbyterians  synagogue or something like that and they wanted her got in touch with her; this was some time before she hooked up with William Randolph Hearst and became famous for deisigningdesigning San Simeon, Hearst Castle.  It was the kind of these she was building.  She was had been designing simple building syncly the arts and crafts, craftsman style, houses in the city and over in Berkeley.  She was the first woman to get an architect's degree from the _________ and ________ and I think she was the first woman to be head of an architect office in San Francisco.  And I think the Presbyterians, the church, whatever, looked because she might have been cheaper than the other architects they might have gone to and this was way before they built Hearst.

woman to head an architect's office in San Francisco. The Presbyterians perhaps selected her because she was cheaper than other architects they might have gone to this was before Hearst Castle after all.

 

 

BG:  I remember when I first went up there to the Nabe and somebody showed me all of the ______________the newly installed solar panels.  Do they exist?How's that working out?

 

AJ:  Now that is very interesting.  I think the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House may not have been the first building to have had solar panels installed, funded by the city! INot sure of my facts here, have to check the View. n the city to have solar panels but maybe like the first community to have them.  I know we have it in the paper once, but geez, do I remember no but it is a big deal to be able to do that.  It's fun now to go outside and see the meter spinning an opposite way, indicating something good I'm sure.

buildings standing, but faded.

 

BG:  I happen to remember Tony Lazzeri___________  and I remember he was the first big leaguer to hit two grand slam homers in one game.  I was amazed about it and amazed that he was from here and that indeed, you found this plaque.

 

AJ:  Well, it is there hanging on the recreation  house at Jackson playground.

 

 rare.  It's hanging in the red house on Jackson.

 

BG:  How many other plagues like that did you stumble upon?

AJ:  There're really aren't many.

 

PL:  There are some photographic discoveries that were a lot of fun.  Hunting at the Maritime Museum Library, they have the collection of the Bethlehem Shipyards, and on Page 30 and 31, the picture on Page 31 of Irish Hill is very familiar.  But digging through their archive, we found the photo to the left of it which joins with that photo.  We didn't join them literally, but they do overlap so you get a broad sweep of the Bethlehem Steel.

 

BG:  Those buildings are pretty much intact in tack, just repaired?

 

PL:  The bricks ones are but I think the rafters are pretty much gone. And Irish Hill is a tiny little speck in their parking lot.  It's really no more.

 

BG:  I'm very interested in the Spreckles Building and the Spreckle s Familyfamily.  They planned such a role.  _____________ 1851.

 

AJ:  There are, I figure tThere are some little remnants of the Spreckles sugar company down in there somewhere that was part of it.  We need to go take a look at it sometimes.in Dogpatch

 

BG:  The power house.  What is the address on that?  It says the South Shore Potrero Hill.

 

PL:  I should know this better, but didn't he {Spreckles} have a falling out with the electrical company, there were several competing and so he started his own electrical company which eventually merged with the other companies to become PG&E.

 

 and I think there are still the remains of his __________ down there which is quite a sizable building and you can't go in it because it's all blocked off now.

 

BG:  So that would have been a competitor to PG&E inside.

 

PL:  It was the birth of PG&E as I understand it.  The company he started merged with others in the city.  There were many competing you see.

 

BG:  Do you have a year on that?

 

PL:  I don't know.

 

AJ:  :  It one of those veryIt's confusing thing because not only were there so many of these competing power companies, they all seemed to change their names monthly or be sue suing one another on a regular basis.  It was very doggy-dog.  It would be SF Electric Company or the Electric Company of SF, The Power Company of SF or SF Power Company.  It was vVery confusing.   And sometimes even the years of things were in dispute.   We had some what of the same problem with Union Iron Works/Bethlehem Steel.

 

 The same thing happened with Bethlehem Steel because it kept Union Ironworks was the real power down there.  But then it was bought by Bethlehem Steel, but people still called it Union Ironworks for years, so it was hard.  And some sources would say, well wasn't it really Bethlehem Steel.  And then we'd go back and look in some book that would say it was 1903 and another book would say 1905.

 

BG:  I notice here that Tubbs Mortgage CompaBG: What's the connection here between Tubbs Cordage Company and ny.  Then you'd mention the Hell Angels.Angels?  Now what was the connection?

 

AJ:  Tubbs was where it was probably the 1^st major industry to come to Potrero Point.

 

BG:  Is that where the clubhouse is?

 

PL:  Yes, one side of there their building boarders borders the street that is now called Tubbs. 

 

AJ:  See Tubbs was actually huge.  It had a this huge building ____________________and one really, really long building which was called The Rope Walk and that is where they stretched out all of fiber that they had gotten from South America to make these huge ___________rope used in the shipping industry.  So if you go down there you will see a diagonal that represents the footprint of the original Tubbs Road Blocrope walk building.k Building.

 

BG:  I heard about the Hell's Angelsle clubhouse from the City Attorney, Dennis Herrera.   I was having breakfast with him and he mentioned he lived there the 3 or 4 houses ofrom the clubhouse.  I didn't believe it so I jumped in the car and I drove by it to see and there it was and it had a sign!  I was surprised because there's been so little press.

 

AJ:   Oh yeah, they're proud of it and Iit's just a funky little thingplace at a the end of a dead- end street and then you have to drive down and figure out how to turn around.

 

 

PL:  There's also a mean barking dog outside.

 

BG:  Well, how did they build that?  Did they buy it?  How did the Hell's Angels get there?

 

PL:  I'm not sure, but then for some time there was homeless guy in the neighborhood that I interviewed and he was the mascot for the Hell's Angels when he was a little kid in the fifties.

 

BG:  Oh, it was there for that long.

 

PL:  I think they started in the east bay.  I don't know the year they came to Potrero Hill.

 

AJ:  I know they were there when I got my first job in San Francisco which was on 25^th and Minnesota and . I lived all the way out in the avenues at the time.  I had to take the 38 Geary and the 15 and it just took hours and nobody I knew at the timeythen knew about where I was working or what part of the city it was and thereor that I was working right next to the Hell's Angels.

 

PL:  I thought it would be cool if they came and spoke at History Night.  We tried to get that going but they never responded.

 

BG:  I noticed your literary section pPoet Allen Ginsberg at 5 Turner Terrace, .  Ferlinghetti's House a, And Kay Cole.  , Did she live on the Hill with Lester Cole, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten of the 1950s? Cole, did she live there with Lester Cole.

 

AJ:  Actually, they might have been divorced at by the time either of them lived on the Hill.  She Kay did a lot of stuff work with the Neighborhood House.

 

BG:  Yeah, Lester Cole _______ use to write us, the Bay Guardian, off and on and I didn't realize until much later that I realized __???????__________..

 

 

AJ:  We very much wanted to have a picture of Kay Cole and Lester Cole together.  Actually, thereThere was a 2^nd person in this our photograph of Kay, but we struggled and struggled to get an ID of him but we didn't know who it was.couldn't get it and had to crop him out.

 

BG:  You couldn't find the two (Kay and Lester) together?

 

AJ:  No.  I found out their daughter's name, and I talked to her, but she didn't have any ________.couldn't help us.  The other thing I wanted was any pictures of Kay or either one of them actually in a Potrero Hill setting.

 

PJPL:  As long as we're talking 1950s: The Powells' ___________ story.  A guy I went to high school with was one of their sons.  It all had a happy ending when they were cleared of all charges.

 

BG:  Why don't you summarize on that story.

 

PL:  Well, they met in Shan HighThey met in China.  Victor John Powell worked publishing a newspaper there and his wife wife Sylvia was working for an aid association.  In theirpublished a newspaper, they publishedin which they printed  reports that they heard from soldiers returning from Korea that the U.S. was using chemical warfare. and becauseBecause of those articles they published they were accused of  _sedition________  and treason and had difficulties finding jobs when they came back home.  The only livelihood they could find was buying old houses, originally on Potrero Hill but then in other parts of the city fixing them up and then selling them.  Eventually, they were cleared of all charges and had a big party at 1301 Rhode Island in 1961.

