The Golden Fire Hydrant - The Hydrant That Saved the Mission
Photo: Alexwennerberg, CC0 (cropped)
A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.
Walk south through Mission Dolores Park, a Jewish cemetery until the 1890s and a refugee camp for more than 1,600 families after 1906, to the corner of Church and 20th Streets. Here stands a small fire hydrant painted gold.
On the night of April 19 and 20, 1906, the fire was pushing toward the Mission and the city's water mains were broken. Then firefighters found that this one hydrant still had water. Their worn-out horses could not pull the engines up the slope, so residents and refugees dragged them up by hand, and after hours of fighting they held the fire at 20th Street.
Every April 18, in a dawn ceremony on the anniversary of the earthquake, the hydrant gets a fresh coat of gold paint. Read the plaque, then turn around for one of the best views of the downtown skyline.
More on Wikipedia: Mission Dolores Park · 1906 San Francisco earthquake
Stops on this tour
- Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
- Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
- Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
- North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
- Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
- Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
- The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
- Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
- Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
- Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
- The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
- The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
- Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
- South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom