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Making the Mission
Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco
By Ocean Howell The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-14139-8
CHAPTER 1
Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco
Early in the morning of April 18, 1906, an earthquake measuring between 7.7 and 8.3 on the Richter scale struck two miles off the coast of San Francisco, rupturing gas mains in the city and igniting a fire that raged for four days, over four square miles. The temblor shook hundreds of buildings to the ground, and the ensuing firestorm consumed almost thirty thousand structures. More than three thousand people were killed. The residents of San Francisco's Mission District had a unique and terrifying view of the event. From the hill above Mission Park (today Dolores Park), they watched the fire destroy their city's most densely built and populated neighborhoods, including downtown, North Beach, Chinatown, the Tenderloin, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, and South of Market. They stood in crowds in the streets of the northern Mission, and watched as the dome of city hall disappeared behind a wall of smoke. (See fig. 1.1.) On Dolores Street, they watched as the flames finally died at the doorstep of the city's oldest building, the Misión San Francisco de Asís, the structure from which both the district and the larger city had taken their names.
Over the following months and years, city boosters understandably recounted the drama of the crisis in much the same way that novelists and later filmmakers would: San Franciscans banded together in the wake of the disaster to support one another and to rebuild their city, leaving them more unified than they had ever been. There is certainly truth to this narrative. The historical record abounds with first-person accounts of bravery and selflessness, and there is little doubt that the shared experience of disaster and mutual assistance created a new psychological bond among San Franciscans. Yet the disaster also marked a moment when San Francisco became a profoundly divided place. The cinders had hardly cooled before a fight erupted over how the city should be rebuilt. The earthquake shook apart many stable political coalitions, but new ones formed almost immediately to advocate for the reconstruction plans that best served their own respective interests, interests that revolved around property, commerce, and cultural identity.
In the hopes of remaking the geography of San Francisco according to a grand, unifying, neoclassical vision — articulated in Daniel Burnham's iconic 1905 plan for the city — many banks and high-profile real estate investors had joined city hall in an attempt to centralize urban planning authority. Resistance to the plan came from conservative business interests and from neighborhood groups, Mission District groups most prominent among them. The opposition prevailed, and San Francisco was left with a power vacuum: if the city had failed to centralize planning authority in the municipal government, then who would guide the rebuilding of the city? In the Mission District, local leaders emerged to announce that, at least in their section of the city, the neighborhood itself would call the shots.
The most prominent of these leaders was James Rolph Jr., a lifelong Missionite who would become the city's longest serving mayor (1912–31) and later the governor of California (1931–34). When Rolph was later asked who had given the neighborhood groups the "authority to organize and govern the Mission during the panic days," Rolph replied, "Nobody gave us authority. We took it." Before 1906, this would not have been possible. During that period, individual neighborhood groups had only spoken with a collective voice when it came to matters like street lighting and repaving. Now they stepped onto a larger stage, exerting influence in matters of city- and even statewide importance for the first time. It would not be the last.
In the twentieth century, many neighborhood-based groups in American cities would come to exert significant and sometimes decisive influence over the physical and social planning of the areas they called home. The story of how these neighborhood groups came to be — and of when and how they were able to operate effectively — holds many lessons for historians of urban America, lessons about urban planning, municipal government, ethnic and race relations, civil society, inequality, citizenship, and the relationship between cities and the federal government. Making the Mission brings these perspectives into focus by telling the history of one neighborhood with a particularly strong and deeply rooted planning tradition.
Now, more than a decade into the twenty-first century, San Francisco's Mission District has become perhaps the most visible battleground over gentrification in the United States. The neighborhood has long been home to Latino and bohemian communities, but it has increasingly become both a playground and a bedroom community for the well-heeled of the Bay Area, particularly technology professionals who work in Silicon Valley. During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, the Mission was the epicenter of a conflict over affordable housing and cultural identity. With the 2010s came a new wave of public offerings from technology firms, and the Mission is again at the center of a fight. Neighborhoods from Williamsburg in Brooklyn to Silver Lake in Los Angeles have witnessed a similar phenomenon. While they enjoy improved city services and falling crime rates, they simultaneously suffer through mass displacement of the working classes, minority communities, and artists and students. Residents who remain complain that their neighborhoods' deeply rooted cultural identities are under threat.
