I like San Francisco in December, I hope it becomes a habit. A year ago I spent a drizzly December day doing a HABS-like documentation of a handsome brick building on Natoma Street in Downtown San Francisco.
This was a small building documentation brought on by the construction of the new $4 Billion Dollar Transbay Transit Center that is replacing the old Timothy Pfleuger designed Transbay Terminal. Since the expansion plan for the project extended over multiple blocks it required demolition of some old and new buildings including 77 Natoma shown above, and I was commissioned to record the features, interior and context of the building before it was demolished.
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A year later the project has just made headlines worldwide as artifacts of the Gold Rush era began to surface at (or rather under) the construction site. The buildings on Natoma shown above including the newer, metal-clad, rounded one on the right and the old bus ramp on the left are all a big hole in the ground now, San Francisco's version of Boston's BIG DIG. Archeologists from William Self Associates are busy combing through the site and preserving the history of an 1880s residential neighborhood now long gone (probably replaced by commercial buildings similar to the one I documented at 77 Natoma).
LINK TO ARTICLE: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/development/2011/12/dig-sfs-transport-terminal-unearths-artifacts
This is how it all looks today in December 2011 from the roof of a building just down the block while I was in the city doing another couple HABS projects. The brick buildings are gone, the bus ramps are gone, the Pfleuger Terminal is gone and construction proceeds day and night - but opium pipes, chamber pots and porcelain doll heads from the 1880s keep telling stories.
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