 

BG:  Is that where they ended up?

 

PL:  No.  They eventually ran an antique store on Church Street.

 

AJ:  I think they lived they lived there in that building on Church.

 

BG:  That's very interesting because that clears up a lot.  The chemical warfare charges were during the Korean War, right?

 

AJ/PL:  Right.

 

BG:  Now were any of those articles every confirmed?

 

PL:  I don't know if they were confirmed.  We could ask Mr. Powell.  He's still around.

 

BG:  Is he still around?

 

PL:  Yes.

 

BG:  Is he still living on the hill?

 

PL:  No, he's still on Church.  His wife died a couple of years ago, but he's still there.

 

BG:  You've got a lot in here.  What are your favorites or your best stuff?  Can you pick out favorites?

 

AJ:  Well, we've always loved the picture that's on the cover because it tells all kinds of stories.  __________ cow'sThere are those cows right there in the middle of the road, it shows buildings under construction, it still shows a lot of empty space, it shows some buildings that are . . .

 

BG:  Early, early Potrero Hill in 1908.

 

AJ:  Also, in the background in the bay itself, which is fairly barely discernable are the ships of the Great White Fleet which stopped in San Francisco in 1908 when during President Theodore Roosevelt's campaign to was going to showdisplay to the world America's might and these ships went around the world..  They The ships anchored in San Francisco for almost 6 months between legs on their way around the world. east. 

 

PL:  Another favorite is the map on Page 33.  This is my favorite in a way because it shows the land speculation and the long history because at first it doesn't look like Potrero Hill at all.  It looks like it's flat as a pancake almost.  You have to realize that it's published by a realtor company and they're trying to make it look like attractive land for development.

 

AJ:  With just a few little gentle rises here and there.

 

PL:  Yeah, the hill is almost not there.  But it does show very clearly the industry is on Potrero Point that characterized some of the earliest building on the hill because we were really the edge of town at that point.  But I really think it is funny how flat they made it look.

 

BG:  That was released?

 

PL:  _____________________ real estate agents.

 

BG:  What did you leave out?

 

AJ:  (Laughter) Oh, geez, Volume 2!

 

PL:  (Laughter) TTons, Volume 3, Volume 4!

 

AJ:  It was a hard process fine-tuning our baby and it really was painful.

 

BG:  Did they give you a limit?

 

AJ:  Yes, we had to have between 180 and 240 maximum pictures and 128 pages, absolutely, and I think it was 10 pages of front matter that's it, you know.  And all kinds of things we would have loved to have, not just pictures, but we would have loved to have had an index, we would loved to been able to say more about our pictures.

 

PL:  It was painful to eliminate them but at the same time the stuff that was left over looked better and better

 

AJ:  We had I think on one of our first messages, said thisa binder is crme de la crme, so we had a notebook called Crme de la Crme , but that crme kept shifting and so then we would have Crme de la Crme B and the rejects from Crme de la Crme B . Etcet and so on. It was a process we called killing our babies.

 

BG:  How did you divide the work on the captions, for example?

 

AJ:  Actually, Peter wrote a great manymost of them and he wrote them out by hand in pencil a in a mini spiral notebook. and then torn them off my hand.  Our plan thought was that he would write just as must as we we should write down as much as we could about each image, even though we knew we couldn't possibly include all the information in the book  possible could because a lot of our photographs we'd had for years and the archives for years and we really didn't have all of our information gathered about them.  So we thought so But this was our opportunity to make sure that all of the pictures we used have as much information as we possibly needgather together all we possibly could about every image he had, even if we would up killing it. Peter wrote screeds, I edited them and typed them.  So we We  knew that Peter's wonderful effusions would get cut way back.

 

PL:  They're really boiled down.

 

BG:  None of these are stand alone photos.  They all need explanations.

 

AJ:  I think that's true with all history books and artistic of photographs.  I I think there is one picture of the bridge freeway being built on Page 109, now that's a stand alone photograph.

 

PL:  But they all need to be enhanced with a story.

