San Francisco has gone through tremendous land changes, and these changes have been dictated mostly by commercial interest. Originally, San Francisco had a very wavering waterfront that consisted mostly of sand dunes. The edge that faced the sea was eventually developed.

This area was a tidal marsh, and it really didn't have much commercial value because it was marsh area. This photograph is a good example of the primary landscape before it changed, before there was enough population to actually force it to change.

San Francisco
had a lot of
creeks. 
Fresh water
flowed 
through this
area and 
eventually
joined the
tidal marsh. 

Over time, the land got more and more settled.

From the view down to Cow Hollow and onto the waterfront, you get a sense of how the area was sparse for a long period of time and then how it eventually changed in large waves.

It eventually had its biggest change after the 1906 earthquake. 
All the rubble from the downtown was brought over 
and filled the Marina area...brick, rock, and mortar...
basically whatever was left of the buildings. 

There was a massive amount of rubble that needed to be disposed of and 
the Marina was just a convenient place to put it. 

The biggest change after that was the Panama-Pacific 
International Exposition, which was going to celebrate
the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915. That became
the culmination and focal point of rebuilding San Francisco
and declaring its restoration to the face of the world.

The Marina area, in terms of its fill from the earthquake,
only partially provided the landfill they needed for the
Pan-Pacific. This was one of the few areas that was 
actually available to have a large land space developed upon.
By reclaiming some of what was essentially just marsh,
they could provide a large enough space for as ambitious
a project as they expected it to be.

This was all built for the fair. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition erased the sense of the earthquake. It erased the sense that San Francisco had been wiped out and had lost its culture.

This was during the war years [World War I] and the decades that followed. 
There really was not the population base here at this time to expand and fill
the area. The property stood vacant for up to a decade before the real estate
developers actually came in.

The story of the Marina is a story of San Francisco itself, because San Francisco is nothing
more than a great number of hills that have since disappeared. But below the hills, you have
nothing but rolling sand dune. It's the shifting sands of San Francisco that have been shifted
by the Europeans that showed up for the gold rush and the Americans that came over land or
around the Horn. They redistributed the sand dunes and created a flat city, making what used
to be a very sculptural sea line a very square, very blocked-out piece of terrain. 

It's just amazing how much the fill has overtaken the bay.