SAN FRANCISCO — The big dig for San Francisco’s multibillion-dollar transportation terminal has unearthed some artifacts from the city’s heady Gold Rush days, including opium pipes from a Chinese laundry and a chipped chamber pot found in a backyard outhouse.
The 70 artifacts have city archaeologists eager for more and local residents pondering the ground beneath their feet.
“It’s not often that you get a chance to stop for a moment and have a window into what used to be,” said James M. Allan, an archaeologist with William Self Associates, the firm ensuring the items are unearthed and preserved. “It gives you pause.”
The $4 billion Transbay Transit Center under construction in the South of Market financial district is billed as the “Grand Central Station of the West.” The 1 million-square-foot bus and train station will serve as the northern end of California’s planned high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The West Coast’s tallest skyscraper is slated to rise above the center.
It’s sleek and modern — and on the same blocks once inhabited by working-class Irish immigrants and Chinese laborers who lived on the sand dunes of the busy Gold Rush port known as Yerba Buena Cove.The now-seemingly quaint accoutrements of their lives are being unearthed: clay opium pipes and ceramic tea pots from China; French perfume bottles; dainty English serving dishes, apothecary jars and the heads of hand-painted porcelain dolls; as well as animal- bone toothbrushes and abandoned chamber pots.