 

AJ:  Like this one, here is Estelle West on Page 108.  She, her house and her 15 goats were in the path of the freeway being built in the 1950s.had some 15 goats and she was _______________ in the 50s and with her hip house and her goat yard in the path of the freeway. So she She kicked up quite a fuss before she had toddle off with her goats

 

BG:  This is an amazing amount of stuff -- from the Potrero Theatre Program down to the family pictures of all these kids and people throwing the snow where did you get all these pictures?

 

PL:  Well, we had the archive Archives collection from the people we had interviewed, sothers just volunteered photos and ariifactsartifacts to us,ubjects and we had the picture of you archived and, then we went to libraries all around the city.

 

BG:  You told me about one that you had to track down or that popped up at some second hand store.  Which one was that?

 

AJ:  That's this one on Page 54.

 

PL:  It popped up at the flea market, which used to be the produce market on Bayshore.

 

BG:  How did you get the ID on it?

 

PL:  All that was written on the back was Russian people SF off Mariposa by 3^rd.

 

BG:  So we don't have any ID?

 

PL:  No, so we don't know exactly.

 

BG:  What year?

 

PL:  We had to guess from the dress.

 

AJ:  We think it really looks that because they're They're so dressed up that we think a wedding must be involved here somehow.it must be a wedding or part of a wedding party.

 

 

PL:  The picture of the Russian funeral came from a family that was interviewed.

 

BG:  That brings up, how did the Russians get to Potrero Hill?

 

AJ:  They emigrated from various places out of Russia.

 

PL:  Russia boarder Turkey _________________________.

 

AJ:AJ:  The Molokan s And they were escaping conscription and also prejudice practices of the   ___________rian ___________chupersecution rch.by the orthodox church  There are several stages of their immigration and I think they landed in Galveston which was a big point of entry.  And thenAAn an earlier group had gone to Galveston, and then to Los Angles.  and the group that wound up on our hill first went to Los Angeles. . .]Our group hit those two places and wound up in San Francisco just a day or two after the earthquake of 1906.

 

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So the story is that  they ________a surly drayman carted that took them to the edge of town, which is the base of Potrero Hill, and  dumped them there.  , and they They took up residence at first sleeping slept on the ground with the other refugees and, thenand then moving moved to the army-surplus tents. , and then to government-built shacks.

 

 That's the birth of the Movachian community on Potrero Hill.

 

PL:  For a number of years, there was confusion about where was Russian Hill because this was Russian Hill.

 

BG:  Okay, their they're here on the hill on Potrero.  How would a community like that support itself?  Where I come from you become farmers.

 

PL:  Actually the shipyards, working in the shipyards.

 

AJ:  Well, people don't realize that while the rest of the city was just _______ a shambles after going through the 1906 earthquake and fire,.  Potrero Hill, Potrero Point, was so busy busy with all of those industries and all of them vital in rebuilding the city.

 

BG:  So there was work for the men.  What did the women do?  Did they work?

 

AJ:  Some of them did.  They took in washing and did the kinds of things that women would could do during those times.

 

BG:  Well what happened?  They left?

 

PL:  Oh yeah,No.  and tThere's still a Malaccan Molokan church on the hillHill., on Carolina Street.

 

AG:  On Carolina Street, right across from ____________________.

 

BG:  Do they oes it have a lot of parishioners?

 

PL:  I think it's getting smaller. I went there one Sunday.

 

BG:  Did you fit in?

 

PL:  I think I looked the part.  They do sing without the instruments in a very traditional way and they have ties with the Malaccan Molokan community back in Russia and I think they've gone back and tried to raise monies for that community.  So that's interesting too.

 

BG:  Are there a lot of generations left?

 

PL:  I think less and less and people are moving away.

 

BG:  Do they own their own homes?

 

AG:AJ:  Oh, yeah.

 

BG:  Where are they?

 

AGAJ:  They're kind of spread out and around.  They started moving up the hill when they could from the flats.  Actually, they were among the first settlers along the top on De Haro Street, Rhode Island, Carolina all up in there at the top where the water tower is.

 

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PL:  One of the names ____________ and Popin and ___________.

