2. Location, History and Economy
The City of San Francisco is located at the northern tip of the peninsula that makes up the southwestern shore of San Francisco Bay. It is situated approximately 87 miles southwest of Sacramento and 48 miles northwest of San Jose. Covering 46.7 square miles of land, it is the largest city in the Bay Area. The City of San Francisco is also a County, and therefore has a unique government structure wherein county supervisors govern on the city level. North of the City, across the Golden Gate Bridge, sits the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Muir Woods National Monument, and Mt. Tamalpais State Park.
San Francisco occupies the ancestral homeland of the Ohlone. The Ohlone is a collective of around 50 separate tribes with related languages from the Northern California Coast. Tribal lands stretched from the coast of San Francisco through Monterey Bay to lower Salinas Valley (Source). The Ramaytush Ohlone and Muwekma Ohlone were the original people of the San Francisco peninsula and the San Francisco Bay region (what is now called Berkley and Oakland) respectively. When the Spanish arrived, they referred to the tribal groups collectively as “Costenos,” meaning “coastal people.” The Ohlone people’s subsistence livelihood was heavily reliant on marine resources. The name was eventually changed to “Costanoan.” Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Ramaytush Ohlone numbered approximately 1500 persons, but colonization during the Mission Period left only a few families surviving. Today, descendants comprise the membership of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone (Source). The present-day Muwekma Ohlone Tribe is comprised of more than 500 members of surviving American Indian lineages aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay region who trace their ancestry through the Missions Dolores, Santa Clara, and San Jose; and who were also members of the historic Federally Recognized Verona Band of Alameda County (Source).
The year 1769 marked the first Spanish contact with San Francisco when Gaspar de Portola was searching for Monterey Bay. However, it was not until 1776 that Lieutenant José Joaquin Moraga and Francisco Palóu settled the Mission San Francisco de Asís, also known as Mission Dolores after a nearby creek. The mission was the 7th of 21 missions established by Spain as they colonized California. Spain also established a presidio, or military outpost, at the northern tip of the San Francisco peninsula. The mission settlements were intended to eventually become pueblos or cities, and the mission churches would become parish churches. The Mission Dolores became one of the largest settlements in all of Spanish California. By the early 19th century it is thought to have been home to over 1,000 people (soldiers, clergy, farmers, enslaved indigenous peoples, etc.) (Source). In 1821, Mexico separated from Spain and laid claim to California. The Mexican government soon proceeded to secularize the missions throughout the state and relocate their land to Mexican citizens for ranchos where they raised cattle. Mexico eventually ceded the area to the United States in 1848 (Source) at the end of the Mexican American War, and San Francisco incorporated in 1850. The city grew rapidly, especially as people immigrated to the area following the discovery of gold. East of San Francisco, Sacramento was an important center for economic activity during the nineteenth century and San Joaquin rivers drained into San Francisco Bay, bringing freight, trade and industry to the city.
When the Gold Rush began to decline, fishing grew in importance. Southern California’s commercial fishing industry began with the influx of diverse immigrant communities from China, Japan, Italy, and Portugal. Italian immigrants to the area established a commercial salmon fishery on the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. The salmon trade picked up during the 1850s and 60s when the price for river freight dropped and steamship service to the Eastern Pacific began (Source). The fishery continued to thrive through the 1870s and eventually, fleets of ships fished the delta where the rivers dumped into San Francisco Bay. By the 1880s, fishers netted 10 million pounds of salmon in the estuary, however, fishing pressure was too much and the Bay’s fishery collapsed by the mid-1880s (Source).
In the mid-1850s Chinese immigrants began establishing fishing settlements on the San Francisco Peninsula. They exported dried fish and shellfish to international markets in Asia. The most important Chinese fishery in the Bay Area was the shrimp fishery, which began in 1871. By 1895 the fishery was considered one of the most productive fisheries in California. The Bay area was also home to a booming oyster business. However, mining, agriculture, and development at the start of the 20th century brought both pollution from industry and human sewage to the Bay, ultimately leading to the collapse of the oyster industry.
San Francisco’s first commercial fishing, the Union Street Wharf, was built in 1884. The wharf had a maintenance shed, four large boiling vats for tanning nets and sails, a boat ramp, and a market house where the catch was landed and sold to the local market. In the second half of the 19th century, the San Francisco fishing fleet was primarily composed of Italian-style lateen-rigged sailboats, called feluccas. Other vessel types included sailing gillnet boats that fished the Bay and the rivers. These boats deployed Sicilian paranzella drag nets that were used for catching herring and rockfish. The crab fishery was also important in the latter half of the 19th century with the crab boat fleet numbering approximately 50 vessels in the 1880s. In 1900, the wharf was relocated to another location on the waterfront due to development.
By 1925, the area’s fisheries modernized and vessel and gear modifications allowed fishers to move to offshore waters. Boatbuilders in San Francisco soon outfitted the vessels with gasoline engines. This new vessel, known as the Monterey clipper, gave fishers greater flexibility in terms of how and what they fished and allowed them to spend several days at sea (Source).
Pacific herring continued to be one of the port’s most important commercial fisheries throughout the 20th century. With advances in gear, such as power blocks for bringing in nets, the fishery became immensely profitable. In the early 1900s, large numbers of herring were harvested for bait, fish oil, fishmeal, and preservation such as pickling and smoking. Because herring was not a desirable canned fish, landings declined between the 1920s-1940s.
At the beginning of the 20th-century markets also started to expand with transport infrastructure. Bay Area products were transported by truck, rail, and ship throughout the country and world. The fish market building was replaced by large-scale fish processing and packing facilities. The sardine fishery came alive, and canneries were built all along the California shore, 27 of which were located in San Francisco and Monterey. Fisherman’s Wharf was expanded to three basins to accommodate the increased number of facilities and vessels (Source). The sardine fishery peaked in the late 1930s, however, sardine fishing continued in San Francisco until it completely collapsed in the early 1950s due to natural variation, ocean changes and fishing pressure (Source).
The decline of some of the area’s fisheries caused many fishers to shift to more lucrative fish processing, distribution and restaurant businesses. Starting in 1972, fishers began targeting herring for roe (the eggs from pregnant females), primarily for export to Japan. The sac-roe fishery garnered higher prices, leading to fishery expansion. The herring roe fishery has run every year since its inception except in 2010 when managers closed the season. However, the fishery began to decline after 1999 due to reduced prices, high variability in species abundance, and restrictive management measure due to concern about stocks. Overall, San Francisco has led California in herring landings (Source).
The city developed the Wharf through the 1970s and 80s to draw more tourists (Source). Around the same time, the Bay area’s Asian population grew and increased the demand for live fish (Source). In San Francisco, and along the California coast, fishers began participating in live fisheries. Sport-fishing and charter boats also became popular in the latter half of the 21st century (Source).
