Mondays are for Learnin’: The Mighty Hayes River

by Andrew Dalton on September 21, 2009

Every Monday, after you’ve finally gotten around to answering all the emails you didn’t feel like dealing with on Friday afternoon, Aggressive Panhandler will (maybe) blow your mind with some interesting fact or history about the neighborhood. Let’s all learn together!

Over here in the geographical (and cultural, as far as I’m concerned) center of the city, we tend to think we’ve got a few advantages over our SoMa and Marina friends. For starters, our bars aren’t filled with suits who think $5 is a good price for happy hour beers or ladies who think 45 is the new 25. We also like to think that we’ve got some solid rock under our feet whereas those other neighborhoods are the vanilla wafer crust on a banana pudding of sunken pirate ships and dead mobsters. (Metaphors!)

So you’ll excuse me if I was a little bit surprised to read Streetsblog SF’s San Francisco is Sinking! post this morning that digs up a 2004 article by Joel Pomerantz titled “San Francisco’s Clean Little Secret” detailing several such natural, underfoot waterways. Of greatest interest to my fellow Panhandlers should be  “the mighty Hayes River” which the article points out begins in “hundreds of upwellings, springs, and seeps in the area near Lone Mountain and USF.” the river is about 15 feet below the surface and has a hydromorphology (you guys took latin, right?) not unlike the Florida everglades. While we hope this is the only thing we San Franciscans have in common with Florida, it’s interesting to learn that a large portion of the landfill in SoMa is built on the the silted, muddy delta of the Hayes River.

Even more interesting is that even though we collectively forgot/ignore this river’s existence, in truth there’s probably no one in San Francisco who hasn’t seen the Hayes River. From San Francisco’s Clean Little Secret:

[The Hayes River] broadsides Market Street, encountering a long concrete subway tunnel that interrupts its gait. So copious are the waters of the Hayes that, to protect their investment from damage, BART runs “de-watering” pumps day and night in the Powell Street BART station. Removing, each week, 2.5 million gallons of tested, high-quality, potable groundwater (into the sewer!) the transit agency keeps the Hayes from flooding the tracks.

So that big fountain at UN Plaza you pass every day on your way to work? Yep, that’s powered by waters from our mighty Hayes River. (This finally answers my question about why I’ve never seen those fountains turned off even in the lowest droughts.) The fountains at the Fillmore Center in the Western Addition are also spewing forth Hayes River water.

While Streetsblog is primarily concerned with what is going to happen to all the SoMa buildings that are sagging into the Hayes River marsh, I’m really more interested in guys down at Bamboo Reef to start leading Scuba tours of underwater caverns beneath my apartment.

Further Reading:

• San Francisco is Sinking! on Streetsblog SF
• San Francisco’s Clean Little Secret from City Bright’s 2004

One Response to “Mondays are for Learnin’: The Mighty Hayes River”

1. dbradley says:

   September 22, 2009 at 4:29 pm

   I second the scuba diving idea.