 

BG:  Are there any other communities like that?  Ethnic communities?

 

AJ:  The Slovenians are from Czechoslovakia.Chekhovia (sp?)  that area?

 

AJ:  They actually come to San Francisco earlier than the Russians and I think I said earlier their primary settlement had originally been the south of Market, so when the south of Market had been flattened by the quake. . .

 

BG:  Now what about the Molokans?

 

PL:  I think they were small.  The family that we found . . .

 

AJ:  There is an earlier map that is Natalie ___________ has; used by the people they are the people that have been conducting the history walks, in Dogpatch which is _______ connected with City Guides.  They have a map.  I am not sure what the date is, but down there near 23^rd, there's a location of Chinese shacks.

 

PL;  And we know there was a Chinese community in the Bayview that harvested shrimp and dried them out on wards, going way, way, way back.

 

AJ:  And actually we didn't get into this at all, there was some things in the paper where there was talk of relocating Chinatown here.

 

BG:  Is that related to the China Basin?

 

AJ:  No, that had to do with where the ship were going to and coming from like India Basin and China Basin.

 

PL:  There was a neighborhood near where I live near 18^th and Missouri there is a little part of the Hill that was called Scotch Hill because there was a community from Scotland there and a Presbyterian church.  So we had Irish Hill, Scotch Hill and Russian Hill - all little hills of Potrero Hill.  It's kind of cool.  The earliest map of the Hill the _____________ goes back to the land grant of the DeHaro Family, that is really favorite photo of mine because the shows it on Page 16.  That was something we discovered in the hunt for images for the book.  I like it for a lot of reasons, but one is that it really shows that Potrero Hill is a system of ridges that interconnect.  There really isn't one hill that Potrero Hill.  It's interesting the way they drew it, I think you get hues of those silhouettes looking from different directions.

 

AJ:  They ________ were not designed to be accurate.  They were just supposed to accompany the graphs and show what area were covered and what to look for.

 

PL:  I was searching with a neighbor, Julia Bergman, and she got into the DeHaro stories and she's a mass of information and friends of hers are working on a book now about the stories of the DeHaros.  We had to look through a lot of microfilm of all the California _________ and that took a long time, but we found it.

 

BG:  Now you folks, the two of you, have done more research and history and work on Potrero Hill than probably anyone else and you're the official biographers of the Hill.

 

AJ:  We've got to know more.

 

BG:  Yeah, you'll probably keep at this.  What's the essence of the Hill?  Jean and I are from the other end of town.  We live in West Portal which is a nice neighborhood we love the area.  Then we come over here and my gosh, this is a wonderful neighborhood though we never quite realized it.  How did this come to be?

 

PL:  I think it comes because of its isolation originally as a peninsula.

 

AJ:  It's almost completely surrounded by water.  One reason why the west opened is that it was very swampy except on the west end of it.  But on the north, south and east of course, it really stuck out.  That's why that end part is called Potrero Point even though you don't see the point.

 

BG:  Now where is Potrero Point?

 

AJ:  Potrero Point is all of that hole, not the whole of it, but a good portion of that water funding Bethlehem Steel.  In the olden days, it really was a peninsula.  There was really water on two sides of it.  Mission Bay was all filled in.

 

BG:  Yeah, there's a lot of landfill there

 

AJ:  Yes, a huge amount of filled land.

 

BG:  We got into that with our building because immediately at the bank and everybody said the foundation was this and that, but we're on very solid land, but a little ways away . . .

 

PL:  I think a lot of Mission Bay is land filled. That's why we did so well in the earthquake.  We're a big chunk of serpentine. 

 

BG:  So let's follow that.  So it was a peninsula with a lot of water around which meant what?

 

PL:  It meant that it was useful as a pasture for the cattle from Mission Dolores and practical in the sense that it could be a surrounded pasture.  They only had to build a very small brick or stone wall because of the boarders of the pasture Potrero means pasture.

 

BG:  Well, the Potrero Hill martini, does that work?

 

PL:  That's the pasture martini.

 

BG:  How did that big brewery get there?  What was it before Bruce and his gang got over there.

