Here we have a map revealing 1924′s “contemplated projects” – Mission detail shown below, click the map to see the entire city.

Unlike the blight-driven plans of neighborhood-splitting projects like the Mission Freeway, it seems many of these came to pass. (Oh, people from the 1920s, your city planning is so quaint compared to the dreams of your children.) Two things stand out on this map:

1) Capp St extension — it was to be a backup artery to Mission St.  While it never hooked up to Van Ness, it did get slightly widened.

Here’s a 1939 shot of Capp and 25th from our friends at the SFPL.

and today via MapJack:

Other than the tree and the curb very little has changed.

Here’s 23rd and Capp under construction in 1940:

And today:

Alas this widening did not stop folks from moving down to the Peninsula.

2) The widening of the Bernal Cut certainly happened.

A very narrow Bernal Cut was originally dug out for the San Francisco San Jose Railway in the 1850s. Here is the Southern Pacific train in the cut, “looking north near Milton St”.  Think of this while you take the San Jose exit off 280.

And “looking south near Charles St.”

(You really ought to buy the Arcadia Press Bernal Heights book — our friends at the Bernal History Project did some fine work on that one – lots of incredible pictures, especially one of the Cut that is simply amazing.)

Anyway, Charles and Milton are way the hell apart but it sure looks like the same house and tree up on the top of the cut. Could it have been the house  at Mateo and Arlington?  1899 map below.

The there is the mystery of Charles St. A Twitter conversation arose on what happened to the 0-100 block of Charles St got me curious. I originally thought they widened the cut mostly to the east.   The eastern-most block of Charles St also got lost in the widening, but Eric Fischer let me know that they moved Arlington as well on the west side of the cut.

Anyway, here is our vanished bridge across the cut at Charles street:

and a water main that crossed at Fairmount over to Appleton (I imagine from the Holly Park reservoir?)

(This was the weird looking one you can see in all the construction photos.)

Out of sheer amusement for making map 1000 pixels long, here are a bunch of the 1899/1900 Sanborn maps I glued together showing the cut. (The 1886 maps don’t show all of it.) You can see the two bridges quite easily.

As we all know from the San Jose exit off 280, the cut is rather larger now than the train pictures above.

Here’s a shot from Jan 1929 with the widening of the cut is well underway.  This is at Bosworth (hint: you know you are in a depression when people are pushing mud around).

And later that year we see pretty much what we have today. The Richland (foreground) and Highland Street bridges, Oct 1929. (Taken at about the same place as the first train shot above).

Same view today:

I’m guessing they took out the two center supports and put those wonky braces up in the 50s when they shut down the Union Pacific rail line? (Muni didn’t run through Balboa until 1991.)

See more before/after San Jose time magick over at Bernalwood. And I just found this interesting before/after comparison video of the Cut on YouTube:

and the same person put up this rather remarkable then & now of a house in Glen Park. But I digress.

Here’s a shot from the Richland bridge in 1942 looking south towards St. Mary’s and Mateo @ Arlington.  Interesting that the railroad tracks are on the inner edge of the curve, and San Jose on the outer part.

Notice the landslides on both sides of the road — that’s why we have those tall concrete walls today.

Now I know what you’re thinking — “how can you possibly detect blight without the advantage of retro-history and the assistance of Eric Fisher’s time machine?” By walking up Duncan between Church and Dolores:

Sometimes blight arrives because you don’t rebuild. Other times it comes around because you don’t finish. This site has been under construction for at least two years, and I don’t think any work has been done for about a year.

But how exactly do we know this is blight as opposed to procrastination? Easy:

Click to zoom for the commentary added by neighbors regarding Contractor “LOSER”.

“Tack down your tarps.”

“Your neighbors are getting pissed – you lock it down or we will.”

Peel back the blue tarp and you see old school Noe ready to roar.

Eric Fisher brings us scans from the 1947 campaign to redevelop the Western Addition, aka “raze a neighborhood.”

One method is the strategic use of color.  Simply layer green upon black.  Problem solved!

Down with fire!  And garbage!  And bay windows! And cars running into giant oil barrels!

Imagine what these guys could have done with Photoshop

Note: I’m all for public health and children not living in squalor.  But the shame of children wearing overalls and the high social cost of dressing like hipsters clearly justify massive urban renewal.

Mr. Stripey Jacket kind of looks like Morrissey, either with a hangover, or about to start a solo.

I did find this copy entertaining:

“Gone are the disreputable joints, the so-called smoke shops, the ‘hotels,’ and pool hall hangouts known to the police.  Gone, too, are the alleys in which juvenile gangs plotted mischief that sometimes ended in murder.”

Damn you, 1940s — we could use a couple more pool halls in the Mission. That pool table at Latin American is rarely free of jackets or asses (not that I could get through a game with their margs.) But I digress.

“The rigid street system, with its death-trap intersections, is reorganized, simplified. The indiscriminate mixture of commercial, industrial and residential structures that is the disease of blighted areas is nowhere to be seen.”

Guess they were against mixed-use development.  Given that’s a primary reason I live in SF (so I can walk places) I don’t think I would have enjoyed the New City. Sure looks pretty though:

"Honey, here blight was once rife."

While the 40s-era planners’ “build projects and highways” plans may have been flawed, were they onto something in terms of urban renewal, quality of life and safety?  Did they see the fundamental changes in society and the jump in crime that would be brought by the 60s?

