Whether we know it or not, we’re all always weaving in and out of the remnants of a railroad line that once crisscrossed the Mission. A while back, Todd Lappin hipped us to a sweet online map and history of the thing.
Yesterday, Adrian Bischoff launched a Google Map of the route, complete with placemarkers and brand-new photographs of present-day visual evidence of the long-gone railroad. Link.
Awesome. Thx.
The weird angled lots and parallelogram buildings puzzled me for years. The tracks along Harrison we’re still there as late as 96 I think, but I never quite understood the connection between the long straight line of Harrison and the weird lots of Treat, Shotwell, and Guerrero. One day I was at Big Nate’s on Folsom and looked over an old map they have. There it was plain as day, a RR that sliced diagonally across the Mission. If this interests you, go over to Nate’s and look at the map.
[...] Mission Mission also points us to a map of the old Mission railroad. Nice work, [...]
very cool. there’s lots of history in the hood.
most of it was a lake, everyone knows that, right?
18th street was a river. you can see it’s a low point as you walk south on guerrero (it’s also why my 3rd floor flat at 18th & guerrero was always hot as blazes in the summer). apparently the river has lots of abattoirs all along it so the…effluvia could flow into the river.
this is an interesting book:
http://www.amazon.com/Franciscos-Mission-District-Images-America/dp/0738546577/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232825085&sr=8-3
sorry the link isnt from a more independent, community based bookseller that hand scribes tomes on 3000 year old papyrus and sells them for $800. oh, wait, i think they have that version at paxton gate.
Here’s a link to the old waterways of San Francisco:
http://www.museumca.org/creeks/images/TopoSFCreeks.jpg
A history lesson from old maps as how the Mission racecourses affected the layout of the railway, along with Google Earth layers I made of zinzin’s 18th St creek.