Building work

Right next to my office, they're starting work on a new office block. It's going to be the tallest building South of Market. It seems that building here is quite an adventure. To start with, the entire financial district of San Francisco is built on a landfill site. For years and years, people used to just dump their rubbish in the bay or the marsh land that surrounded it. If you look at really old maps, the peninsula used to be much smaller than it is now, before they started dumping rubbish. Take the Marina district for example - when they get an earthquake, the buildings down there wobble around like they're built on jelly. They pretty much are - they're built on a swamp filled with rubbish.

Not surprisingly, the officials thought that building high rise structure on jelly was not a great idea so they created regulations to ensure that all new building were anchored to the rock which is often below sea level. So all big building projects here involve digging down 30 feet to find the a nice big lump of rock to build on.

Life gets a little more complicated when the builders stumble upon something of real interested when digging their nice big hole. In one story I've been told, an old wreck from the gold rush days was discovered. It was from the time of the gold rush, the ship was anchored in the bay and the crew headed into the hills to look for gold. They never returned and the ship sunk and ended up in the marshes. Over time, as the dumping of rubbish began filling in the gaps, it became part of the land. That was until some developers wanted to build a new office block. On discovery, the building work was halted for two years while archeological teams worked their way through the remains thousands of ancient artifacts.

Maybe the story is true, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a little bit true. I like it all the same.