 

AJ:  I think it was a brewery before that, right?

 

PL:  No, we found out there was a funny jingle with that company.

 

BG:  You have that picture in here?

 

AJ:  Yeah, it was the old Jason Sanborn's.

 

BG:  Jason Sanborn the coffee people?  Are you going to publish this in your next book?

 

AJ:  Oh, just look this.  This just breaks my heart. 

 

BG:  What breaks your heart?

 

AJ:  ________ Maytag on Page 123.  And we had just sent the proofs back and Linda Clark was just looking at the proofs and she said his name isn't

Fitz is it?

 

PL:  But this edition is almost sold out.  They're reprinting it.

 

BG:  So is there any more of the essence here? 

 

PL:  But how has it kept its character up until now?

 

AJ: Well, sometimes we think it might be losing it.

 

BG:  Listen, there's an onslot here.  The plan is to put 30,000-40,000 down here - Market re-housing downtown through 3^rd Street.

 

PL:  I think it's  the isolation.  It became a residential neighborhood isolated from the rest of the city by a commercial area.

 

BG:  They're going to link this up.  See the implicit rule which we found out about if City Hall coverage is the rule at City Hall has been west of 19^th Street, no density west of 19^th or west of Ceazar Chavez.  Through all the problems and all the stuff down in the south east part of town, this is where the highway goes, the train, the power plant, the PG&E and Muni and now that are stuck.  There is no place to go so they'll put 40,000 people down there.

 

AJ:  That is not a particularly new attitude because some of the first industries that came to Potrero Hill came because they were deemed dangerous black powder and put them down here.  Of course other industries started in other parts of San Francisco, but by the lat 1850's, industry was here. 

 

BG:  So if the industry was here, that meant that a lot of people wanted to be over there on the other end of town except if they were working.

 

AJ:  Yeah, so it was very, very blue collar.

 

BG:  Kind of like sections of Dogpatch are now?

 

AJ:  Dogpatch actually contains a little flavor in its little micro-house it's wonderful.

 

BG:  Down here it's jJust Ffor Yyou that little place and that little place, the Hell's Angel Clubhouse.

 

AJ:  Yeah, there are these little places I don't know what street it is, quite derelicts, but is still being used by the fire company not as a firehouse but as a burrio from the 1880's or something like that.  And that helped get another one there which has since been torn down.  And that's a very nice building I wonder if there's any photographic possibilities.

 

PL:  Another thing that ended up in the neighborhood because of the forces you're saying is the amount of public housing.  I didn't know it but I was taking to a long time resident.  She said that in the 50's if you said you were from Potrero Hill it was assumed you lived in public housing.

 

BG:  Well's here another point.  You've got is picture here on Page 3 and you point out that the 1100 block of Tennessee Street was finally paved in 1980 and you have a picture here of what it was before.  I have always been marveled at this street of Carolina in front of the whit house, I guess between 16^th and 17^th; it's like something out of the country.  How can this coexist a few blocks from showplace square?oHo

 

 

AJ:  Well, just up until a few years ago, there were still quite a few unpaved streets on Bernal, on that south side of Bernal and you really felt like you're really in the city?

 

BG:  There's wonderful stuff about Bethlehem Steel, the first World War how was Potrero Hill contributing to World War I and II?

 

PL:  In a big way.  They got the first contracts for a military ship.  That was big news because that meant that west coast shipyards were getting contracts.

 

BG:  Were we the first?

 

PL:  We were one of the first. 

 

AG:  We were the first west coast shipyard data contract it was done here in 9 months.

 

BG:  So that great picture of the women of Bethlehem Steel, I don't know if you have it, they were all buildings down here for the war?

 

PL:  Yes, and it was amazing the speed.  In the archives at the Maritime Museum, they have pictures of how quickly they were building ships.  In a matter of days, you can see the structure go up and boxed in.

 

AJ:  I don't know if Bethlehem Steel or Union Landworks set any records.

 

PL:  But they were competing and they were major contributors.

 

AJ:  The competitions were an ongoing thing.  What I think was interesting though as I seem to recall was that it went a little more than that.  The second World War _______ right up.

