Peter T. Seculovich Passes
Historical Essay
by Stephanie T. Hoppe
Stephanie T. Hoppe is a former staff counsel to the California Coastal Commission and a great-great-granddaughter of Peter Seculovich.
Conclusion: Part 10 of Peter T. Seculovich in San Francisco
In June 1909, neighbors discovered him collapsed in his home and took him to hospital. He died the following day, aged 82. Burial plots were hard to come by with the city’s cemeteries in the once-remote outer Richmond district filled to capacity, and cremation had become the norm. Seculovich’s ashes were interred at the Odd Fellows’ Columbarium, which still stands near Lone Mountain, although the adjacent cemetery was moved to Colma in neighboring San Mateo County.
The Examiner ran one last article about him, headlined “Capt. Seculovich, ‘Father of Mission,’ Rich, Found Dying in Hovel”:
Captain P. F. [sic] Seculovich, known as the “Father of the Mission” and through whose hands has passed the ownership of many pieces of land in that section, was found dying from pneumonia early yesterday morning in a little hovel at 2001 San Bruno avenue, where he has lived a secluded life for the last twenty years.
Seculovich is still accounted a wealthy man. When he was removed to the Central Emergency Hospital more than fifty deeds were found on his person. Enclosed with them were two medals presented him by the people of the Mission for services rendered to the community many years ago.
Seculovich came to California in ’49 and settled in what is now known as the Mission. Until fifteen years ago he was closely identified with the growth of that section. Since that time, however, he has led the life of a recluse.
When the news of Seculovich’s plight was conveyed to his son-in-law and daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Theriot, yesterday they had him removed to a private hospital, where he will receive proper care.
Seculovich gained considerable notoriety ten years ago, when he appeared before the Board of Supervisors with a claim of title to several hundred acres of city property, including part of the site of the City Hall. (6/18/1909, p. 6)
Little of this information was accurate. Until four years before his death, Seculovich lived at 3241 Mission Street, as he had for nearly 40 years. He may well have become embittered, perhaps even mentally unstable, but he was still taking his arguments and issues to public bodies in 1907, two years before his death. That he was ever wealthy seems unlikely, although he may well have worked to give that impression, and it would be characteristic of him to carry his deeds and awards on his person. Before his death, he conveyed all the properties we know of to his daughter, though we can suspect that he continued to consider them his. His claim to Block 60 of the Western Addition involved no city property, let alone the site of city hall, nor hundreds of acres, but one square block, less than 4 acres.
Of the 26 lots that we know of that Seculovich acquired on Bernal Heights, none were built on during his lifetime, and he sold only one, to Nicholas McComas in 1888 for $250 (Gift Map 1, Lot 129) —present-day 129 Wool Street, which according to Zillow.com was not built on until 1912, and is presently worth $1.6 million. Jennie sold a number of the properties in 1910: four contiguous, steeply sloping lots with houses now fronting on Chapman, Prentiss and Banks Streets that were built between 1909 and 2009 (Gift Map 3, Lots 995-998); four of the six lots “with the splendid panorama” on the east side of Bonview Street, to the south of Coso Avenue, today part of Bernal Heights Park; and, finally, the ten lots that made up the south half of the block between Ellsworth and Gates just north of Crescent (Gift Map 2, Lots 430 to 439), which were reconfigured to front on Crescent and all but one quickly developed, the final one not until 1947. The western portions of Bernal Heights near Mission Street were largely developed by the 1920s. The rest took much longer, with vacant lots remaining and some roads not yet paved in 2007. Of the 11 marsh lots Seculovich acquired (Gift Map 4), he and Jennie sold six in the early 1900s. We have no record of the disposition of seven of Seculovich’s original lots on Bernal Heights or five lots in the adjacent marsh. So far as we know, Seculovich never claimed to be a Forty-Niner. Indeed, he was still in Austria in 1851 and by his own account arrived in San Francisco in 1853.
But the supreme irony of the Examiner’s summary of his life is not the misstatements but the complete omission of the enterprise to which he devoted so many years—restoring navigability and shipping to Islais Creek. Even after deposition of earthquake debris and filling by railroads on both sides of the Kentucky Street embankment, several hundred acres of tidal marsh remained at the time of Seculovich’s death, and Islais Creek still flowed, at least most of the time. The shallow bay that once extended half a mile from the mouth of the creek to San Francisco Bay proper was shrunken to a narrow channel bordered by mudflats due to the restriction of tidal flushing to the width of the culvert in the embankment.
New state legislation promoting reclamation in 1925 raised the hopes of those who considered the remaining creek and marshlands an eyesore. To fill the 280-acre reclamation district subsequently formed, more rock was quarried from Bernal Heights and from cuts for road construction. Reclamation was declared complete in 1936, and an aerial photo from 1940 shows the marsh completely filled, but largely undeveloped. Islais Creek itself was hidden from view, culverted and covered with Alemany Boulevard, which was eventually widened to six lanes and then itself covered by the elevated Interstate 280. Franconia Landing and Seculovich’s marsh lots lie buried under concrete near the Cesar Chavez interchange. By the 1980s, both railway and shipping transport were but memories in San Francisco, replaced by freeways, trucks and containers—and mostly moved across the bay to the Port of Oakland.
The Long Bridge and Kentucky Street embankment once marked the mouth of Islais Bay, half a mile east of where the creek emptied into the bay. Today, filled land extends eastward another half a mile into the bay. A stub Islais Channel some 300 feet wide reaches inland 1,500 feet from present-day Third Street, not quite to the line of Pennsylvania Avenue, which could not be extended across dry land. The drawbridge Seculovich campaigned so hard for was finally installed in 1915, a single-leaf bascule, replaced in 1945 with a double-leaf bascule featuring art deco ornamentation in the bridge tender's house and the silver-painted covers over the arms supporting the counterweights under the bridge. In the 1980s, a great-great-grandson of Seculovich’s, also named Peter, at the time master of a tugboat on the bay, sailed under the opened draw to tow a vessel out to open water. The ageing art deco bridge is scheduled to be replaced by, once again, a fixed span. The upstream source of the Islais Creek sees daylight in Glen Canyon Park in the Glen Park neighborhood.
Today, driving on the elevated freeway that rises above Seculovich’s creekside marsh lots and follows the course Islais creek once took to San Francisco Bay and seeing the unbroken expanse of pavement and buildings on either side, we might think Seculovich’s dream of returning shipping to Islais Creek hopelessly quixotic. But at least twice, in 1883 and again in 1903, circumstances came close to implementing much of his vision. We are perhaps more likely to mourn the lost marsh habitat, which port development would have destroyed as thoroughly as has in fact happened. In Seculovich’s time, the marshes surrounding San Francisco Bay seemed endless and eternal—blank slates awaiting human commerce and industry.
SOURCES
Seculovich Family Papers in the possession of Stephanie T. Hoppe
San Francisco newspapers, 1855-1910 (Chronicle, Examiner, Call & Post)
San Francisco City Directories, 1855-1910
San Francisco Voter Registration Rolls 1860-1910
US Decennial Census, 1860-1900
Maps
August Chevalier, San Francisco in 1911
John C. Colquhoun, Map of A Portion Of Bernal Rancho Including All Of The Gift Maps, Precita Valley Lands, Etc., 1869
V. Wackenreuder, City and County of San Francisco, San Francisco: Henry Langley, 1861
Whitaker & Kelley, Map of Bernal Heights, The Gift Maps, Precita Valley Lands, Etc., San Francisco, June 1889
U.S. Coast Guard Survey, San Francisco, 1869
Websites
bridgeoftheweek.com, foundsf.org, newspapers.com, sanfranciscostory.com, sfgenealogy.org, wikipedia.org, zillow.com
Books
Bernal History Project, Images of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights, San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing, 2007
Robert Callwell, Transit in San Francisco A Selected Chronology, 1850-1995, San Francisco: Municipal Railway, September 1999
Derek Heyes, Historical Atlas of California with Original Maps, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007
John S. Hittel, A History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally of the State of California, San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co, 1878
B. E. Lloyd, Lights and Shades in San Francisco, San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Company, 1876.
Nancy Olmsted, Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay, San Francisco: Mission Creek Conservancy, 1986.
Resource Consultants, San Francisco Bayside: Historical Cultural Resource Survey, San Francisco: San Francisco Clean Water Program, April 1982
William Crittenden Sharpsteen, “Vanished Waters of Southeastern San Francisco: Notes on Mission Bay and the Marshes and Creeks of the Potreros and the Bernal Rancho,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, June 1941