Historical Notes from my Childhood Home

Sorry this is a break from silicon2tanana reportage, but I don't know where else to jot down this Interesting Stuff. Please ignore if this is of no interest to you, but feel free to read, if interested. :)

Timeline:

Here is a 1903 photo of a location near my high school's present location in San Francisco:

image courtesy of OpenSFHistory / wnp36.10037

The caption reads, "Spring Valley water flume crossing a gully toward row of eucalyptus trees between present-day Stonestown and Lowell High School. This structure was demolished in 2018."

More details of the history here. That row of eucalyptus trees in the background line Eucalyptus Drive today, where I walked to and from both middle school and high school.

Apparently a series of flumes was built all over the western side of the City to channel water from Lake Merced to the downtown areas where almost the entire population lived at the time. Much of this infrastructure would later become obsolete when Hetch Hetchy became the main water source for San Francisco. Another website, the Western Neighborhoods Project, describes the photo as follows. "On May 26, 1898, San Francisco approved a new city charter that allowed the municipal ownership of utilities, effectively putting it in competition with the Spring Valley Water Company. Pictured here is a Spring Valley water flume over a gully in 1903 in the Stonestown area. The City ended up buying Spring Valley in 1930."

After the 1906 earthquake, major consruction proceeded in the neighborhood, which had been formerly sand dunes and artichoke fields. Thus my childhood neighborhood was built.

Stonestown shopping center was built adjacent to the site in 1952, some 50 years after the trestle was built. Old topographic maps of San Francisco suggest that Stonestown shopping center was built on top of a filled-in ravine. Lowell High School, which was founded in 1856, moved into its current location near there in 1962. We now have the present setting for the above trestle, which lays between Lowell High and Stonestown, which is now a mall called "Stonestown Galleria". I knew the foreman of the tile-layers who laid tile in the interior of the mall when it was converted to an indoor mall in 1987.

I attended Lowell from 1991 through 1995, and although we had an "open campus" and were allowed to come and go between classes, we were warned--weekly, via the bulletins we got in homeroom (which at Lowell is called "registry" or "reg"; I was in reg 9510) NOT to go onto the "trestle path" that went through a local city park and led to Stonestown Mall. We were told that it was "very dangerous", but no more details, so of course our teenaged minds provided the following Reasons:

• Girls get raped on the trestle path.
• Teenagers of both genders get murdered on the trestle path.
• Drug dealers conduct deals on the trestle path, related or unrelated to the above two items.
• General mayhem.

In reality, I think the reasons to keep us kids off the trestle path were more mundane. It was a safe neighborhood, but the structure was 100 year old at that point.

Here are some photos from Steve Rotman's flickr (photos uploaded 18 July 2005)

And here are some photos from Jef Poskanzer's flickr (photos taken 1 May 2010). Poskanzer reported, "It's about 450' long! And 50' high!... Apparently it was a sewage pipe, since there are standard sewer manholes on each end... Also the mystery of why they didn't detour twenty feet east and run the pipe under the Stonestown parking lot is easily solved: the bridge pre-dates Stonestown, and the ravine must have extended much further east. Stonestown must be built on the filled-in ravine..."

Another person on flickr, who goes by Octoferret, replied, "I looked at some old topographic maps, your assumption about the ravine getting filled looks spot-on..."

Another Lowell grad on flickr, who goes by Aunti Juli, replied, "I couldn't find much, except that the students at Lowell talk about the trestle path as far back as 1965. The school paper repeats that it is unsafe (rape, attempted rape, serious accident), but it is discussed as a favorite spot to cut classes as well."