Mission Bay [1] was a bay and the estuary of Mission Creek, on the west shore of San Francisco Bay, between Steamboat Point and Point San Quentin or Potrero Point. It is now mostly filled in and is the location of the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco.
Mission Bay was a lagoon nestled inside of a +500 acre salt marsh and was occupied by year-round tidal waters. [2] This area was a natural habitat and refuge for large waterfowl populations that included ducks, geese, herons, egrets, ospreys, and gulls. The indigenous people who first inhabited this area were the Yelamu people who spoke the Ramaytush dialect of Ohlone. [3] After the creation of Mission Dolores in 1776, European immigrants exposed the indigenous population to various deadly diseases that decimated the original inhabitants of Mission Bay.
From the 1850s the area was used for shipbuilding and repair, butchery and meat production, and oyster and clam fishing. [4] Beginning in the mid-1800s, in attempts to make this area suitable for building, Mission Bay, like most of the shoreline of the city of San Francisco, was used as a convenient place to deposit refuse from building projects and debris from the 1906 earthquake. As the marsh stabilized with the weight of the infill, the area quickly became an industrial district. With the addition of the railroad, Mission Bay became the home to shipyards, canneries, a sugar refinery, and various warehouses. [5]
San Bruno Mountain is a fault-block horst in northern San Mateo County, California; its northern slopes rise in San Francisco. It is surrounded by San Francisco Bay and the cities of Brisbane, Colma, Daly City, and South San Francisco, and has played an important role in the history of all these communities.
The Ramaytush or Rammay-tuš people are a linguistic subdivision of the Ohlone people of Northern California. The term Ramaytush was first applied to them in the 1970s, but the modern Ohlone people of the peninsula have claimed it as their ethnonym. The ancestors of the Ramaytush Ohlone people have lived on the peninsula—specifically in the area known as San Francisco and San Mateo county—for thousands of years. Prior to the California Genocide, the Ohlone people were not consciously united as a singular socio-political entity. In the early twentieth century anthropologists and linguists began to refer to the Ramaytush Ohlone as San FranciscoCostanoans—the people who spoke a common dialect or language within the Costanoan branch of the Utian family. Anthropologists and linguists similarly called the Tamyen people Santa Clara Costanoans, and the Awaswas people Santa Cruz Costanoans.
Richardson Bay is a shallow, ecologically rich arm of San Francisco Bay, managed under a Joint Powers Agency of four northern California cities. The 911-acre (369 ha) Richardson Bay Sanctuary was acquired in the early 1960s by the National Audubon Society. The bay was named for William A. Richardson, early 19th century sea captain and builder in San Francisco. It contains both Strawberry Spit and Aramburu Island.
Schoolhouse Creek is a creek which flows through the city of Berkeley, California in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Mission Creek is a river in San Francisco, California. Once navigable from the Mission Bay inland to the vicinity of Mission Dolores, where several smaller creeks converged to form it, Mission Creek has long since been largely culverted. Its only remaining portion above-ground is the Mission Creek Channel which drains into China Basin.
San Vicente Creek is a 3.9-mile-long (6.3 km) coastal stream in northern California which flows entirely within San Mateo County and discharges to the Pacific Ocean. Its waters rise on the west facing slopes of the Montara Mountain, block and its mouth is at the unincorporated community of Moss Beach, within the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. Historically there was a tidal marsh at its mouth, but some of this reach has been degraded by fill, especially in the construction of West Point Drive. This westernmost reach of the creek has been especially ecologically productive, and part of the reason for Fitzgerald Marine Reserve's designation on August 5, 1969, as a state reserve and was named after James V. Fitzgerald.
Point Isabel is a promontory on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in the Richmond Annex neighborhood of Richmond, United States.
The Chochenyo are one of the divisions of the Indigenous Ohlone (Costanoan) people of Northern California. The Chochenyo reside on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, primarily in what is now Alameda County, and also Contra Costa County, from the Berkeley Hills inland to the western Diablo Range.
San Bruno Creek is an intermittent stream that rises on the eastern slopes of the Northern Santa Cruz Mountains in San Mateo County, California, US. The headwaters descend a relatively steep canyon east of Skyline Boulevard in a tortuous course. Comparison of topographic maps from 1896 and 1939 illustrates the extreme modification in the lower reaches due to urban development from the rapidly expanding population. The San Bruno Creek watershed was originally settled by a tribe of the Ohlone, and later this locale was part of the Spanish missions' landholdings.
Wildcat Creek is a 13.4-mile-long (21.6 km) creek which flows through Wildcat Canyon situated between the Berkeley Hills and the San Pablo Ridge, emptying into San Pablo Bay in Contra Costa County, northern California.
Stege Marsh, also known as the South Richmond Marshes, is a tidal marshland wetlands area in Richmond, California in western Contra Costa County.
The Dotson Family Marsh, formerly Breuner Marsh, is a 238-acre regional park on San Pablo Bay in the East San Francisco Bay Area city of Richmond, California, In 2009 the East Bay Regional Parks District acquired the Breuner Marsh site, adding it to Point Pinole Regional Shoreline. A habitat restoration plan for 60 acres of wetlands and 90 acres of California coastal prairie was subsequently approved.
Lobos Creek is a stream in the Presidio of San Francisco in San Francisco, California.
The Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve, known officially as the Baylands Nature Preserve, is the largest tract of undisturbed marshland remaining in the San Francisco Bay. Fifteen miles of multi-use trails provide access to a unique mixture of tidal and fresh water habitats. The preserve encompasses 1,940 acres in both Palo Alto and East Palo Alto, and is owned by the city of Palo Alto, California, United States. It is an important habitat for migratory shorebirds and is considered one of the best birdwatching spots on the West Coast.
John Gunder North was a Norwegian born ship builder in San Francisco. During his career, he built 273 hulls of all kinds with 53 bay and river steamers, including the famed paddle steamers Chrysopolis, Yosemite and Capital.
Rancho Potrero de San Francisco or Rancho Potrero Nuevo was approximately 1,000-acre (4.0 km2) Mexican land grant in the present day Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California.
Yerba Buena Cove was a cove on San Francisco Bay where the Mexican town of Yerba Buena was located. It lay between Clarks Point to the north and Rincon Point to the south. The beach of the cove was set back as far as what is now Montgomery Street between Clay and Washington Streets.
Steamboat Point a headland marking the northeastern limit of Mission Bay, on San Francisco Bay. It was named for the shipyards that built and repaired steamboats there during the 1850s to the mid 1860s.
Point San Quentin, later known as Potrero Point, was the land projecting into San Francisco Bay that marked the southern extremity of Mission Bay, in San Francisco, California.
Potrero Point is an area in San Francisco, California, east of San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood. Potrero Point was an early San Francisco industrial area. The Point started as small natural land feature that extends into Mission Bay of San Francisco Bay. The Point was enlarged by blasted and cuts on the nearby cliffs. The cut material was removed and used to fill two square miles into the San Francisco bay, making hundreds of acres of flat land. The first factories opened at Potrero Point in the 1860s. Early factories were powder magazine plant, the Pacific Rolling Mill Company and small shipyards. The large Union Iron Works and its shipyards were built at the site, stated in 1849 by Peter Donahue. To power the factories and neighborhood coal and gas-powered electricity works were built, later the site became Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E).
