This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate
San Francisco during the Gold Rush had a serious water shortage. There were several freshwater streams, but they were too far away from the settled area on the east side of town to be useful, and wells were scarce.
Early San Franciscans bought their water from street vendors, who made the rounds with large wooden barrels mounted on mule-drawn carts. Some water came from nearby springs such as an intermittent one located on Mason Street just north of Washington, near the present-day cable car barn. But most came from springs on the Sausalito ranch of William Richardson and was ferried by tank steamer across the bay by the Saucelito Water and Steam Tug Co.
In 1851, this company supplied water to no fewer than 65 carts, whose owners served regular routes. It was a highly profitable business: The cart owners would not sell their routes for less than $1,500.
In 1856, realizing that if they could supply plentiful water to the city they could make a fortune, a New Yorker named John Bensley and a 43-year-old French-Canadian named Anthony Chabot took over the Mountain Lake Water Co., a failed franchise that had planned to pipe water from Mountain Lake to downtown. The original franchiser still claimed the rights to Mountain Lake, but Bensley and Chabot planned to get around that by tapping Lobos Creek, the stream that flows out to Baker Beach.
Although Lobos Creek appears to originate in Mountain Lake, the two men conjectured that its real source was under the sand dunes of what is now Golden Gate Park. They consulted a Latvian-born engineer named Alexander W. Von Schmidt, who agreed about the source. Eventually, he would prove to be their nemesis.
Damming the creek
The three men’s plan was to build a small dam on Lobos Creek and transport the water downtown by the same route that the Mountain Lake Water Co. had proposed — along the cliffs of Lands End and then down toward town through a wooden flume.
In August 1857, the Board of Supervisors granted the Bensley Co. a franchise to deliver water to the city. The company constructed a 7-mile flume and tunneled through a cliff that once stood where Fort Point is now. In June 1858, the flume rounded Black Point, on the bluffs of Fort Mason. A pumping station was built at the foot of Van Ness Avenue, and work began on two reservoirs on Russian Hill, one on Francisco Street at 135 feet elevation, and another on Lombard Street at 306 feet.
On Sept. 27, 1858, the first water flowed to San Francisco. Within two years, there were 74,000 feet of pipe and 100 hydrants, delivering Lobos Creek’s 2 million gallon daily output to thousands of customers.
Bad taste
But the water company’s relations with the city soon soured. “There was a rash of customer complaints over the high prices charged for water that did not always taste pure and fresh,” Sherwood D. Burgess wrote in “The Water King: Anthony Chabot, His Life and Times.” People were also irritated that they had to pay to connect their pipes to the water works’ pipes, and that the company had the right to enter their premises to ensure they were complying with its 18-page book of rules and regulations.
The competitor that doomed the Bensley Co., ironically, originated in one of the feeble downtown springs that the company had come into existence to replace.
1856年,一位名叫乔治旗购买了prings at Washington and Mason, in a little depression called Spring Valley. The springs generated only 20,000 gallons a day, and the Bensley Co. did not take Ensign’s company seriously as competition. Ensign sold some of his water to vendors, but he also shrewdly ran a 1,500-foot hose down to a municipal firefighting cistern at Broadway and Stockton and delivered the water free. In 1858 the grateful city awarded Ensign’s Spring Valley Water Co. another franchise to provide water to the city.
That meant nothing — until a group of men bought out Ensign in 1860. One of the partners was Von Schmidt, who had left the Bensley Co. when it refused to pay him for a water meter he had invented.
Building competition
Bent on getting even, Von Schmidt developed Ensign’s franchise, acquiring the Islais Creek water supply of a short-lived company that had constructed a dam in Glen Canyon and building a flume that carried it to the Mission and to a reservoir at Buchanan and Market. The Spring Valley Water Co. was now a viable competitor, but its total output was still only 200,000 gallons a day — one-tenth of what the Bensley Co. was supplying.
But Von Schmidt had a far bigger water source in mind: Pilarcitos Creek in San Mateo County, which drained into the Pacific near Half Moon Bay. In 1861 the Spring Valley Water Co. began work on a massive tunnel and 32 miles of flumes. Several years later, it completed the Laguna Honda Reservoir, and water from Pilarcitos Creek began flowing into San Francisco.
The Bensley Co.’s demise was assured in 1864, when mud from the landslide-prone cliffs of Lands End began leaching into its flume. To get clear water, some Bensley employees illegally connected its mains to Spring Valley’s and sold the blend. The scam was discovered, and a short time later Spring Valley acquired the company, establishing a monopoly that would last for 60 years.
公司Bensley当时喊着是走了,但其旧reservoirs on Russian Hill still exist and the Lombard Street reservoir is functional, providing water to nearby neighborhoods — a little-known link with San Francisco’s first water company.
And to this day, the Presidio draws its water from Lobos Creek.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail:metro@sfchronicle.com
Trivia time
Answer:202 Green St.
This week’s trivia question:What punishment did Giants pitcher Juan Marichal receive for hitting Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro over the head with a bat on Aug. 22, 1965?
