Where the homeless camped in 19th century
For years, one of the largest homeless encampments in San Francisco has stood on Division Street. Half a dozen or more tents, some with bicycles and other possessions piled outside, can usually be found under the freeway around 11th and 12th streets.
Few motorists who drive down Division Street realize this is not the first time a homeless colony has stood near there. In the 19th century, a shantytown called Dumpville existed just a few blocks to the east, where the stream that used to flow along what is now Division Street trickled through mudflats into Mission Bay.
This peculiar settlement had its own rudimentary government and economy, featured the first recycling operation in the city, and even attracted a homeless shelter. And it lasted more than 20 years.
As its name suggests, Dumpville grew up on the site of San Francisco’s first major garbage
dump, which was open from 1869 to 1877 on what is now Berry Street between Sixth and Seventh streets, on the edge of Mission Bay and Mission Creek. As noted in “Behind the Seawall: Historical Archaeology Along the San Francisco Waterfront, Vol. 1,” edited by Allen G. Pastron, Berry Street did not exist before Dumpville: An 1869 map shows it as underwater, whereas an 1877 map shows it partially filled.
Dumpville created itself: It stood on landfill made up of garbage dumped into the wetlands. It came into existence in part because of the severe economic downturn that afflicted San Francisco in the 1870s, a crisis exacerbated by the city’s skyrocketing population.
Newcomers in SoMa
San Francisco grew from 150,000 residents in 1870 to 235,000 in 1885, with most of the newcomers crowding into the South of Market. By 1880 this was the most densely populated area of the city, filled with cheap hotels, boardinghouses and restaurants.
As Alvin Auerbach notes in “San Francisco’s South of Market District 1850-1950: The Emergence of a Skid Row,” an article in the fall 1973 issue of the California Historical Quarterly, no less than half of San Francisco’s boardinghouses, a quarter of its hotels, half of its 655 lodging houses and one-third of the 250 restaurants listed in the 1880 city directory were South of Market.
Many of the mostly single men who frequented these establishments were migrant workers. In 1871, the great social critic Henry George observed them “disappearing” after the wheat harvest in the valley “into the flophouses of San Francisco — to come back next season like so many ragged crows.”
In 1872, another observer described the inhabitants of the area as “blanket men,” “runaway sailors,” “reformed street thieves,” “old soldiers” and “bankrupt German scene painters” (this last presumably not a large category). The origins of Skid Row, the last remnant of which still exists on Sixth Street, can be traced to this era.
Men unable to afford the flophouses, or who didn’t want to stay there, slept outside at the Vallejo Street wharf, in the lumberyards east of Beale Street, on ships anchored in the harbor — and in hovels at the base of Sixth Street. By the late 1870s, so many impoverished men were living in shanties made of scrap materials at the dump, “filth hotels,” that the area became known as Ragville or, more commonly, Dumpville.
Too nice to ‘bummers’
Then as now, some criticized the city for being too hospitable to the indigent, whom they regarded as lazy ne’er-dowells. In an 1875 article in Scribner’s Monthly, Samuel Williams wrote, “San Francisco is the Elysium of ‘bummers.’ Nowhere else can a worthless fellow, too lazy to work, too cowardly to steal, get on so well. The climate befriends him, for he can sleep out of doors fourfifths of the year, and the free lunch (offered by saloons) opens to him boundless vistas of carnal delight.”
For the inhabitants of Dumpville, it was more like boundless vistas of raw sewage. Mission Creek, which ran right next to the shantytown, carried human waste from more than half the city’s neighborhoods into Mission Bay. A sea captain named Fred Klebingat recalled that the reeking creek had the consistency of mud, oozed gas bubbles and would turn white paint black overnight. This foul stream was universally referred to as S— Creek.
A reporter disguised as a tramp wrote a 10-part series on Dumpville for the San Francisco Daily Evening Post in 1878. “Here were congregated many people of all nationalities, their wan and pinched countenances plainly showing the inroads that want had made there,” the reporter wrote.
Dump dwellers
As the garbage wagons dumped their contents — as many as 300 wagons a day were hauled to Dumpville — the dump dwellers swarmed over the piles, using shovels, pitchforks and poles to look for “rags of any and every description, old bottles, cans, scraps of iron, glass, old sacks, corks, pieces of wood, brick, oyster shells” and anything else that would bring in money.
Scavenging through the garbage was sufficiently profitable that from the beginning of Dumpville, a succession of enterprising bosses seized control of the operation.
The Post reported that an “old Italian” ran the dump, commanding a crew of several men. He told the Post they made from $2 to $3 a week, which was probably a small fraction of what he was making himself.
This dump czar exercised complete control of his odoriferous turf. He allowed Chinese scavengers to go through the garbage only after 4 p.m., when everyone else had looked through the rubbish, and charged them “two bits a head” for the privilege.
The scavenging operation at Dumpville was remarkably thorough and sophisticated — so much so that it became San Francisco’s first recycling center. That story, and the eventual downfall of Dumpville, will be the subject of next week’s Portals.