Potrero Point

Potrero Point San Francisco is the location of the earliest and most important industrial facilities in the Western United States on the eastern extension of San Francisco's Potrero Hill, a natural land mass extending into San Francisco Bay south of Mission Bay. Potrero Point, the point of Potrero Hill, was systematically blasted and cut, its serpentine cliffs removed. The work yielded two square miles of rock for fill and hundreds of acres of flat industrial land east of Illinois street between 20th Street and Islais Creek.

The region has been in regular industrial use since the 1860s, first as a location of a powder magazine and small maritime industries along the steep shoreline and early industries such as Pacific Rolling Mills, and later the famous Union Iron Works plus shipyards and related production, service and shipping-related industries, coal- and gas-fired power plants and energy generating facilities that eventually became Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E).

Centered along Twentieth Street at Illinois Street, the site contains the most extraordinary example of an historic industrial village still extant in the West. The first locomotive, typewriter, printing press, cable car equipment, the famous battleship Oregon and steel for many of San Francisco's 19th century buildings came from the Potrero.

Potrero Point, formerly Point San Quentin, was a peninsular extension of Potrero Hill on the south east side of the city of San Francisco. Potrero Point and surrounding areas have changed drastically over the past 150 years, with a small hill being all that remains.

Potrero Point drew the attention of industrialists after the California Gold Rush because it had cheap land isolated from the densely populated city center and because of its natural deep water access. Industrialists and speculators sought to exploit Potrero Point's natural advantages and to overcome the obstacle caused by the swampy Mission Bay. The natural contour of the bay shore was changed by filling, with much of the fill material was taken in the process of blasting away the serpentine hills that once rose above the point. The steep camel-back ridge extending into the bay offered deep water access connected to the Potrero Hills, the site was first cut off by the Third Street cut, and later leveled for land building.

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