January 10, 2008

Andrea de Brito

Surrounded by a wall of identical cream-colored condominium buildings to the north, the 280 freeway to the west, and the University of California, San Francisco’s (UCSF) new campus to the east and south, Mission Creek is a commonly overlooked preserve.  The waterway, which empties into China Basin, was once a transportation lifeline of the City’s lumber, hay, and maritime industries, connecting barges to Central Pacific rail cars.  A century and a half ago, before it was partially filled-in with sand, paved over, and developed, the Creek wound all the way to Harrison and 16th streets, and Division and 10th streets.  When the Spanish arrived in 1776, they built Mission Dolores on the banks of Mission Creek.

Today Mission Creek is home to twenty live-aboard vessels, some of which have been anchored in place for more than two decades.  Earlier this fall the Mission Creek Harbor Association signed a new lease with the San Francisco Port, which will enable the vessels, along with 25 other berths, to remain where they are until at least 2043.

Harbormaster Kevin O’Connell lives in a boat called “The Cartoon.”  O’Connell built the boat a quarter-century ago to look like a caricature of his face:  two windows for his glasses, and a slanted wall for his arched nose.  Someday he plans to grow an asparagus fern at the bottom for his bushy moustache.  O’Connell offers me an unfiltered cigarette, which, even for a non-smoker seems ungracious not to accept.  There’s something ceremonial about sitting in a swaying houseboat on the creek, smoking with the harbormaster.

O’Connell, who was raised in Chicago, Illinois, and left home when he was 14-years old to escape an abusive stepfather, pulls out a black-and-white aerial photograph and smoothes it open on the boat’s floor. He traces the ghost of the old creek with his cigarette all the way up to Mission Dolores.  O’Connell then leafs through a few pages of Vanished Waters, stopping to show photographs from the 1890s of rough-looking men building huge steam schooners to carry lumber. “We put this together twenty years ago. We decided to do a little history lesson,” he said.

Less than two hundred years before the first house boaters settled on Mission Creek, the Ohlone people paddled the waterway in canoes made of tule reeds. Before Europeans arrived in the mid-1700s, the Ohlones had navigated San Francisco’s streams and creeks for at least two millennia, fishing, catching birds, mussels, and clams, collecting and planting reeds, and establishing seasonal encampments. When the Spanish arrived they enslaved the Ohlones, and tried to convert them to Christianity.  Instead, they drove the native population to extinction.

By the 1880s, two huge lumberyards supplied the wood, mostly from ancient redwood trees, for almost all of the City’s homes.  On the channel’s north side, where the multi-story condominium buildings now loom large, cabinet shops made trim and built boats; at the mouth of the channel, mounds of hay imported from the Sacramento Valley fed San Francisco’s horses. 

In 1969, 27-years old and having completed a stint as a military cook during the Vietnam War, O’Connell arrived at Mission Creek to find a loose community of whiskey-drinking merchant fishermen, ex-Navy workers, boat builders, and sailors.  A Beat poet and raving ex-Catholic intellectual, he was one of the few people in the community who’d been to college; a bit too highbrow for some of the old-timers.  But he’d worked as a merchant fisherman, and had always felt most alive when he was on the water. He enjoyed the sound of waves lapping at his boat’s hull as he fell asleep.  By 1980, and fueled by a steady supply of Jack Daniels, O’Connell built the basic structure of his boat in just one week.  He’s lived on the creek ever since.

“Do you know this place used to be called Shit Creek?” he asks. “It was really vile here. The water was filthy, electricity was spotty, we used generators, and we threw together our own docks.”  Behind this outward show of disgust, though, O’Connell’s has a deep pride in what once existed.  He fondly describes the old creek as a civilized laissez-faire community with an Old West feel.  Artists arrived throughout the 1970s, enjoying the play of the sunlight on the water, the closeness to nature, and the funky backwater community.

In 1975, a San Francisco Port official arrived at the Mission Creek community and told the house boaters that they needed to leave within thirty days.  Within 24-hours all twenty doors wore eviction notices stating that the make-shift harbor was going to be torn-down, and the houseboats would have to be moved to an undisclosed location.  It wasn’t the first time the community had been threatened.  In the late-1950s, the State of California ejected the first house boaters from nearby Islais Creek, just to the south, to make room for a copra-producing plant, which closed in 1974.  However, in exchange for that disruption the state had offered the community fifty-five permanent berths on Mission Creek.  But this early agreement, backed by a grandfather clause promising the dwellers comparable berths if they were ever forced to move again, was disregarded by the City in its quest for new development.

A Mission Creek resident contacted a lawyer, who quickly secured a temporary restraining order preventing the Port from coming near the Creek.  Shortly thereafter, the Port revoked their eviction order, and declared that the community could remain in place if they cooperated with a plan to transform the area into a greenbelt.  “We were really fighting for our homes and our harbor. It’s like a little village down here—that sense of us having something really unique and not being willing to just go find another place. You keep doing that and you run out of places,” said O’Connell.  In 1976, the Mission Creek house boaters organized into the Mission Creek Harbor Association. Unlike surrounding Bay Area houseboat communities, with the exception of Sausalito’s renegade Gates Cooperative, the Mission Creek harbormaster and all other appointed positions are one hundred percent volunteer.

Forming an association didn’t stop the City’s chronic appetite for growth, particularly in southeast San Francisco.   In 1980, the Port claimed that the three-year lease offered to the community in 1977 had never been signed, and that harbor renovation costs had been underestimated, triggering years of wrangling between the community and the City.  Over time, many of the blue-collar house boaters could no longer afford to live on the creek and moved to homes on land.  Some of the sailors and fishermen found cheaper berths in ports outside San Francisco. Some died.  As the area developed the individuals and small camps of people living in their cars, tents, or under make-shift shelters along the creek also began to disappear.

When the ’89 earthquake hit, O’Connell was working on his boat with four other carpenters. When he felt the first tremors, he thought someone was speeding down the channel in a giant powerboat. He walked onto his deck and watched the pylons swaying in figure eights like a samba line. “I felt a boom,” O’Connell remembers. “A sudden surge of pressure lifted the whole boat up and dropped it down. The wing of the freeway was snapping back and forth. The expansion joints were opening all the way up like teeth. Chips of concrete were shooting across the channel.” The idea of your home being lifted and dropped may not sound like the most assuring earthquake experience, but O’Connell swears that Mission Creek is the safest place to be during an earthquake.   “We’re a lot more self-sufficient than regular beach people,” O’Connell said.

Many of the community’s current residents have similar stories as O’Connell.  In 1980, 33-year-old Tony Lang wanted to move out of his converted firehouse in Oakland and into a cheap place in the Mission. He stumbled on Mission Creek, where he saw a for sale sign on a World War II-ear landing craft sitting on a sinking dock.  “Well, that would be interesting,” he thought.

A telephone installer at the time, Lang enjoyed riding his motorcycle around the railroad tracks through fields of wild rabbits.  “I remember seeing Mission Creek before it went away completely, dripping out of a pipe at the end of the channel,” Lang said.   Two years after moving to the creek, Lang got married on his leaky, rotten boat to a woman he met in a City College Cantonese class. “I told my wife when we got married that once you live on a boat you can never get used to living on land. She didn’t think that was funny,” Lang laughs. “There was always that sense of danger—trying to get it not to sink at all times. The automatic pump was going off every hour, in the middle of the night. There were big holes you could put your finger through.”

Lang, who now teaches at City College, believes floating on water gives people a sense of freedom and spirituality.  But he misses the more carefree days of the “country marina.”  “The [new] lease is confining us more and more. The old days are better,” Lang said.   But he also admits that his wife and daughter, who attends the University of California, Berkeley and also lives on the creek, like the changes because now they feel safe walking outside late at night.

When Ginny Stearns, another creek resident, adopted a baby girl from China fifteen years ago, she wasn’t sure if raising Mei Li on an old houseboat was a smart decision, but her husband insisted on it. A ten-year resident at the time, Bob Isaacson was not about to give up his home and community to live on “the beach.” And then their boat sank.

“I woke up one morning and there was creaking and groaning,” Stearns recalls. “I ran downstairs and saw that water was pouring through the back door. I ran around and tried to stop things, but it was clearly hopeless. This wasn’t supposed to happen:  I was living with an engineer.” After cold creek water rose slowly to the second floor, Stearns found out that a few houseboats had sunk on Mission Creek. “It became clear that when you’re in a boat on the water, you’re in a little eggshell,” she said.

