Mission Creek (from Spanish: ''misión'') is a river in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
,
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
. Once navigable from the
Mission Bay inland to the vicinity of
Mission Dolores, where several smaller creeks converged to form it, Mission Creek has long since been largely
culverted. Its only remaining portion above-ground is the Mission Creek Channel which drains into
China Basin.
[Museum of California](_blank)
Watershed map, access date December 31, 2008
The two
Ramaytush
The Ramaytush or Rammay-tuš people are a linguistic subdivision of the Ohlone people of Northern California. The term Ramaytush was first applied to them in the 1970s, but the modern Ohlone people of the peninsula have claimed it as their ethn ...
Indian villages of Chutchui and Sitlintac were located on Mission Creek.
Background
Declared by the state legislature in 1854 to be a navigable stream, it retains the designation today, even though most of it was vacated for use by boats in 1874 and later filled in.
Soil liquefaction, such as that which killed numerous people in the
1906 San Francisco earthquake, has been known to occur along buried portions of the creek.
The China Basin Building was erected on the creek's north bank in the 1920s and used for off-loading and processing bananas through the 1950s. In the 1970s it was known as the Del Monte Building and used as a food distribution site by the Hearst family in response to the demands of the
SLA.
![Mission Creek houseboats and ramps](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Mission_Creek_houseboats_and_ramps.jpg)
A community of house boats has existed along the creek's south bank since 1960 when the state of California moved the houseboat community there from
Islais Creek to make way for merchant ship trading.
The mouth of Mission Creek has been known to
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...
fans as
McCovey Cove
McCovey Cove is the unofficial name of a section of San Francisco Bay beyond the right field wall of Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, named after famed Giants first baseman Willie McCovey. The proper name for the cove is China Bas ...
ever since the year 2000 when the
San Francisco Giants
The San Francisco Giants are an American professional baseball team based in San Francisco, California. The Giants compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) West division. Founded in 1883 as the New Y ...
relocated from their former home at
Candlestick Park
Candlestick Park was an outdoor stadium on the West Coast of the United States, located in San Francisco's Bayview Heights area. The stadium was originally the home of Major League Baseball's San Francisco Giants, who played there from 1960 ...
to
Oracle Park on the creek's north bank. Balls hit over the right field wall splash-land in the water there.
Lake Dolores
The ''Laguna Dolores'' was fed by the creek.
It was the site of the original
Mission Dolores, and probably stretched between
Mission Street
Mission Street is a north-south arterial thoroughfare in Daly City and San Francisco, California that runs from Daly City's southern border to San Francisco's northeast waterfront. The street and San Francisco's Mission District through which it ...
and Valencia, and 20th and 16th streets before being filled in with sand.
References
Bibliography
*
*{{cite book , first1 = Nancy , last1 = Olmsted , first2 =Chris , last2 = Carlsson, first3 = Bob , last3 = Isaacson , edition =2nd , title = Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco's Mission Bay , location = San Francisco , publisher = Mission Creek Conservancy , date = 2010
External links
''Vanished Waters of Southeastern San Francisco'' by William Crittenden Sharpsteen''Water Water'' by Chris Carlsson''Mission Creek'' by Chris Carlsson
Rivers of San Francisco
Mission District, San Francisco
Subterranean rivers of the United States
Rivers of Northern California
Tributaries of San Francisco Bay