99% Invisible - 228- Making Up Ground

Episode Date: September 13, 2016

Large portions of San Francisco, New York City, Boston, Seattle, Hong Kong and Marseilles were built on top of human made land. What is now Mumbai, India, was transformed by the British from a seven-island archipelago to one contiguous strip … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On May 3rd, 1978, construction workers in San Francisco were digging a foundation for a new building on San St. Street. Right next to the tallest skyscraper in the city, the Trans-America pyramid in the heart of the financial district. They were about 20 feet below street level when their shovels hit something totally unexpected. It was the hull of an old ship. That's reporter Emmett Fitzgerald. Archaeologists immediately came in and started scraping away all the dirt and mud.

And after a few days, they'd uncovered the full skeleton of a 120-foot gold rush air of vessel called the Niantic. Preserve perfectly in the earth beneath the streets of San Francisco. of a 120-foot gold rush era vessel called the Niantic. Preserve perfectly in the Earth beneath the streets of San Francisco. As the archaeologists did their work, hundreds of people gathered to watch the bizarre scene. A massive, massive ship being pulled out from beneath the pavement. As the construction hoarding was put up, people were carving holes in it to look in and see N an gigantic emerge from the mud.

That's James Delgado. I'm an archaeologist and a historian and I'm the author of Gold Rush Port, the Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco. Delgado was 20 years old then, an archaeologist in training, and he was part of the excavation that day. Inside the ship, he found all kinds of artifacts from the gold rush that had been preserved underground. Bricks, nails, tin plates for sheathing, boots, jackets, saddles, shovels, a lot of booze, 49ers like to drink. Delgado even popped the cork on a

bottle of 150 year old champagne. Tasted awful. But the excavation of the Niantic launched his career in marine archeology and inspired him to study the ships beneath San Francisco, because the Niantic isn't the only one down there. I'd say that there are probably as many as 70 ships that were buried that in some way

shape-reform remained even if it's fragments. In 1994, city workers were digging a tunnel for the munitrain when they hit the side of another gold rush ship, the Rome, and the decision was made to drill through it. They tunneled right through the hall, and today thousands of San Francisco's travel through the ship every morning as they'd ride the train between Folsom Street and the Embarcadero. It's not really marked in the tunnel, but for those of us who know when you take that turn, you're passing through the Gold Rush Ship Room. To understand how all of these ships ended up buried underground beneath the city, we

need to go back to the 1830s. When San Francisco was just a tiny little port, called Yerba Boena. It was an outpost of a few buildings with a tiny town square that set. By 1847 the population had grown to a few hundred. They renamed the port San Francisco, but it was still just a small town. But in 1848, all of that changed with the discovery of gold in January. The gold rush brought a tidal wave of prospectors to California. And by the end of 1850, the San Francisco waterfront was clogged with more than a thousand ships and the town had grown into a city of

thousands. So you're looking at a city that within a decade has gone from being a village to being the 12th largest city in North America. But the land around San Francisco was mostly sandy hills and not well suited to the scale of development. So to meet the surging demand for real estate, the city sold off plots of water in the shallow tidal zone. A person could buy a piece of water, but it was their job to turn it into usable ground. Some people dumped sand or garbage into their plots to try and make land.

Others drove steaks into the mud and built platforms on top of the water. And a lot of people repurposed the ships that had brought them to California. The ships helped, because as they came, many of them were sitting idle. The crews have gone off to the diggings or had run away. So the owners rented them out or sold them outright to become floating houses, square houses, the town jail, offices. You name it. Over 200 of them became floating buildings.

Ships were the centers of commercial life in San Francisco. Well, you had the Apollo saloon, which was basically a restaurant. They sold the donut and a cup of coffee for two bits, they said. You had the euphemia, which was turned into the town jail, and later became an insane asylum.

You also had ships that served as water sisters. You had other ships that worked as government offices. And another ship, the good ship Panama, was used as a Siemens church. The city looked like a forest of masts, and planks connected the ships, creating a grid of boardwalks perched above the water. One visitor said that San Francisco was a Venice built of pine. But there were obvious downsides to a floating city, and little by little, people began to fill in areas between the ships using whatever they could get their hands on.

From garbage to unwanted cargo to dead bodies, you name it, everything was thrown into that, and with this gradually began the process of filling in the mud flats. In this way, the shoreline itself began to advance. At this point, the harbor was a patchwork of freshly filled lots, ships, and buildings on stills. But then, in May of 1851, a massive fire broke out in downtown San Francisco. The wind fan the flames, and by the time the next day had dawned, more than 2,000 buildings were gone, the flames were so high that they could see the glow in Monterey 100 miles south. Some of the ships caught fire and sank, leaving their half-charred holes in the muddy water.

