Thanks to the California Digital Newspaper Collection, we can see manifests of the King Philip and other ships of the era. Here’s the manifest from 23 July 1859. Basically anything interesting came around the horn.  I don’t know what’s more surprising, the quantity or how many different things were on one ship.

Pianos. Soap. Fireworks. Rum. Whiskey. Wagons. Nails. Shoes. Books. Sheets of pig iron. Barrels of salt pork. Hops.

Speaking of hops, I am kind of surprised there is no beer on the manifest.  The King Philip sailed from Boston, so perhaps it wasn’t a big beer town?  But regardless, they certainly seemed to have everything else. (Another project would be to compare ships manifest before and after the Transcontinental Railroad made it through in 1869.  But I digress.)

Now, I know you are thinking, “But man cannot live on barrels of whiskey and rum alone!  One needs a good beer on occasion!”  Thankfully porter and ale were shipped from London in great volumes.

For reference, “HHDS” is a hogshead, which was about 63 gallons, which is 63 * 128  = 8064 oz, or the equivalent of 672 bottles (times 100).  So the Southern Eagle carried the equivalent of over 11,ooo six-packs across the Atlantic, around the horn, up the Pacific to San Francisco. (It also carried coal, pig iron, wine, champagne, and port.)

I’m still surprised at how much beer was shipped in to town given there were at least a dozen breweries  as we can see from the 1859 city directory in the Herrick/Hoogs San Francisco Almanac:

Just to show you how quickly things were growing in this era, the 1859 Langley directory shows says there were 18 breweries, including the fancy new “Philadelphia Brewery” on 2nd & Folsom:

Here’s a list of all 18 listed here along with an ad showing what the area may have looked like:

Here’s 2nd and Folsom on the 1859 Coast Survey map.  If the brewery was on 2nd, and the hill is sloping up to the left, then are we looking southwest, at the block bounded by Harrison and 3rd? Note this was the Rincon hill cut out by developers in the 1860s.

But as you might expect from a bunch of Philadelphians, the Daily Alta reported that they were dumping “offensive effluvia” all over the place:

And in one of those historical coincidences, check out the ads next to this article:

England was quite the beer shipping center, especially to India, as we can see in this report for the good ship “Edwin Fox” from 1860.

February 14, 1860
The ship sailed for Bombay. Included in the cargo was a substantial quantity of "Taylor Walker's India Pale Ale". It was to be the first of several voyages in which she carried alcoholic beverages to India and earned the name the "Booze Barge". British pale ales for the Indian Empire were made to a higher than normal strength, and given more hops, to protect them on the journey.

This is from the New Zealand Maritime record, a rather amazing collection of shipping records from the NZ National Maritime museum. (Alas the tale that IPAs had higher alcohol content to survive the journey is not true — porters and stouts also made the journey.)

But I bring you TRAGIC NEWS from the year 1869:

August 12, 1869
The [Edwin Fox] ran aground on the Coromandel Coast at 2 a.m. With assistance unavailable, the Master ordered 107 tons (446 hogsheads) of India Pale Ale jettisoned. The ship then drew herself out of the mud and reached port the next day.

That’s the equivalent of nearly THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND BOTTLES OF BEER THROWN OVERBOARD OH THE HORROR

The history of the Edwin Fox is pretty fascinating — it was built in India in 1853 and made of teak. After its days of shipping IPA to India, it served as an Australian prison ship. Afterwards, it took colonists to New Zealand and also made ports of call in San Francisco in the 1880s. The teak hull is still afloat in Picton, New Zealand today.

While we’re on the topic of ships near Picton, New Zealand (why yes, I do spend all day reading the New Zealand Maritime Record — don’t you?) there’s quite a shipwreck in the Marlborough Sounds (which is a ridiculously cool looking area as this photo by @yorrike attests):

Arial shot of the Marlborough sounds, which I took when flying out of New Zealand on Tuesday. #Aotearoa http://t.co/V2WLrctZ—
  (@Yorrike) November 24, 2011

In 1986, the Soviet cruise ship Admiral Lermontov (yes, a Soviet cruise ship) was sailing too close to shore, hit a rock, ripped a 40 foot long hole in the hull, lost power, listed and then sank. (Sound familiar?)

While the Soviet captain didn’t schettino, they were not exactly jumping to get word out there was a hole in the boat:

Presumably, because of language problems, no announcements were made to passengers to advise them of the position and tell them what to do, although many passengers were alerted to the problem by the fact that the crew were wearing life-jackets.

In the meantime there was an announcement that dinner would be delayed an hour and the wine tasting session that was in progress would be extended. The band continued to play, but the wine tasting stopped when the list sent glasses sliding off the tables.

Only one person died (a Soviet engineer below decks), and the wreck is a popular diving destination today (though three divers have gotten stuck and died within the wreck).  I do not know what sounds worse, dying on a Soviet cruise ship while it is afloat or getting stuck on one underwater.

That being said, they had quite the lounge and bar scene, as photos from the New Zealand Maritime Record report on the sinking (including a couple of before and after shots):

But even the Nevsky and Neptun bars are not enough to get me on a cruise ship.  (That and the data roaming charges.) I’d rather take a schooner to Vladivostok:

Damn the torpedoes!

And don’t forget that Russian Hill was named for Russian sailors buried well before the Gold Rush era. It’s not clear what year, or what ship, or even if the graves were moved.

1861	1862

Hittell in his 1896 History of California states that “a few graves, surmounted by black crosses and bearing Russian inscriptions” were visible as late as 1849:

I’ve found copies of Burnett and his recollections of 1849 San Francisco along with El Dorado and Taylor’s story of his trip to San Francisco in 1849 (in vol 1). Here’s Taylor’s description of Russian Hill is in volume 2 that Hittell used, but with some more detail:

(But whatever you do, DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK OR THIS ONE OR THIS ONE.  OR YOU WILL BE READING IT FOR THE NEXT 3 HOURS. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Burnett’s Russian Hill reference is from a poem, and other than a false lead on a name of a ship, not all that exciting.

Another reference, from 1878:

"THE CITY’S DEAD: Another spot, selected at as early a date as 1842, was the eminence between Taylor and Jones streets, and north of Vallejo street. Here were buried several of the crew of a Russian vessel, stricken with some malarian disease, which occupation of the hill by them resulted in the name of Russian hill being applied to the spot. Not many additional burials were made there, however, as it as considered too inaccessible for funeral corteges, and in 1850 it was abandoned and the remains of those placed there were afterwards removed to other localities. . ."

And I just found an 1851 reference in a proposal for new reservoirs:

The Russian Consul of SF seems to think it wasn’t entirely removed in 1860…

..The Russian cemetery that gave Russian Hill its name was located on the crest of the hill above Taylor between Green and Vallejo. The exact site is now a ramp and staircase on the corner of Jones and Vallejo. There has been much speculation as to the origins of this cemetery and why the Russian Fur Company chose this spot to bury their dead in the 1830s. The cemetery was San Francisco's second burial ground; the first was at Mission Dolores. The Russian cemetery was used during Gold Rush times, but was gone by 1860. In 1917, workmen excavating the Leavenworth Street slope are said to have found human bones there....

… and they were from a ship belonging to the Russian Fur Company (they of the Russian River and Fort Ross) rather than a warship. If so, it may be one of those listed in the ships that came to Spanish/Mexican California, with dates and ship’s master.

• 1806 – Apr 16 — Juno (Resanoff, master), SF
• 1816 – Rurick (Kotzebue); Oct 15 – Rubio, Kalzule; Sept 16 – Suvarof, Chirikof, Ermenia, SF
• 1817 – Russian Naval Officer Padushikin, in small boats
• 1823 – Buldakov
• 1824 – Buldákof (Jan 8, Aug 12)
• 1825 – Elena (Oraviof), Kiahkta
• 1826 – Argony (Inestrumo), Baikal (Benesman)
• 1827 – Baikal (Etholin), Okhotsh (D. Zarambo)
• 1828 – Kiakha
• 1829 – Kiahkta, Baikal (Benseman)
• 1831 – Baikal (Livovich)
• 1832 – Urup (Zarembo)
• 1833 – Baikal (Livovich)
• 1835 – Sitka (Basilio Wacodzy)
• 1836 – Sitka (Basil Wacoocky)
• 1837 – Baikal (Jan, Stephen Vouks), Sitka (Oct)
• 1838 – Sitka (Oct-Nov, Wacoocky)
• 1839 – Baikal, Elena (Vallivode, Sept)
• 1840 – Elena (S. Vallivade), Nikolai (Oct-Nov, Kuprianov)
• 1841 – Elena (Feb)
• 1843 – Naslednik Aleksandr (spring)
• 1844 – Naslednik Aleksandr (fall)
• 1845 – Baikal (Oct-Dec), Naslednik Alexander (Oct-Nov)
• 1847 – Naslednik (Oct)

Note that some of these visits were from the four ships built at Fort Ross — the Rumianstev (1818-1823), Buldakov (1820-1826, the Volga (1822-1827) and the Kiakhta (1824-??).

And there’s a scary amount of ship detail in Mr. Bancroft‘s footnotes in his History of California – here are the Russian ships that came to San Francisco from 1836 to 1840:

And for those of you who read Two Years Before The Mast, here are the ships that Richard Henry Dana Jr. came in and left on (1834-1836):

Note that the Russian-American Fur Company decided to leave California in 1839 and sold Fort Ross it to Captain Sutter in 1841, leaving completely in 1842. There were a couple of ships still trading along the coast after Fort Ross was shut down, including the Naslednik Aleksandr that carried I.G. Voznesenskii, a Russian scientist.

Hmmm, that narrative sounds interesting. Hey, it was by a “professional writer”! Alas all the versions I see are behind paywalls.

I initially thought a Russian ship might have buried crewmates in SF once the colony at Fort Ross was gone, but it seems as time went by the crews on Russian ships in the Pacific were mostly Finnish and “from 1840 onwards the Company’s around-the- world ships were manned entirely by Finnish merchant skippers and crew” (thus mainly Lutheran). The Naslednik was even built in Finland.

So unless there was a Russian naval ship that stopped in the 1840s that’s not in these records, I think we’re looking at one of these trading ships before 1841. This presumes of course that it wasn’t just burials from one ship. Or maybe a bunch of Finns are buried there. I can see real estate values plummeting if we have to rename it to “Finnish Hill”. (Kidding, I like the Finns, they make good goalies.)

There are surprisingly few references online to the cemetery.  The Online Archive of California lists a “Early view of Russian cemetery on Russian Hill [Vallejo and Taylor Streets]. Photograph of a painting. 1820s” (Volume 2:63) but it’s not online. Grr.

Unfortunately, there’s no sign of the cemetery in either the 1853 (top) or 1859 (bottom) Coast Survey maps (I added the red cross to show where most records seem to think it is), but regardless you can see the city starting to spread westward.

Calisphere has a couple of photos of Washerwoman’s Lagoon taken from between the two peaks of Russian Hill.  This one is supposed to have been taken in around 1866 (plus or minus 4 years) from Leavenworth and Green — if so, the graveyard site would have been a block behind the photographer (towards the slightly taller Russian Hill).

It’s hard to match up the view on the 1859 Coast survey map (remember it was surveyed in 1857, so it could have been easily 10 years out of date.  I tried estimating the field of view — I cannot match that big house with the fence, but the lay of the land seems right to me.)

This next one was taken further to the west, several years earlier (between 1859 and 1862), on the far side of the hill you see in the top photo, (the one marked as 314′ ft in the 1859 Coast Survey map) — I mainly include it because it’s cool, and if you can match up a lot of buildings on the 1859 map. I’ve tried to overlay the approximate field of view:

And that’s enough for now.  Time for an IPA.

RT @sfhockeydude: …the SF Bulls free shirt you get with season tix looks like it says "Balls Hockey" http://t.co/JV9qFW5l—
shanners (@oshanada) October 04, 2011

This of course immediately sparked new cheers by my new Twitter friends:

The design of the "Balls Hockey" shirt would best be described as "Wannabe Ed Hardy" the Affliction shirt wearing douche crowd will love it.—
ryan (@sfhockeydude) October 04, 2011

@burritojustice @oshanada I see my future-self double-fisting at a game, yelling "LET'S GO, BALLS!"—
ryan (@sfhockeydude) October 04, 2011

(I think we all see where this is headed.)

Anyway, I have created a poll to get a feel for which of these alternate names shall replace the tragedy of the San Francisco Bulls.  Please read Peter’s finely crafted article to understand the nuances of each choice before voting, along with my original post. And of course, gazing upon the glory of the San Francisco Sutros:

Ahhhh. Oh yeah, the poll.  In the spirit of Ranked Choice Voting, you can pick up to three names (though you can’t actually rank them, sorry…) And of course a write-in option.

And a note to Pat Curcio – please take all this as constructive criticism.  We really want hockey to work here.

Oh, Free Marketing Idea:

Have REALLY good food and beer during games at the Cow Palace.  Seriously.  While renaming the team the San Francisco Food Trucks is admittedly a stretch, you should seriously consider doing a weekly Off The Grid food truck extravaganza and get local/regional brewers like Anchor, Speakeasy, Trumer and Almanac to be partners.

However, I have a suggestion that will both increase ridership and increase revenue from existing passengers:  I propose that Caltrain sell beer ON THE TRAINS to raise revenue (and passenger morale).

(Beer machine image via pokoroto, Caltrain image via digitalczech)

Anyone who has been to Japan knows the absolute magic of beer machines.  They are omnipresent (and quite likely omniscient) and one can buy up to a 2 litre “Big Boy” if necessary. (@SelfEdge reminds us there are also advanced models, but there probably isn’t enough commute time to justify a Caltrain bar car.)

But do not fret — the Caltrain beer machines shall be stocked with local and regional beer — Speakeasy, Anchor, Lagunitas, etc.

Let’s say a regular beer would go for $5, a large for $7, and Caltrain-exclusive beers (like Pliny The Commuter and Anchor Steam Engine) for $9. If everyone who rides the afternoon/evening commuter trains buys a beer, Caltrain will be saved! My math is as follows:

Let’s say there are 50 working weeks a year.  This gives us 250 days of high traffic Caltrain secondary revenue opportunities. So we have $120,000 a day that Caltrain needs to make up.

• 2009-2010 ridership was just under 40,000 people per day.

• Each afternoon, there are 5 “bullet” and 9 limited stop trains during afternoon commute hours. (I am assuming people will not drink on the way to work, but boy are there ever days…  And the local trains could easily drive you to drink.  But I digress.)

• Considering only at the afternoon fast(er) trains, $120k/14 is just about $9K per train.

• I believe 80% of Caltrain’s revenue comes from commuters, so I’m estimating around 15,000 folks on the afternoon/evening commute.  That’s close enough to 1000 people per train.

• If everyone buys two regular beers, Caltrain’s deficit will vanish!
• You could even use your Clipper card to buy a beer! (Though if you forgot to tag off you’d probably get charged for a 6-pack.)

OK, so probably not everyone will buy two beers. But this would be a sizeable chunk of revenue. And beer on the car could potentially increase ridership. Then there’s food vendors at each station — why not eat dinner on the train? Also: Japanese coffee machines for the morning commute.

Come on Caltrain, figure this one out, OK?

While the font seemed relative fresh, it had a cork and foil liner, so I figured it was not that new.

I did a little historical digging (big surprise, I know) and it looks like my bottle cap dates from the mid to late 1930s, right after Prohibition ended.

(Note to historical hunters — bottle caps are called “crowns”.  You’d think Bert would have taught us this important fact. (And sorry if you’re going all Ernie on this post.))

Acme was a transplant brewery from Seattle. Not many breweries made it through the 1906 earthquake and fire, and millions of dollars of beer were shipped from Seattle and bottled here. Within a year, the Olympia brewery converted the bottling plant into a full brewery, and Acme was born. (Brewery Gems has lots on Acme Brewing in SF from the first half of the 20th century.)

(April 11, 1907, via SFPL’s Chronicle archive)

Acme was located at the foot of Telegraph hill, on 1401 Sansome (between Greenwich & Lombard).

In the 1920s, Several breweries merged to form the California Brewing Association (including several in the Mission)  but only Sansome St and the National Brewery at Fulton and Webster were kept open. (Sansome St was sold off in 1929). They survived Prohibition by making Acme Light “near beer” with 0.5% alcohol (along with vinegar and syrup) but ramped back up after the 1933 Repeal.

Side note: Acme sure had it going on when it came to fonts. Some 1933 shots:

(1933, Repeal, via North Coast Brewing)

(1933, delivery truck, via SFPL)

Acme started advertising “real” beer before Prohibition officially ended and got a significant leg up on the competition. It served them well in the beginning:

via Brewery Gems:

After Repeal Acme Breweries built a new bottling plant adjacent to the old National site at Fulton & Webster. The new plant was described by architects and designers as “one of the worlds most beautiful industrial buildings.”

The Fulton plant had a rather nice view of City Hall (via North Coast Brewing)

Alas, Acme’s streamlined plant wasn’t built until 1941, so my 30s-era bottle cap came from more humble origins on Webster between Fulton and Grove.

After the war, Acme Brewing struggled to compete against the national breweries but didn’t make it.  The SF plant was sold in 1954 to an East Coast company attempting to go national, but the site was closed in 1958, and our sleek building was torn down in 1968 (SFPL):

The Acme brand survived however, and has popped up as a contract beer every decade for the past 40 years.  Today, Fort Bragg’s North Coast Brewing (e.g. Red Seal, Brother Thelonius) owns the rights and makes an Acme IPA and Pale Ale (which I am certain taste far better than what was once under my 75 year old bottle cap).

They also have an Acme museum. Hooray! Drink Acme, the once and future beer!

I am going to thoroughly confuse future owners of my house by jamming new Acme bottle caps beside the old one in that same truss.

There’s a garden, what a garden
Only happy faces bloom there
And there’s never any room there
For a worry or a gloom there

Googling around for something witty to end with I came across this IMDB summary for the 1946 Three Stooges movie “Beer Barrel Polecats“:

The stooges make a whole batch of homemade beer, but get tossed in jail when Curly sells some to a cop. Their minor indiscretion turns into a forty year sentence when a keg of beer Curly has hidden under his coat explodes while the boys are being photographed.

How does anyone, even Curly, fit even a small keg under a coat? A beer ball, maybe. (Hey, whatever happened to the beer ball?  Those things were awesome.  Can you still get them? They would be perfect for Dolores Park, no?)

Here’s the same intersection in 1931 via SFPL:

Even the Palace Steak House was there! (kidding).

I rather like the reestablishment of the rounded building corner. A bit different from 2 years back, with an abandoned paint store on the left that was once a car dealership.

Here’s the Sanborn map of the intersection in 1915. It shows a saloon on the NE corner, (though it looks more like a produce store in the 1931 shot — I’m slammed right now but feel free to dig around the 1927 and 1938 city directories and post in the comments if you find anything interesting.)

Click for PDF of a wider map.

Per TK’s request, red are saloons, yellow are liquor stores. In fact, the North Star Brewery was on Capp between Mission and 26th:

Here’s the same intersection in 1930-1950 — the building in the black and white photo was torn down and turned into a used car lot.  (Green are car-related businesses — dealerships, repair shops, gas stations.  Mission and Army seems to have been the Richmond Auto Mall of the day.) Click for a PDF of a wider slice of the area:

(If you are running Firefox, you may see the above animated PNG that blinks back and forth IN TIME showing the rather dramatic widening of Army Street as noted by Gillian in the comments.  But you may need to click and open it in another window. And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work in Safari, no idea in IE. I used the APNG editor in Firefox, and I do know Safari can show animated PNGs, so if anyone has a clue, pipe up.)