 

PL:  That brought public housing to the Hill, too.

 

BG:  Was the public housing for the workers initially?

 

PL:  The public housing started for those people impoverished from the depression and then World War II started and suddenly there was a need for worker housing.  So there was a transition from depression victims to worker housing..    ATnd the initial public housing was quite solidly built and with _______ _________ has terracotta roofs and it'swas made out of cement.  But the later additions were made temporarily and they never were intended to be here as long as they have been.  But like the Potrero Annex was built as temporary housing so called.

 

BG:  Any of that housing been torn down or pretty much there as it was built?

 

AJ:  There was some that was torn down.

 

PL:  There were some torn down for the middle school.  And there was housing on the western side of Irving and Scott School that was torn down.

 

BG:  What we're worried about here at The Guardian is that a lot of them are being earmarked to be torn down and put in market rehousing.

 

PL:  Yes, somebody told me that if you just go down to this office, you'll see a model of what they have in mind.  They want a market rate an then a subsidized mix, but they're afraid they're going to be displaced and not be able to come back.

 

BG:  I think that ___________ probably _____________.  So you think, the earthquake, the tents and then the shacks and then public housing.  This is as nice a place in town in terms of weather and geography.

 

AJ:  It's the best.

 

BG:   I mean you go out to Seacliff and you never see the sun because it's all fog.  We'll start out in West Portal and drive down here and it's nice and sunny.

 

PL:  It never was really a fashionable district and now it is becoming fashionable.

 

AJ:  And that is what is upsetting to people.

 

BG:  Well that's why this is such a valuable piece of work.

 

PL:  It's not good as it use to be.

 

BG:  Well, it's hard to save a preserve if you don't have the history.

 

AJ:  This is something that Dogpatch Neighborhood Association did a wonderful job on.  I don't know how many years they worked on this project but it was a couple to four years ago that they were officially declared a San Francisco historic district from their own efforts there is there within a few wonderful parts of our past.  Now with this being declared as a historical district they will be saved they won't be trashed.

 

BG:  This has been really interesting, but let's start to whine this down.  We have to make sure everyone looks at this.  How do you summarize your work, the Hill, the book - is there a way you can do this?  Is there a page or a monologue.  We found this montelogue that A.J. Blumenthal wrote for a San Francisco news column in 1949 and we knew we had to include it somewhere.  It sums it up in a way that describes Potrero Hill.

 

BG:  Oh, great, read it.

 

PL:  If you want to be literal Potrero Hill is situated just south of downtown, west of outer 3^rd Street, and east of General Hospital.  To put it another way, it's at the intersection of if you want isolation, economy and honesty.  These are the ingredients that make Potrero Hill into something more than a place and close to a religion.

 

BG:  And that is the last draft on San Francisco's Potrero Hill book.  So just give us a quick hit on Potrero Hill Night and what the two of you are going to do.

 

PL:  This year and each year, this is our sixth annual History Night the core of History Night are interviews conducted by Phil De Andrade.  Phil Andratti (sp?).  And this year, Sister Kathleen and Sister Lochucia who are retiring from St. Teresa's Andreus Church and John Greenberg who is continuing director at the recreation center will be interviewed by Phil.  All of his people have been there since the 1960's and they've done a lot for Potrero Hill that I'm still learning about.  So we are really looking forward to that night.

 

BG:  The book will be there?

 

PL:  Yes, the book will be there.

 

BG:  And what about our friends from Digital Com?

 

PL:  We will have photograph enlargements that willweill be availableavailavbe for purchase.

 

BG: Will they be ones from the books?

 

PL/AJ:  Yes.

 

BG:  Give us a sample - a preview of a coming attraction.

 

PL:  Well, there will be one of the earthquake.

 

AJ:  We never did say that that picture was a major find. The earthquake Pages on 50 and 51.  It was actually a two glass mix and wonderful Digital  Com merged those, and they did not do any touching up in Photoshop.

 

PL: What's really cool is you can see the ponds that are the remains of Mission Bay.  I had never seen the scanned photograph before.