By the time they managed to put the fire out, the waterfront was just a mushy mess of smoldering timber. And that mushy mess was too unstable to rebuild on, so they used some of the world's first steam-powered excavators to scrape sand off of nearby hills and dunes and dump it on top. By September of 1851, the old waterfront had been completely buried.

And with it, the nianctic, the Rome, and all of the other gold rush ships entombed in this manufactured ground. After the fire, San Francisco continued to expand, filling in more and more of the tidal zone in deeper and deeper water. And eventually the state stepped in. They built a seawall to cap the production of new land. They drew a line and said San Francisco you can go no further, and today we know that line, it's the Embarcadero. The walkway along the eastern edge of the San Francisco Wharf. But by that time a city had built up on top of all this sand and dirt and garbage.

And over the years San Francisco continued to develop, and today what had been the title zone is the heart of the city's financial district. Throughout history, the absence of ground has proven to be a surprisingly small obstacle for people who want to build stuff. Simpsisco isn't the only city that is built its own land. Large portions of Boston, Seattle, Hong Kong, and Marseille were built on top of Phil. It's not uncommon to see it in other cities, New York, Manhattan built out and filled. The area of the World Trade Center sits on with landfill.

They actually found a ship when they were building the original World Trade Center towers. What is now mum-by-India used to be a seven island archipelago before the British colonial government turned it all into one contiguous strip of land. Tokyo has built 60,000 acres of new land over the last several centuries. The process of building new land along the waterfront is often referred to as land reclamation. Which is kind of ridiculous. Land reclamation is another one of those words that's made up and it masquerades what's really happening. You're creating land where it didn't exist before. Or even creating a whole country, like the Netherlands.

There's a very extraordinary history of basically the Dutch making their own country. That's Stephen Graham, professor of cities and society at Newcastle University, and author of the book Vertical, the city from satellites to bunkers. I mean, most of Holland, most of the Netherlands, as it's currently constructed, is an engineering construction. It's a huge project of land reclamation and land manufacture. The Dutch developed incredible techniques to build land in places that were actually below sea level.

And this has been going on since medieval times, where large dikes were constructed, large pumping systems were constructed to create a dry country underneath the sea. And the Dutch are proud of this history. There's a popular saying there, God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands. Humans have been making their own ground for a long time, but the process has reached new heights in recent years.

The historic scale of land reclamation, and land manufacture, and the building up of land beneath cities is absolutely minuscule compared to the scale at which it's going on today. More and more cities are building waterfront property for airports, skyscrapers and housing. It's sheer urban economics because you create new supply in an area where there's amazing levels of demand and therefore it's very profitable. And new dredging technologies have enabled developers to build land faster and on a grander scale, often at the expense of the environment.

I mean they use huge ships for example, which have what they call rainbow dredging systems. These ships suck up massive amounts of sand and gravel from the sea floor and shoot it through the air in a giant, arcing rainbow of muck onto the area where they're trying to build new land. This technology has been particularly useful for creating artificial islands. China is using these rainbow dredging ships to turn uninhabited coral atolls in the middle of the South China Sea into larger islands that could support human settlement. They're actually manufacturing land in the hopes of staking territorial claim to highly contested waters. And then, there's Dubai.

Dubai is a post to child for this process really. The wealthy desert Emirate has built a series of artificial islands for wealthy elites. Three of the new landforms are shaped like massive palm fronds. Another project called The World is a cluster of islands designed to look like a map of the world from above. But Dubai's reclamation project has stirred up so much sediment that they buried coral reefs, oyster beds, and sea grass fields in the Persian Gulf, and some of the islands that make up the world are already starting to erode back into the sea.

Dubai is also running out of sand. At least the kind of sand you need to build things. Desert sand is too fine for construction, and Dubai has used up so much of the sand around its coast that they now have to import it from Australia. Globally, humans use over 40 billion tons of sand a year. The two largest uses of that sand are concrete production and land manufacturing projects. And it's created a global sand shortage that is forcing countries to go to extreme lengths in their efforts to build new ground. The most famous example here is Singapore. The wealthy island nation is one of the densest countries in the world.

