Vintage San Francisco Market Street in The 1940s 20210225
by Wingsdomain Art and Photography
Title
Vintage San Francisco Market Street in The 1940s 20210225
Artist
Wingsdomain Art and Photography
Medium
Photograph - Photoart
Description
Vintage San Francisco Market Street in The 1940s 20210225
Market Street is a major thoroughfare in San Francisco, California. It begins at The Embarcadero in front of the Ferry Building at the northeastern edge of the city and runs southwest through downtown, passing the Civic Center and the Castro District, to the intersection with Corbett Avenue in the Twin Peaks neighborhood. Beyond this point, the roadway continues as Portola Drive into the southwestern quadrant of San Francisco. Portola Drive extends south to the intersection of St. Francis Boulevard and Sloat Boulevard, where it continues as Junipero Serra Boulevard. Market Street is the boundary of two street grids. Streets on its southeast side are parallel or perpendicular to Market Street, while those on the northwest are nine degrees off from the cardinal directions. Market Street is a major transit artery for the city of San Francisco, and has carried in turn horse-drawn streetcars, cable cars, electric streetcars, electric trolleybuses, and diesel buses. In 1839, the first street grid was laid in the Mexican trading post of Yerba Buena by Jean Jacques Vioget, largely aligned with the cardinal directions, with blocks measuring 412 by 275 feet (126 by 84 m). Yerba Buena was renamed to San Francisco in 1847 after it was captured by United States troops during the Mexican–American War. Market Street, which cuts across the city for three miles (4.8 km) from the waterfront to the hills of Twin Peaks, was laid out originally in an 1847 survey by Jasper O'Farrell, a 26-year-old trained civil engineer who had emigrated there. Market Street was described at the time as an arrow aimed straight at "Los Pechos de la Chola" (the Breasts of the Maiden), now called Twin Peaks. Property owners forced O'Farrell to retain the earlier Vioget-drawn north-south Yerba Buena street grid rather than conform the roads to the hilly topography; they also forced him to establish the diagonally-offset grid south of Market with larger 600-by-400-foot (180 by 120 m) blocks aligned with Mission Street for Happy Valley. Market was laid out to transition between the two competing street grids, parallel to and one block north of Mission. O'Farrell first repaired Vioget's original layout of the settlement centered around Portsmouth Square, and then established Market Street as the widest street in town: 120 feet (37 m) between property lines. However, the width of Market also aroused the ire of property owners, who felt the new street was excessively wide and potentially encroached on their holdings; they made preparations to lynch O'Farrell. At the time, the Market Street right-of-way was blocked by a sixty-foot sand dune where the Palace Hotel is now (at the intersection with New Montgomery), and a hundred yards further west stood a second sandhill nearly ninety feet tall. The dunes were leveled between 1852-54 and 1859-73, first by James Cunningham, who was responsible for levelling the area around Second and Montgomery, and then by David "Steam Paddy" Hewes; Hewes purchased the steam shovel (nicknamed "Steam Paddy" as it was reputed to be able to do the work of a dozen Irishmen) that had been brought to San Francisco by Cunningham during the earlier period. The sand removed was used to fill Yerba Buena Cove between Portsmouth Square and Happy Valley at First and Mission Street; Mission Bay at Fourth and Townsend; and for the construction of the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad. Over those years, up to 2,500 short tons (2,300 t) of sand were moved per day, clearing approximately 5,000 acres (2,000 ha) of sand dunes, some of which had risen up to 60 feet (18 m) above the present-day level of Market Street. -wikipedia
www.wingsdomain.com
Uploaded
February 25th, 2021
Statistics
Viewed 460 Times - Last Visitor from New York, NY on 04/11/2024 at 6:57 PM
Embed
Share
Sales Sheet