I found some ridiculously detailed homicide stats that name every person ever murdered in SF from 1849 to 2003 — the very first on the list was Beatty Belden, shot by “Chileans” on Telegraph Hill because of a “misunderstanding” — and crunched some numbers over time. (I took the 10 year census numbers and extrapolated SF population for other years , except for the last 10 years where I found yearly US census estimates.)

SF Homicide Rate, 1860-2008 (per 100K)

The 20s-40s were positively halcyon days in terms of murder in San Francisco — I’m kind of surprised that the rate was so low during the Great Depression and Prohibition.

But murder rates jumped drastically in the 60s. I’m neither a statistician nor a criminolisiticist, so sorry for any miscalculations, but homicide rates approached those of the 1870s.

This jump happened nationally, pointing to greater societal issues, but the SF rate was surprisingly high, even compared to NYC during the 70s. Granted cities like DC/Detroit/Baltimore were much higher, but let’s face it, the 60s-80s (suburban flight, racial discord) was a rough time for America.

SF-NY-Chi-US Homicide Rate, 1870-2007

US and FBI data, NY source data, Chicago data. Lots of extrapolating but the trends are clear.

SF leveled off in the 70s, and the 90s were a turning point for the rest of the nation. Chicago is well on its way down and NYC homicides have plummeted and now at the national average.  SF was dropping as well but is now ticking up, WTF?

But I guess Gavin can rest comfortably knowing that none of this matched the epic murder rates of the Barbary Coast days of the 1850s (or New Orleans today).

SF Homicide Rate, 1849-2008 (per 100K)

For all those sociologists out the frantically pounding away in the comments section that I’m doing it wrong, you’re probably right.  In fact, the FBI puts out a press release each year warning people not to do a straight comparison of homicide rates.  Georgia State University publishes a homicide ranking list adjusting for socioeconomic factors (poverty, median income, male unemployment, race composition, and female-headed families).  SF doesn’t come out so well.

Once again I find myself at the end of a post much longer than I intended to write, struggling to come to some sort of meaningful summary on top of snarky commentary and pretty pictures. (Damn you Eric Fisher!)

As for the idea of grassy fields and apartment buildings calming society, I doubt it would have made a difference in the 60s.  Just look at the failure of most if not all American housing projects or the riots in the banlieues of Paris in 2005. You can build all the elevators you want but race and jobs are undeniable factors.

Despite the crime wave in the 70s, New York made such density via elevation work. But how many other any other cities have done so? Tokyo? Vancouver? Singapore? Not many. What makes the difference? Is it possible to build a society that matches density with safety, or are we at the mercy of national socioeconomic trends?

“San Francisco is an old city. Much of it is built of wood. The areas of obvious blight and decay are generally those spared by the 1906 fire. Here buildings 40, 50, and 60 years old are crowded together. They have been patched, repaired, and changed into apartments, stores, rooming houses, and garages. The districts in which these conditions are found are convenient to the business and industrial centers. Streets, schools, and utilities are all in. The land is gently sloping, the climate excellent. But the future of this once valuable property will be dark until the old structures can be scrapped and attractive new buildings adapted to modern needs can be built on the land.”

Eric brings us the blighted Noe Valley in 1945:

“Blight disfigures San Francisco, drives people out of the city, interferes with business and industrial development, lowers the value of good property, increases the costs of government. An attractive, new city can be built by reclaiming blighted areas.”

This is 1945, looking north on Sanchez, with Duncan on the bottom and 25th on the top:

Link to today via Microsoft’s birdseye view, but for easy comparison let us zoom in and see the utopian vision brought on by the sweeping aside of blight and decay, with so many chang… err, wait…  I think only one building turned over.

Oh, lazy post-war San Franciscans. You missed your chance to reubuild a glorious and shiny future!  History clearly will curse you for ignoring those fateful words of the wise 1945 planners — this once valuable property will be dark until the old structures can be scrapped and attractive new buildings adapted to modern needs.

Poor, poverty-stricken Noe Valley, worth nothing.

Makes you wonder what Fillmore and the Western Addition would have been like had the city not so generously redeveloped it.

Here we have “The Master Plan of the City and County of San Francisco: Classification of Areas for Redevelopment (1945)” scanned by the indominable Eric Fischer.

While less colorful than our previous Blight Map of 1948, this is more detailed, revealing blight block by block. (Guess if the dark shading means good or bad.) Behold a 450 pixel-wide slice of blight from North Beach down to the Mission.

(Note this is even before 101 went in. And they certainly had their eyes on building on top of Bernal — those would have been epic streets.)

Here we have the key:

$40 adjusted for inflation is just under $500 today — I can only imagine how gobsmacked the city planners of 1945 would be to see Craigslist rental prices 3 to 6 times higher on their “substandard” properties.

It’s fascinating how blocks with million dollar homes were considered tear-downs 65 years ago.

The yellow sections indicate neighborhoods. Note that the Mission is nearly 100% blight!  Hooray, let’s built a giant highway through the middle!

(Interesting Noe and North Beach also got the blight map, especially since all three neighborhoods really haven’t changed all that much in the past 60 years.)

Of course, being blight-free was no guarantee of not getting Tom Petty’d.  Here we see a rather flabbergasting interchange planned for the Sunset at Irving and 6th Ave:

Click the image for a larger mosaic showing convenient freeway access to Kesar Stadium and the feed in to the highway running down Oak St. Thank the transport gods for the freeway revolt.

As always, more on Eric Fischer‘s Flickr stream.