And it's constantly looking to expand its territory. There's plans to make Singapore 20 or 30% bigger over the next 40 or 50 years through manufacturing new land. Without enough sand of its own, Singapore has had to look elsewhere. There's been a lot of evidence that the extended land manufacturing around Singapore, the basis for its growth as a tiny island city, is based on basically stealing sandy islands

from the poorer countries like Cambodia and Indonesia and Burma and then moving the material physically. Land itself is flowing from poorer countries to wealthier ones. Those countries have made sand exports illegal because of this sense that they are losing their own territory. Land manufacturing isn't just expanding territory outward, in some cases it's expanding upward. On the coast of Nigeria, developers are building a new luxury city called Eco-Atlantic, on top of manufactured ground. And the starting thing about Eco-Atlantic is it's about three or four meters higher than

the rest of Legos, and it's been designed to be more resilient to expected sea level rises than the rest of the city. Legos is a very poor low-line city that's extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. So there's a very disturbing, sort of almost apartheid geography emerging here, where elites are able to build their own escape routes from increasingly perilous conditions through going higher into manufactured land. In theory, building new land could be a part of the solution to sea level rise, but Stephen Graham says these new land projects are often built exclusively

for the rich. They are being built as private projects for those who can get in and can afford it. They're not being built as public projects very often to protect cities as a whole. Massive reclamation projects like eco-Atlantic are the most obvious examples of manufactured land. But even if you live far away from the coast, the ground beneath your feet may have been partially created by humans. People are continuously impacting the surface of the earth. We dig up rock from one place, grind it into cement, and build a sidewalk somewhere else. We blow up skyscrapers, dump the rubble somewhere, and build a hospital on top of it. And all of this human activity has actually created a new layer on the surface of the

Earth's crust. It's made up of old bricks, ground up cement, and rusting metal. Archaeologists and geologists have started calling this layer the Archaeosphere. The Archaeosphere isn't totally unnatural. It's filled with soil and roots and earthworms, sometimes grass grows on top of it. And that makes it hard for us to notice.

Stephen Graham says that this idea, that human activity has actually created a geologic layer on the surface of the earth, is bringing archaeologists and geologists together. Traditionally, archaeologists study human artifacts within the ground, while geologists study the ground itself. But what if the ground itself was made by humans? Archaeologists are increasingly working with geologists and they see the ground as a gradual

accumulation of the leftovers, obviously it's rubbish, it's the bodies of the dead, it's the leftover materials, and it is increasingly part of the build environment, I think that's really important. Important for one, because we need to understand what the ground is made of, if we want to build safely on top of it. Manufactured ground can be unstable and more susceptible to earthquakes and landslides. For example, in China in Shenzhen,

when the construction material that was heaped up on a hillside as part of the great expansion of that city, basically slumped down as a great big slide, and I think there was about 80 people killed in that as well. So we need to become much more aware that in creating our own geology we're also creating our own hazards. But the Archaeosphere is also a resource to be explored. There's been estimates that there's as much copper in that artificial ground as there is in all of the copper mines in the world. So in

Scandinavia they're actually starting to mine the disused industrial ground of their own industrial cities. When you walk through a city coded in pavement and covered in buildings it's easy to assume that the ground beneath you is ancient and natural. There's a tendency always just to see the ground as something that's always been there and always will be there, but there's a huge amount of evidence that cities build their own ground, cities are agents for making their own geology. If you look at a brand new land reclamation project like Eco-Atlantic, it's obvious the

ground is manufactured. Right now it looks like a giant sandy construction site, but if all goes according to plan, pretty soon there will be parking lots and skyscrapers and apartment buildings. And right now it's hard to imagine that such a blatant example of artificial ground will one day become seen as just an ordinary part of the Nigerian landscape. But you probably could have said the same thing about San Francisco in 1850. 99% invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald with Katie Mingle and Sheree

Fusef, plus Sam Green's fans Lani Hall Kirk-Hulls dad Terran Mazza, Avery Trouffleman, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to archaeologist Matt Edgeworth, who's writing about the Archesphere helped us a lot on this episode. Also Stephen Graham's new book Vertical is coming out this fall, you can find a link to it on our episode. Also, Stephen Graham's new book Vertical is coming out this fall. You can find a link to it on our website. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We have a lively community on Facebook. I'm on Twitter at Roman Mars like way way way too much.

But if you want hundreds and hundreds of stories to make yourself sound really interesting at parties, I recommend you go immediately to 99pi.org. Radio to pee. From PRX. From PRX.