The Mission stands out among gentrifying urban areas for a few reasons. The fact that it is located in the geographical center of San Francisco, one of the country's most expensive real estate markets, ensures that economic pressures and therefore social tensions are heightened. But economic tensions hardly appear less intense in places like Manhattan's Lower East Side. What makes the Mission unique is the extent to which neighborhood groups have organized, and the savvy that they have demonstrated in enlisting the power of the state — particularly the tools of urban planning — to fight the tide. Present-day groups like the Artists Eviction Defense Coalition and the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition have not only distributed picket signs; they have also repeatedly convinced the city to reject permit applications from chain stores, to enact moratoria on condominium conversions, and to put in place strict if temporary limits on certain kinds of office development. These efforts have not halted real estate speculation or displacement, but most observers agree that they have slowed the process. Perhaps most importantly, these efforts have continued to reinforce the identity of the neighborhood and to convince people that the Mission has a unique and important culture, one that is worth fighting for.
Why has the Mission District organized so effectively when other neighborhoods have been left to the mercy of the market? It's no good to point to an amorphous ethos, like San Francisco liberalism, to explain the phenomenon. The Dog Patch and the Inner Sunset neighborhoods have both gentrified without much of a fuss. Even the iconic Haight-Ashbury District — once a crucible of cultural politics — has undergone profound changes without putting up much of a fight, at least not the way the Mission has. To understand the Mission's organizing energies, one must look to history. In the mid-1960s, Mission residents openly worried that the coming of two Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations would spark a speculative boom that would push the poor and even the middle classes out of the Mission. This marked the first moment when fear of displacement prompted residents to organize. But to fully understand the resulting coalition, one must recognize its place in a long lineage of neighborhood-based groups, one that stretches back at least to the aftermath of the disaster of 1906, if not to the organizing efforts of the 1890s.
From the time of the great earthquake and fire through today, both residents and visitors alike have described San Francisco's Mission District as "a city within a city." In the national discourse, this phrase has had a variety of duties; it was used to describe opulent world's fairs, homogeneous minority neighborhoods, isolated slums, insular office-tower complexes, and newly minted suburban tracts, among other urban forms. But in the Mission, observers meant something else. There they saw not only a physically separate space, but also a self-sustaining urban unit. The Mission was an area with its own little downtown, a commercial district that "could clothe and feed you from the cradle to the grave," as James Rolph would put it in 1930. Perhaps more importantly, observers saw a cohesive urban identity, one distinct from that of the larger city. That identity would change profoundly across the twentieth century — from elite suburb, to the home of white union labor, to a gateway for immigrant newcomers, to the barrio, and most recently to a gentrification battleground — yet the neighborhood has somehow always maintained its distinctiveness. Local historians have even reported that the area's inhabitants once spoke with an accent all their own, a sort of Irish "Brooklynese," though no recordings have survived to confirm that. But with or without a "Missionese" accent, few would dispute that the neighborhood has always been a world unto itself.
In writing this book, I quickly found that it was no accident that the Mission came to function as a city within a city. Throughout the twentieth century, neighborhood residents cultivated an independent identity through festivals, architecture, ethnic politics, and in the area's own newspapers, like the Mission Mirror, Mission Merchant's News, Mission Enterprise, and, later, the New Mission/Nueva Misión. Yet I also found that the various forms of identification and cultural self-promotion were only the beginning of the story. The story was also about political power, particularly with respect to urban planning.
The concept of a city within a city gave neighborhood residents — "Missionites," as they proudly called themselves — a framework through which to assert their distinctiveness against the Fillmore District, the Marina District, downtown, Los Angeles, and the East Coast. But that was only part of the point of asserting an independent identity. When James Rolph referred to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mission as "a town within a town," he was not merely describing the neighborhood's current condition; he was also describing the aspirations of both its leading citizens and its ordinary residents. For Rolph, as for many of his neighbors, it was not enough that one could visit a dentist, buy clothes, see a ballgame, or take in a movie without leaving the neighborhood. To truly be a city within a city, the neighborhood needed its own professional services and financial institutions. Most importantly, it needed a mechanism through which neighborhood residents might exert a measure of self-determination, particularly when it came to questions of schools and sewers, roads and rail connections. In other words, if there were decisions to be made about what should be built where, the residents of the neighborhood should be allowed to make those decisions for themselves.
Motivated by these convictions, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Rolph and his associates founded the Mission Bank and the Mission Savings Bank, as well as the Mission Promotion Association (MPA), a civic group dedicated to uniting the residents of the Mission District and to guiding and promoting the physical development of the neighborhood. This association would become remarkably powerful. Not only would it exert decisive influence over the planning process in the Mission, but it would also effectively establish itself as the de facto planning authority for fully half of the geographic area of San Francisco, pushing through municipal government its own plans for park space, schools, rail connections, new roads, and much more, throughout the southern portion of the city, while blocking plans that its members believed were at odds with the interests of the Mission. The MPA held no official power, but it was widely acknowledged that the association nonetheless wielded decisive influence over the planning process. In the early twentieth century, the San Francisco Chronicle also described the Haight-Ashbury District as a "city within a city," in the sense that it had its own retail district and its own character; but the newspaper anthropomorphized "the Mission," writing about the neighborhood as though it were a political actor — indeed, as one of the most powerful political actors in San Francisco.
Remarkable though the MPA's accomplishments were, the association was only the first in a series of Mission-based groups that would effectively, and sometimes even officially, wield planning power within the neighborhood. The MPA operated from 1906 until 1920. In the 1920s, the Mission Merchants' Association would take up the mantle and continue to influence the planning of the area. In the 1950s, the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC) would initiate a revitalization campaign that would soon involve city agencies and federal monies. In the l960s, using funds from the federal Model Cities program, a civic group called the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO) would found and effectively control both a planning authority, the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), and a housing authority, the Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC), both of which had official standing as state entities. The Nixon administration's 1973 moratorium on funding for Model Cities led quickly to the demise of the MCO and marks the end of this study — but not the end of neighborhood-based planning in the Mission. By exerting control over the process, this series of neighborhood groups established and reestablished "the Mission" as an actor among a larger cast of characters in the city, the region, and even the state. Both participants and observers of planning politics would speak of what "the Mission" wanted, or what "the Mission" opposed, in the same way that they might speak about what the California Department of Transportation wanted or what the Chamber of Commerce opposed.
There were certainly moments when it did not much matter what the Mission wanted. When in the early 1950s elderly residents living in the path of the proposed Bayshore Freeway spoke out against the condemnation of their houses, their protests not only fell on deaf ears in city hall, but were even mocked in the daily press as a quaint reaction to inevitable progress. Similarly, during the Great Depression the Mission Merchants' Association declared that the city's housing authority was operating like "the Gestapo" when it announced plans for public housing projects in the neighborhood without having first consulted the local residents and businesses. The Merchants vowed to stop the projects, warning all comers that "the Mission has never taken anything lying down." The Mission may not have taken the housing authority's plans lying down, but neither did it win.
Neighborhood groups struggled to be heard during the Great Depression and World War II, as well as during the immediate postwar period when freeway construction and slum clearance topped the agendas of urban planners. Yet even during the decades when local institutions appeared to be moribund, the area's deeply rooted planning energies were still nurtured by entities like the Catholic parish churches, the Mission Merchants' Association, the Mission Neighborhood Centers, and ordinary residents who remembered a time when "the Mission" determined its own fate. The embers were always there, and they would be reignited in the 1960s.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making the Mission by Ocean Howell. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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