 

BG:  Where in the world did you find this?

 

AJ:  From __________ ___________ another city historian and a great collector of photos.

 

PL:  He didn't want to tell where he got it.  He's working on his own Arcadia book about the natural history in the city and I think that will be really great.  Oh, another feature of History Night will be a performance by a Hula group who practice up at Daniel Webster. 

 

BG:  What history do we have on the Hula group?

 

AJ:  None, other than they live on the Hill and the director lives on the Hill.

 

BG:  We have to keep this legit.

 

AJ:  Well, they have now hula-ed their way to various celebrations and street festivals throughout the year.

 

PL:  And a lot of Potrero Hillers go to their hula class at Daniel Webster School.

 

BG:  See one of the reasons I am really glad to see this is because there is a real movement to have a major city museum on 5^th and Mission with _______________ exhibitions and so forth.  But you guys have put together a chunk of material that is something that can be done there and it will be a way to a place to showcase Potrero Hill in a little broader setting.  If you don't drive down here and sit at Farley's, you probably don't get it.  And even so, gosh, there's a select few that you never get it.

 

PL: I think a lot of people didn't use to know where Russian Hill was but that's less and less.

 

AJ:  It's much less.  But when I first came, as I said before, I worked at MinnesotaMinnosota and 25^th and nobody on my side of town was associated with what was over here.

 

BG:  We were at 520 Hampshire Street.

 

AJ:  Yes, I use to pass by there all time.

 

PL:  That's a cool building.

 

BG:  And before that at 19^th and York and we never got down here.  Now, all this action Mission Bay and 3^rd Street and so forth, now people will know where we are.

 

AJ:  You know now people who have not been here in a long time will see the changes on 18^th Street and will be surprised.

 

BG:  Well one thing. We're trying to get into some formula retail to save and preserve this area.

 

PL:  Is there a logo or something like Buy Potrero?

 

BG:  Yeah that stuff too, but I talking more about zoning.

 

AJ:  Quick, quick, quick!

 

PL:  You mean so there won't be chains.

 

BG:  Yeah, keep the zoning - it's formula retail and they dive other parts of town.  We'd like to do it down 3^rd Street, but I think there would be some resistance.

 

BG:  Well, this is good stuff and this is really helpful.  Our anniversary issue is on the southeast corner - the politics, the economics.

 

AJ:  Cool.

 

PL:  Great.

 

BG:  A essentially explaining what is going on and B putting out the ammunition to deal with it because what we're finding is that all this talk about market rate housing, work force housing, guess who they are building for?  The people who work in the Peninsula and Silicon Valley and the people who can pay those high rents.  It's not affordable housing.

 

PL:  They want to treat it like a bedroom community.

 

BG:  Yeah, and that is what they are building here.  See that is the information we want to get out so there can be some resistance.  That's the point.  Well, thanks folks.  We really appreciate this.

 

AJ:  Thank you so much.

 

PL:  Thank you, Bruce.  Anytime.

 

Per authors, please add:

Project House Archive Project in existence since 1986

 

Christopher's Books @ 1400 18^th Street, San Francisco

Books available for available at:

 

         Christopher's Books @ 1400 18^th Street, San Francisco

 

         Potrero Branch Library @ 1616 20^th Street, San Francisco

     4 Star Video @ 1521 18^th Street, San Francisco

Center Hardware @ 999 Mariposa Street, San Francisco

St. Farley's @ 1315 18th Street, San Francisco

World Gym @ 290 De Haro, San Francisco

Chatz @ ,301 Arkansas, San Francisco

 

 

         Video will be shown viewable at:

 Potrero Hill History Night

                  Saturday, October 22.

Enola Maxwell School

656 DeHaro Street @ 18^th Street

Socialize and view exhibits at 6pm

Program begins at 7pm

  For more information call 415-863-0784

. towers.

 is.

PL:  One of the names ____________ and Poppin and ___________.

 

BG:  Are there any other communities like that?  Ethnic communities?

 

AJ:  The Slovakians are from Chekhovia (sp?) and that era