Stearns and Isaacson rebuilt their boat, and became an essential part of the community’s artistic element.  A quaint sign posted on the small strip of land fronting the creek reads, “Welcome to Huffaker Park. The park is open from sunrise-sunset.” The patch of green space, which was designed by Dogpatch resident Jeff Brown, features meandering dirt paths and a community garden.  According to Stearns,  “The more you see evidence of individual participation—like you can see that someone’s made this bed of flowers—the more respectful people are.”  Stearns worked hard to create the park, which is named in honor of deceased former harbormaster Ruth Huffaker, who led early negotiations with the Port.  Stearns reintroduced butterflies to the area, and posted a sign with illustrated descriptions of the eight species that now make the park their home.

“I’m a self-appointed documenter of the wildlife that’s here. I have an extensive list of birds that I see here, partially so that we can say to Catellus, ‘Yes, we do have these birds, and I have daily lists for eight or ten years of the birds and butterflies here’,” Stearns explains.  As part of their extended lease, the Mission Creek Houseboat Association will help Catellus Development Corporation, now ProLogis, develop and maintain an extended stretch of parks along Mission Creek.  Stearns’ driftwood bird perches, which can be seen from her balcony overlooking the creek, will soon be installed along the waterway, paid for by ProLogis.

Stearns also created the “people-feeder,” a box supplied with food for hungry people that was installed both alongside the creek and in front of SomArts gallery in the Mission.  A community member stocked the feeder every day with homemade sandwiches.  Stearns laughs as she remembers building a child’s Huck Finn raft and watching Mei-Li paddle down the Creek with a friend. Such a country scene wouldn’t have been possible a decade and a half ago, when the paint factory dumped chemicals into the creek, and untreated sewage flowed into the brackish waters year round. “I’m glad I missed that,” Stearns said.

Another Mission Creek resident, Jack Wickert, plays the trumpet.  And the piano, tuba, euphonium, guitar, clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, obo, violin, viola, cello, upright bass, as well as some mean notes on pieces of rubber tubing.  Since the 1970s, Wickert has played in national and international tours with companies like the San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino and the Pickle Family Circus.

Wickert’s houseboat walls are decked with framed photographs of circus troupes and garish drawings of Adelitas—brave female warriors of the Mexican Revolution—standing tall and full-figured, holding machetes and waving Mexican flags. At the far, dock-facing end of his boat, light refracts through a stained glass window that one of Wickert’s friends salvaged from a church demolition. The steep, pointed roof is reminiscent of a medieval parish church.

Wickert walks through his front door and onto the dock to watch three boys and their father test their balance as they step from land onto a river raft carrying a cooler and lawn chairs. The three will paddle toward McCovey Cove, south of the stadium, for one of Barry Bonds last games with the Giants. Wickert yells across the creek, “I’ve got life vests!”

After his family moved to the City from Wisconsin in 1940, young Wickert reveled in the tactile pleasures of a less developed San Francisco.  He was drawn to the water, often collecting scraps of meat from the butcher to use as bait to catch the grimy little fish that swam in Islais Creek, and which were frequently putrid by the time he got home.

In 1974, Wickert and performance artist Bonnie Sherk fought to obtain the City’s permission to tear down a concrete slab under the Cesar Chavez freeway interchange to open up Crossroads Community, better known as “the farm.” For fourteen years, he and volunteers ran an “edible landscape:”  urban space with a vegetable garden, a park, a theatre, a rehearsal space, ‘a school without walls’, a darkroom, a library, gardens, and a farmhouse full of goats, pigs, and chickens. Teachers from local schools brought children to the farm, where they were free to explore its offerings.  Wickert says that he’s one of the few people that have more than a half-dozen friends that make their livings as clowns.

When a seagull lands on the railing and squawks and squawks, Wickert, a cigarette propped between his lips, stops mid-sentence and shouts, “Shut up you son of a bitch!”  But there’s a more grating sound that drowns out the birdcalls:  the endless rhythm of gargantuan machines pounding, grinding, drilling and lifting throughout Mission Bay.  In addition to the UCSF campus, in a few years multiple new office buildings, a Little League baseball diamond, and possibly a new public school will be built in the area.

Over the past three hundred years multiple ways of life, and the people who engaged in them, have come and gone in San Francisco. Today, Mission Creek is one of a small fistful of creeks that aren’t completed paved-over.  In fighting for their homes, Mission Creek residents have also fought for the right of water to run above-ground through a growing City.  For the right of water and all the life that grows in it, on it, and around it, to exist alongside freeways, baseball stadiums, condominium complexes, and universities.