UPDATE: I just discovered a detailed site history in the city’s Preliminary Mitigated Declaration for 3400 CC:

Historically, the building has been used for both new and used automobile sales and service until about 1990, when it was briefly used as a furniture rental business. From 1991 until early 2006, it was used as a Kelly-Moore paint store. Previous uses included “Jesse C. Lanning Autos” (1930s), “Phil Frates Plymouth” (1950s), “Jim Wessman Lincoln Mercury” and “Auto City Wholesale” (1960s), “K&C Chrysler/Dodge (1969 – 1982) and “Rent-a-Center” (1990). There is no documentation indicating that 3400 Cesar Chavez is associated with any historic event, especially since the building was built in a more modern style and in a more outlying neighborhood than other historic Beaux-Arts style auto showrooms located along Van Ness Avenue.

And 80 years later we get apartments again.

Hey, does anyone know if the Walgreens will move from 30th and Mission?  Or will there just be two in four blocks?

However, alcohol content varies more than you would expect. I have taken the time to plot this very relationship.

We can obviously cast aside all the beers above the best fit line as they serve little purpose.  There are a considerable number of outliers to consider.  Olde English 800 (5.9%/160) and Rolling Rock (4.5%/120) are certainly contenders. But the “ice beers” seem to serve us well — Keystone Ice (5.9%/142 calories) is followed closely by Milwaukee’s Best Ice (5.9%/144) and may prove sufficiently ironic for the Mission.

But rather than eyeballing this, if we list the alcohol % per calorie ratio (bang for the buck) a surprising trend develops: the lite/light beers actually prove most potent.

And through scientific study I have determined that for a beer to be truly ironic it must break 3.5 — sorry PBR and Hamm’s, you just don’t cut it.

Behold Milwaukee’s Best Light (4.5%/98), the new ironic beer!

At 4.59, Milwaukee’s Best Light simply crushes the rest. PBR and Sierra Nevada fail by over 1.2 points! Sadly this finely crafted brew is not available at BevMo.

UPDATE: Sadly, it turns out that MBL is merely Miller’s ‘economy label‘.  But Beer Advocate gives it a D!  This clearly means we will see it in Dolores Park in the very near future.

Warmer in Victoria than in SF right now — this fact is deserving of a towering beer.

(I highly recommend moderating a panel.  You get to listen to everyone’s answers and then sound really clever by repeating what they just said, but using different hand gestures.  Make sure everyone has a beer though, and that you are taller than them.)

In all seriousness, a great event.  I met many blogs for the first time –  NJudah, MuniDiaries, SFist, EveB, MeganAllison, Bikes and The City, just to name a few. All were as witty and attractive as their writing indicate, and the evening was an interesting discussion on the future of blogging and journalism.  Number one point — we need to have a better word than “blaaahg”.

However, the most shocking revelation of the evening was that Allan Hough of Mission Mission CANNOT SEE IN THE THIRD DIMENSION.  (At least using that cross-eyed method, a la my upside-down traffic cone experiment of yesterday.)

Below is another 3D sample — behold the Shmaltz RIPA I had after finishing my taxes this afternoon.

Can you see my Shmaltz in the THIRD DIMENSION?  Answer in the poll below.

• BEER ICE CREAM made of one of these unsuspecting Shmaltz beverages by Humphry Slocombe (vote!)

• Anthony’s take on Jesse’s beer brisket:

• Eli’s latkes!

I can’t wait to see what else is on the menu. This could be epic. I am drooling on my keyboard. So everyone show up at 7:30 after I’m done eating, OK?

Mmmm, latkes. I don’t think it’s possible to eat too many latkes. I am going to have to fast that day to fit in all that brisket, latkes and BEER ICE CREAM. And beer.

For the record, I finally got my hands on the Origin Pomegranate Ale. That is one fine beer, as is Lenny’s RIPA. Do yourself a favor and hit up some of the chosen beer BevMo or Whole Foods.