There is a part of history I don’t expect to find written. The photo on the right has two historic events that are unlikely to be recorded.
The first concerns the pier that sticks out into San Francisco Bay. I ran daily on this path, now called Crissy-waterfront Path, for over twenty years. One morning in the 1980s I saw a stunning sight. Nearly 200 Chinese running wildly caring small bags into the woods on the left side of the image.
What happened is that a small cargo ship moored itself to this tiny pier and told the hundreds of illegal immigrant Chinese on board to leave all their belongings on the ship, jump onto the pier and run South until they found other Chinese people who would hide them. The instructions would have worked....
The instructions would have worked for everyone who could have made it before the police arrived. Clement Street is due South of the landing spot and the many Chinese on Clement St. would have hidden the illegal immigrants (if they were awake at roughly 7am when the horde would have reached Clement St.)
The newspapers reported that about 50 Chinese and the ship’s captain were arrested, most deported. That means more than 150 made it successfully.
The second point to be forgotten by history concerns the dirt path on the left-- the current Crissy-waterfront Path. I was directly responsible for the dirt nature of the path. The original path was to be blacktop so walkers and bicycles could enjoy it. I gathered 30-50 runners to show up at a meeting on the subject and protest that plan. We argued for a hard dirt running path that could be used by everyone. (Morning runners are among the most difficult people I have ever had to organize.) I personally took the director of the project down to show him several blacktop paths where runners had carved out their own adjacent path to suit their own running needs. He understood and the path became hard dirt instead of blacktop.