Interesting Thing of the Day, has a great post about the history of land development in San Francisco. The city of San Francisco is one of the prettiest cities in the US. Pictures of it and the Golden gate bridge, are often used in depictions of the US West coast or of the State of California.
San Francisco was founded by the Spanish in 1776, but didn’t see major growth until the 1848 California gold rush. During the gold rush, land values in the city skyrocketed. And there was a severe shortage of land space. At the same time, hundreds of ships had been abandoned by their crews in the harbor. The crews had left to seek their fortune in the mines and hills beyond the city.
The city members decided to recycle the abandoned ships and use them as landfill to create new building areas in the bay. Other ships were towed onto the beach and set up as new buildings. To this day, construction crews are continually finding buried ships and parts of ships beneath the city.
Read the article, it really is very interesting. San Francisco’s Terra Infirma
This post reminded me of a post from last year with a 1660 map of New York city superimposed over a modern one.
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About 5 minutes before I read this, I had just seen this article:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/08/data_centers_on_cargo_ships.html
Instead of using ships to build land in San Francisco, the article is about using ships to hold data centers (while they float off of Pier 50 in San Francisco).
Fun stuff.
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