Clay and Sansome - The Ship Under the Street

Clay and Sansome - The Ship Under the Street

Photo: BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.

On the corner of Clay and Sansome Streets, a bronze plaque marks one of the strangest buildings of Gold Rush San Francisco. The Niantic, a former whaling ship, arrived in 1849 crowded with gold seekers, who promptly abandoned her. She was hauled onto the mudflats here and turned into a storeship, with a roof built over the deck and warehouses inside. This corner was then the water's edge.

The great fire of May 1851 burned her to the waterline. Instead of hauling the wreck away, builders filled the cove around it and put up the Niantic Hotel on top. Pieces of the hull turned up during later construction, and in 1978 workers digging a foundation uncovered the ship's timbers along with Gold Rush bottles, tools and goods. Part of the find went to the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, and part of the ship is believed to lie under the street still.

More on Wikipedia: Niantic · San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

Stops on this tour

  1. Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
  2. Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
  3. Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
  4. North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
  5. Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
  6. Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
  7. The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
  8. Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
  9. Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
  10. Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
  11. The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
  12. The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
  13. Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
  14. South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom