The Thirst of San Francisco

I have been reading Imperial San Francisco by Gray Brechin, which is a history of the long shadowy reach of the development of San Francisco. It is an excellent book, and a good reminder that corruption of the elite did not begin with Donald Trump. Here are my notes on Chapter 2, which is about water development.

• The Sunol Water Temple was built in 1910 modeled after the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli northeast of Rome; its funder William Bourn had second generation wealth and a sense of civic responsibility.
• San Francisco has very little water in its territory; a financier named George Ensign got legislation to create private companies to claim water rights-of-way through eminent domain. Thus we get the Spring Valley Water Works.
• San Francisco County originally extended to the border of Santa Clara County, but in 1856 the legislature created San Mateo County. The city elite wanted San Mateo back. They diverted Pilarcitos Creek.
• Hermann Schussler becomes the chief water engineer at Spring Valley Water Works.
• William Ralston wanted an urban park but did not really like Frederick Law Olmsted’s suggested design.
• The civil engineer William Hammond Hall gets obsessed with building Golden Gate Park.
• Hermann Schussler builds an aqueduct from the Sierras to Virginia City, thus aiding one of Ralston’s rivals.
• Schussler recommended acquiring water rights to the Alameda Creek watershed.
• In a bold gambit Ralston acquires the rights to Alameda Creek, wanting to sell the water company to the city.
• In August 1875 there is a bank run on Ralston’s bank encouraged by William Sharon; Ralston is bankrupted and disgraced and dies swimming in San Francisco Bay.
• William Sharon (also senator from Nevada) manages to emerge from Ralston’s ruin with most of Ralston’s assets and few of his liabilities. He becomes one of California’s wealthiest men.
• Sharon dies in 1885. There is a spectacular estate battle involving a woman named Sarah Althea Hill, who claimed to be married to Sharon. Hill loses this case and eventually ends up in an asylum; much of Sharon’s estate winds up with Francis Griffith Newlands, Spring Valley’s attorney.
• Newlands takes up residency in Nevada and become congressman there. He starts to develop Burlingame as a luxury enclave for the elite of the West. Lots sell quickly there after the depression of 1890 ebbs. Hillsborough gets carved from Burlingame to become an even more exclusive town.
• The Hillsborough set is second-generation wealth, heavily intermarried and extremely secretive.
• But Hillsborough needs water for its estates and horses, not even Alameda Creek suffices.
• Newlands understands that the water has to come from distant sources, which requires taxpayer funding. James Duval Phelan, a fellow elite Progressive, becomes a proponent of this.
• Phelan is elected mayor of San Francisco in 1896, and wants to consolidate the Bay Area into “Greater San Francisco” a la the boroughs of New York. But this requires a great aqueduct.
• Phelan becomes fixated on Hetch Hetchy Valley on the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park.
• Newlands leads passage in Congress of the National Reclamation Act, launching the agency now known as the Bureau of Reclamation. This agency’s first project is in Nevada, not surprisingly.
• Down south, Fred Eaton, William Mulholland, and J.B. Lippencott quietly acquire water rights for Los Angeles at the expense of the farmers of the Owens Valley.
• Phelan’s claims for a reservoir within Yosemite National Park are thwarted by the U.S. Secretary of Interior.
• The 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurs. It is clear the city will quickly be rebuilt, and Phelan’s plan has a lot more support.
• The debate over Hetch Hetchy is bitter, pitting John Muir and the Sierra Club on one side and much of the Bay Area on the other side.
• City voters approve a $45 million bond issue in January 1910, but federal legislation for the dam construction doesn’t pass until December 1913. Hetch Hetchy does exactly what it is designed to do – raise land values.
• Michael M. O’Shaughnessy becomes San Francisco city engineer and leads the Hetch Hetchy project.
• Huge cost and time overruns on the Hetch Hetchy project, partly because the initial bond measure was lowballed to ensure voter passage.
• The water finally arrived in 1934. O’Shaughnessy had been stripped of power by his enemies. O’Shaughnessy dies in October, 18 days before dedication day for the water project. A new water temple is built in San Mateo County, the Pulgas Water Temple; it is a mile north of William Bourn’s estate, Filoli.