A Gateway without a Port: Making and Contesting San Francisco’s Early Waterfront

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, San Franciscans transformed a muddy cove and trading outpost into an American town and then global port. In their rush to build a port and a city, they created a socially, politically, and materially unstable foundation for their rapidly growing urban waterfront. This article argues that the development and growth of early San Francisco cannot be understood apart from its waterfront in general and its role as a port in particular, contributing to a relatively small literature on the relationship between cities and their ports in urban history. Tracing the legal contests over the tidelands, material construction of piers, rise of a vice district, and clashes with vigilante justice, this article examines the creation of San Francisco as a gateway city. It suggests how historians might recover the dynamic, entangled, and at times violent histories hidden beneath the sediments of time along all urban commercial waterfronts.