Hunters Point, San Francisco, California
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Hunters Point or Bayview-Hunters Point is a neighborhood in the southeastern portion of San Francisco, California.
[edit] The neighborhood
Hunters Point, named after a local family during the 19th century, is in the extreme southeastern part of San Francisco, strung along the main artery of Third Street from India Basin to Candlestick Point, home to Monster Park. Of San Francisco's microclimates, Hunters Point has the warmest weather of anywhere in the city. Bayview-Hunters Point, or "HP", as it commonly called, is a predominantly African American area with the highest percentage of homeownership in the City.
Hunters Point, or "HP", is home to many family businesses, community organizations, home recording studios, and churches that have thriving congregations. Many of the African-Americans in the area are the children of the massive southern migration of the 1940s, where thousands of African-Americans came from Southern states for job opportunities at the burgeoning war industries at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Between 1940 and 1950, the population leaped from 16,500 to 147,000; the neighborhood's predominance of African-Americans is a legacy of the restrictive housing covenants of the past.
Many consider Bayview-Hunters Point a marginalized community, with nearly one-third of San Francisco's toxic waste sites with concurrent endemic health issues from those toxins. A 30% unemployment rate along with marginal city services create a volatile social powderkeg. Black-on-black crime and prostitution is a huge problem with gang wars surrounding territorial drug trade accounting for a high murder rate. Blacks comprise less than 8 percent of the population, yet they made up 63 percent of San Francisco homicide victims in 2005.
The neighborhood's population is changing — a traditionally Black-community established the Hunters Point Shipyard and blue-collar factory jobs and the reasonable housing prices has recently seen a decline due to gentrification. Many African-Americans from the Bayview-Hunters Point region have moved to other Bay Area cities, notably Antioch, Oakland, Hayward and Richmond while Latinos, Asians, and whites represent a growing part of the neighborhood drawn by warm weather, cheaper housing prices and new construction surrounding the city's current projects with this neighborhood is the Third Street Light Rail Project, expanding mass transit system into less-serviced neighborhoods.
The Bayview-Hunters Point area is rapidly morphing — the old infrastructure of factories and shipyards in some of the last available land in San Francisco is being torn down. Murals featuring Black pride are common in Hunters Point — residents there hope that those murals will still be there when the noise and dust of construction clear and that the new improved Bayview-Hunters Point community will provide new opportunities.
Many community groups, such as the India Basin Neighborhood Association work with community members, other organizations and city- wide agencies to strengthen and improve this diverse part of San Francisco.
[edit] History of the Shipyard
Hunters Point as a community grew up around the two graving docks purchased and upbuilt in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth century by the Union Iron Works, owned by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company, located at Potrero Point. The original docks were built on solid rock. In 1916, the drydocks were thought to be the largest drydocks in the world, for the time. At a length of over 1000 feet, they were said to large enough to accommodate the largest warships and passenger steamers afloat. Soundings showed an off shore depth of sixty-five feet. The Navy used the docks as a mid-site between San Diego and Bremerton, Washington.
Much of the shoreline was extended by landfill extensions into the San Francisco Bay during the early-20th century. The Navy recognized the importance of shipbuilding and repair in the San Francisco Bay and began negotiating for use and appropriation of the Hunters Point Drydocks during World War I. A Congressional hearing on Pacific Coast Naval Bases was held in San Francisco in 1920 at San Francisco City Hall wherein city representatives, Mayor Rolph and City Engineer O'Shaughnessy and others testified on behalf of permanently siting the Navy at Hunters Point.
The land was again appropriated by the United States Navy at the onset of World War II and became one of the major shipyards of the west coast. Many workers, including African Americans, moved into the area to work at this shipyard and other wartime related industries in the area. After the war, the area remained a naval base and commercial shipyard, as many blue collar industries moved here. The Navy closed the shipyard and Naval base in 1974 [1] and gave it back to the city. Right now, there is a renaissance of the Hunters Point Shipyard.[2]
As in most industrial zones of the era, Hunters Point has had a succession of coal and oil-fired power generation facilities that have left a legacy of pollution, both from smokestack effluvents and leftover byproducts that were dumped in the vicinity. In 2006 Pacific Gas and Electric Company completed rerouting of electrical services in the Bay Area and closed their Hunters Point Power Plant.[3] After WWII and until 1969, the Hunters Point shipyard was the site of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the US military's largest facility for applied nuclear research, which left many areas of the shipyard radioactively contaminated. [4]
[edit] External links
- Bay View Newspaper
- Historic Hunters Point in pictures
- India Basin Neighborhood Association
- Map of Hunters Point gangs circa 2004
- Map of India Basin
- Hunters Point infant mortality rate is comparable to Bulgaria
- Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment
- 1966 Hunters Point riot
- Review of a documentary film about Hunters Point
- Hunters Point on WikiTravel
- Alternative economic development for Bayview-Hunters Point
- Community Window on the Shipyard, an archive of Shipyard-related documents
- Literacy for Environmental Justice, a local organization working on Environmental Justice issues in Hunters Point
