S3 Ep4 Where Juana Lived - Jonathan Lammers Interview

Today’s episode is an interview with a new listener and accidental friend of Monkey Block’s Facebook Page that led to IMs on Facebook, a rabbit hole on Juana Briones, and then to an online interview. 

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https://fia.umd.edu/answer-how-did-this-group-of-houses-get-to-be-here/

Today's episode is sponsored by a one-time contribution from Tami and also from Jinny, who moved from a one-time contributor to a monthly supporter. Thank you both of you for supporting Monkey Block.  Today's episode is an interview with a new listener and accidental friend of Monkey Block’s Facebook page that led to IMs on Facebook, a rabbit hole on Juana Briones, and then to an online interview. 

A little background on today's guest. Jonathan Lammers is an architectural historian with experience documenting the history and buildings of San Francisco and North California. Some of his projects include acting as the field survey coordinator for the South Mission, and Central Soma Historic Surveys, and the San Francisco Neighborhood Commercial Building Survey.

He documented San Francisco's cultural and ethnic history, which includes authorship of the San Francisco Filipino and San Francisco Latino Historic Context Statements. As well as contributing research to the San Francisco African American Historic Contact Statement.  He prepared the successful nomination for the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts to the National Register of Historic Places and worked on historic surveys of Market and Octavia, which we get into today.

But there's more. As a member of the San Francisco Planning Department, he completed a private survey, I believe, for the lots of land. Juan Briana is owned outside of the Presidio,  also known as Ojo de Awa Figueroa, and also her lots at the bottom of Loma Alta. Today's Telegraph Hill by Current Day North Beach, also known as Playa The  With his permission, I've provided links to some of his work. If you want to go to monkey blocksf.buzzsprout.com.

I'm amazed who will give me the time of day, considering I'm a hobby early San Francisco historian. I'm always hoping my enthusiasm makes up for my lack of formal credentials.  I add commentary today during the interview because we switch topics and look at images online, which as a dear listener, you obviously can't see. 

We get into the Juana Briones discussion and his research regarding her land.  If you would like to either revisit or get more information about Juana Briones, I have an episode about just her. Way back in season one, episode four, called the third map of Yerba Buena. Since recording this interview, Jonathan and I have kicked around ideas and maps back and forth, and we'll need to do a second interview to catch you up on what we have learned.

I'll point out where I'm not clear on the information regarding the real estate development of land Juana either did or didn't own at the time of development. Are you ready? Here we go. 

Hello, Jonathan. I'm so glad I have a chance to speak with you today.  Why don't you tell us how we met?  Okay. Now this is amazing. Wait for it.  I was looking for a new podcast and I put in the phrase “San Francisco history” and you came up.  Okay. Not so amazing.  Simple as that.  Well, I'm glad that's the case. You got on my radar when you sent a friend request on Facebook, and then you had made a comment uh, does anyone know this person?

And I jokingly responded I actually know them really well.  Yes, I have. I still have a bunch of friends who live in San Francisco and are historians and I figured one of them knew you or that you might be somebody on the periphery. Maybe it was, you know, mystery person that we hung out at the, uh, historian's party and, uh, didn't remember and  Oh, I'm certainly a mystery person,  but I was never invited to these secret historian parties.

And I also meant, I meant to like your page on Facebook, not send a friend request. But once the cat was out of the bag, I figured I had to roll with it. You didn't want to retract the friend request. I can't do that. That's just, this is bad. You know, that's bad Facebook etiquette. Exactly.  

Well, what interests me and also kind of intimidates me is that you are an architectural historian. 

Yes. And I didn't know that that job title even existed for a majority of my life.  It's a nice way of saying I write about old buildings and the phrase architectural historian is something that comes out of the secretary of the interiors professional standards.  So, when you are working in this field, they want you to have some sort of history of a contribution to the field. 

And so basically, you would qualify under historian at this point because you have two years of contributing to the public's knowledge of history. I'm a historian now? You now meet the Secretaries of the Interior's professional standards as a historian.  That's all it takes, huh? That's it.  Secret handshake too. 

I haven't been introduced to the secret handshake, the dances or the songs. None of that.  I'm curious how long you have been, this is such a tongue twister for me, an architectural historian.  Uh, you know, that's an interesting question.  In some ways I was, before I ever worked in this field, I always had a warm and fuzzy visceral reaction to old buildings. I think that's a product of growing up in mid-century suburbia. The first time I was around a lot of old buildings, they just excited me. And so I was the person who bought Field Guide to American Houses and books like that, and I was just interested. And then I started working professionally in history, but I was working with archaeologists.

And then that led to another job working for an architecture firm, and they were really focused on buildings. And that's how it got started.  Did you study history or architecture? I studied history, but I didn't have no specialty. I mean, there are a lot of people who go to grad school and they, um, get a master's in historic preservation.

I'm one of the few people. Uh, really, I just have a bachelor's degree, and I studied history because, frankly, it allowed the most time for me to drink beer and play in a rock and roll band and be a terrible student.  So I'm a much better, I'm a much better historian than I ever was a student.  I sort of just worked my, my way up, you know, it's just how it worked out.

It's a strange path, you know, it's funny, but when it really, really started is, uh, I moved out to San Francisco during the dotcom boom, not to work in history at all.  There was a friend who worked for a firm based in Florida. And they had recently opened an office in Menlo Park, and they needed warm bodies to fill, and they made me the proverbial offer I couldn't refuse.

And, of course, the company failed 10 months after I moved out there.  And I got a job as a writer for a little while, actually writing patient education booklets. And then I quit my job.  Traveled the world for a year. And when I came back to San Francisco, I said, I really want to work in history again. I've just been missing it.

And right at that moment, the San Francisco planning department was embarking on some major historic surveys of what was called the Market and Octavia area, which is sort of Upper Market to both triangle Hayes Valley. And then the, what they call the Inner Mission. Which was the Mission district, uh, basically from 20th street to Cesar Chavez. And, you know, that's 6, 000 buildings  and I was suddenly hired to work in the thick of that on that survey. And so there was something about the repetition of every day going out and looking at these buildings that I just began to see the field in a way that I hadn't. Before the layers of the city became apparent, I'd already been studying on my own, but now I was getting so I could look at a building and say, oh, that's going to be built in 1890 plus or minus 2 or 3 years.

You know, I just got really fine, fine grained appreciation of being able to see a building that had been altered quite a bit, but still to see what it was when it was built and the only way to do that is to go slightly insane as I did, working until 10, 11 o'clock at night for months on end.  A lot of people who work in my field, they go to graduate school.

Since I had been focused as just a, a hobbyist, but had really been trying to learn more about San Francisco, in many ways, I knew a lot more than they did because they'd done a master's thesis on the bridges of Serbia or, you know, some esoteric part of Renaissance architecture, they had looked at Victorians in the Mission District closely.

And so I had sort of a leg up and I really, really loved it. And that's sort of where I made my, made my bones, as they say.  It was dog years. 

It's interesting, you know, I had several books on San Francisco history, but it wasn't until I was sitting down to write a cohesive script that I had to pull all the pieces together. And that's when it clicked, and I heard you say the same thing about the houses. Maybe you'd walk this block 100 times, but it wasn't until you had to sit down and write something about it that you really took a deeper dive into what it was you were looking at.  For sure. And then there was also just, I call it pattern recognition. 

It's um, once you have seen enough of a certain type of building, when you see it anywhere in the country now, I immediately recognize it. I wanted to ask, one of the first things you and I IM'd about was about Juana Briones, and that's the one episode people comment on the most. Or say it's their favorite and you sent me a map that I think you had worked on part of one of your city planning projects where you were able to identify where Juana Briones had her farm in what is now North Beach.

I wanted to ask you about that project.  Oh, well, it all started sometime in 2016, and I was friendly with Mike Buehler, who worked at San Francisco Heritage, and he asked if I'd helped out, and I said,  sure.  And that was before I realized that there was almost nothing written about the Latino experience in San Francisco prior to World War II. 

Now imagine researching San Francisco Californios before 1849. It really starts after World War II and in particular with the 1960s and sort of the Chicano Awakening and all of that and the start of the community mural movement. That is really, there's a thousand books and four trillion web pages on that era. 

But if you really wanted to look at the, what was going on, say, during the gold rush or 1870s or 1890s, there was, there's no book on it. The closest thing is Latinos at the Golden Gate, which is a great book and does touch on it. But a historic context statement is designed to identify properties that exist today  that can be recognized for their significance in association with a historic context.

That's really the key to what you just said, that exists today. Exactly so. I, okay. So, for me, a good historic context statement is also a good history. You still want to cover what was, because sometimes there are themes that are really important, but there's no building that exists.  Particularly because the core of what they called Little Mexico, or you could also call it La Colonia, to the people who live there, the colony.

That was in the sort of North Beach, and what is today the Chinatown area along Broadway, um, close to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. And then Alberta in 1906, so a lot of the early stuff is gone.  So I started researching and went through old newspapers and I started using phrases like Little Mexico, Mexican businessman, whatever, Mexican musician, uh, Spanish musician, Spanish classes, everything you can think of. 

Of course, Juana Briones is a well known story, and there's a lot on her, but I didn't see anything immediately available about where did she live. Everybody said the North Beach area, on the edge of the, of the Loma Alta.  So, the land records were there. I can't even remember where I looked them up.

It had the block and lot. And then I looked at the really early post survey maps, which are incredibly detailed. I mean, these are people mapping the coastline, but they also did the city streets and they put little dots where all the houses were.  And in that area, you could see a house that was at a strange angle.

And that is usually a very good indication of something being really old because it was built when there was no street grid.  But there was another one on the same property and I had to look that up and it turned out she built a building during the gold rush era. It was used as a hotel later on as a school.

I knew none of this.  And so I just thought to include that little map in there. And when I saw your episode about Juana Briones, I said, Hey, did you know?  I know where her house was. I can pinpoint it. You can go walk by that spot.  And that's when I shared the map with you.  So that was a very long winded way of how I came to Juana Briones.

Juana's Loma Alta property in North Beach was somewhat in the middle of the block that is now Saints Peter and Paul at Powell and Filbert. It's in the middle of the block because at that time there wasn't the street grid we see today.  I knew that she owned four lots that her last lot touched, the corner touched on what is now St. Peter Paul, but that's about all I knew. That's about as specific as it was. So four lots, I forgot the exact lot numbers. So when you sent the map, I'm like, aha, that's where it is. And it is out of diagonals. I don't know that this is true, but it makes sense. It might've been along the path that would have been from the Pueblo de Yerba Buena.

To the Presidio, and her house was facing that path and that's why it might have been at a strange angle to us today. Yes, and you can still see that in some of the early pictures. When you look at how you can see, I mean, sort of a street, you know, took it.  I might have that.  I touched on her a bunch and we didn't mention this.

I wrote a report for a friend about these houses on Lyon Street, which sort of exist in the Netherlands. Apolinario Miranda and Juana Briones de Miranda initially lived near El Polin Spring, inside of the Presidio, where her sister and her husband of the Miramontes family lived.  By 1833, the Mirandas, Apolinario and Juana, moved to the Ojo de Agua Figueroa, now on Lyon Street, to a 100 vada grant just outside of the Presidio, but it's likely they lived there before that. 

It was customary to build your house and start working the land before you formally applied to own it.  And that was because you would state that you needed this land to support your family.  Oh, there was, there was some stuff left over from her time there that made it into the early 20th century, if you can believe that.

Uh, some greenhouses, yeah, that were rented out.  Last night I was doing my research, and I'm terrible with directions, but I, uh, I wanted to see those four houses on Lyon Street that are strangely placed and that's where her land was just outside of the Presidio technically. Yes. Can you see the screen now? 

So there's the, uh, there's the old road running out to the Presidio.  By 1836, Juana moved to Loma Alta on the outskirts of the Pueblo de Yerba Buena.  A simple footpath was initially created by the Yelamu, then turned Spanish, then Mexican horse trail from Black Point, current day Aquatic Park, to the Presidio, called the Presidio Road.

And a path from the Presidio to the Mission San Francisco de Asis was called Mission Road, and they met somewhere near current day Powell and Filbert, but at an angle.  It's a real old photo. This is Washer Woman's Lagoon, still there with tanneries around it.  Is this an 1860 photo?  Around then, yeah. And it shows the Presidio off in the distance, and then you see this road headed from the middle top of the Photo and it moves over to the left and it's Presidio road.

You were just mentioning like being aligned along that road. And I mentioned I had a photo where you could still kind of see it today. That alignment is roughly Filbert and Greenwich streets,  but here in this early photo, just, uh, you know, 10 years after the gold rush, you can see that there's a fairly well developed path getting out there to the Presidio.

And that certainly would have run all the way towards the Yerba Buena area, and of course there would have been an offshoot of that towards, towards Mission Dolores.  But talking about her little grant, here it is on the edge of the Presidio.  We are discussing El Polin Springs, where she originally lived. 

And then there's her little house on the 1869 Coast Survey. The one that she lived in originally, you know, assuming so, and this was a view from 1880 near right in that area. There's a little, little land grant right on the edge of the line of Lyon Street.  Now we are discussing the Ojo de Agua Figueroa grant. 

And then this is an abandoned building, so I think this was likely hers. And then this says Chinese Gardens here. This is 1893 Sanborn.  See this house is sort of at a weird angle, and it's just an L shape, and it's got a very boxy bay window on it. That reeks of something that was crude that was added on to over time.

And then it says abandoned as well, so it's very good. The inference is that that is the house that Juana lived in with Apolinario. Is that right?  And then there it is when it's sold, and then later on it gets developed with, uh, there it is, 1905, still there. And there's an orchard here in the middle of Lyon Street. 

And then these houses, the Venetian homes that was eventually built on that lot.  Oh, those are gorgeous houses.  Yes. The person I wrote this for lives in 1 of them.  Okay. Let's see. Is this just outside of.  God is not the palace of fine arts. Um.  Above it, yeah, this is at Lyon Street, uh, not too far down the hill from the Lyon Street steps, and these are the only things on the Presidio side of the street, because this was a little inholding.

Everything else is Presidio, but this little wedge of homes has the Presidio for its backyard. At some point in my timeline, in my podcast, I'll get to when gold was discovered, but I became aware that in 1846, when the United States took possession of California, you do see Californios start to move out of San Francisco because it did start to become a little bit hostile for them as part of…the United States manifest destiny. Yes. So, I became so curious, you know, this started off as Spain and then became Mexico. And then we had Californios when I'm doing all this research on the gold rush, why am I not reading a lot about Californios in San Francisco? And it started to become obvious that because they moved out, they either left to areas where you don't see the Americans wanting to live or they wound up moving back to Mexico, and that's why you just don't see a whole lot. I mean, that's one of many reasons.  Well, Juana held onto her Ojo de Agua Grant, and one of her Loma Alta grants up until the early 1850s, she and her children had moved to Palo Alto by 1846 in the same year as the Battle of Yerba Buena.

She would not be the only California to leave San Francisco after the Americans took possession of the Pueblo.  Um, like Juana Briones herself wound up leaving. She maintained the land in the Presidio. I think she leased or sold three of her four lots in North beach to her son in law, Robert Ridley, and then she sold, she broke up one of her lots, but she herself wound up moving to Palo Alto. And the reason she gave was it was starting to become too crowded for her liking. Absolutely.  And it wasn't very long after she left, like not long at all, not even a year that where her land was like Powell street started to be developed, which would have been one of her four lots. 

Yes. That as soon as she moved, they were like, well, sorry to see you go, but we're about to develop this…eminent domain where they were going to take it over anyway to develop the city. But that is that is interesting that you were not able to find a whole lot about. People who were California, unless you were very, very prominent. 

Well, there's, there's lots about, you know, the big landowners and how they were eventually, you know, cheated out of their lands over time, just all the court costs paying their lawyers. So, those still figure very prominently. Also, you have to remember the population was really. small on the whole and just absolutely overwhelmed.

And San Francisco's Latino population as a whole was very small through most of the 19th century. And it filled with people from different places. I mean, during the, the earliest days of the gold rush, you've got a lot of miners from Mexico who already have mining experience and they're essentially run off from the gold fields.

But you have a tremendous number of people who come from Chile.  You talk about in your, in your work about all the ships that came up, there's a lot of connections between Peru and, and Chile. And those were the, you know, those were some of the first people to make it up. You know, the Americans may have come over in, in 49, but the people who lived in those West Coast ports already in South America, they were primed to be first in town. 

And so that's where you have the, I'm sure you've heard of the little Chile incident where the hounds sort of burn the. A settlement of Chileans there again in the, in the North Beach area along the Broadway, really along what becomes the Barbary Coast, essentially, the heart of the Barbary Coast is the, is the earliest nugget of what you would say is, uh, San Francisco's Spanish speaking Gold Rush arrivals.

That's where they were living. The Latin quarter that existed within the.  Yeah, I mean, that was, there was always that, you know, the Italians and the Latinos live side by side for the entire time. So, yes, it's got to parse out the. the Mexican quarter or the Spanish quarter within the larger Latin quarter. 

And also, the populations really mixed. Our Lady of Guadalupe, a lot of the people who funded that church, even though today when we say Latino, we think only of that shared experience of the Americas, right?  But there are people from Spain and Portugal. And the Basque countries who were major, major funders of that church.

So it is a very interesting community at that time. And you also have sort of, it's a separated community socioeconomically. There are a lot of very wealthy merchants from Mexico or from Chile who come to San Francisco. They run transnational corporations. And then there's people who are just, you know, straight up essentially day laborers.

And then there's also sort of inter, you know, uh, Spaniard would say, Hey, I'm a Spaniard. I'm not a Mexican. I'm not one of those. I'm from Spain. You got me wrong.  Freud's narcissism of small differences.  It's still alive and well. So, but in certain things they would band together because of, you know, shared language and a certain amount of shared heritage and in other cases.

You know, oil and water. So really, really fascinating.  I've brought this up in other episodes too, that ultimately, he who writes history determines which history gets told. And so for me, I have to learn about some of the things I'm writing about, not because the person wrote about it, but someone's second hand or third hand.

And I have to stitch together people who are from New England writing about Yerba Buena… Before the Zoom meeting timed out, the magnificent point I was making was that because so little is captured about the micro-focused history of Yerba Buena, San Francisco and the Californio experience before and soon after 1849, I have to decipher what New Englanders, Englanders, Europeans, and even South Americans wrote about Yerba Buena, often misunderstanding the culture and the customs, therefore inserting bias or incorrect interpretations of the customs and the culture. 

Even within California, Yerba Buena was its own colony, its own little world that did things differently from San Diego and Monterey, and proudly so. To accommodate what I've just said, I gravitate towards the few surviving accounts from people who lived here either as a Californio or as a naturalized Mexican Californio versus someone who wrote about their visit of a few weeks.

When you see it through that lens, the interpretation of Yerba Buenan life differs And now for the episode epilogue, capturing some takeaways from today's interview.  The term early San Francisco history is relative. My ears perk up when I hear early and San Francisco, but often the early topic is about the 1880s or after. 

Juana Briones time in the Presidio area in the District of San Francisco was 1812 to 1836.  And her time after that in the Pueblo de Yerba Buena, which either was or wasn't considered a part of the District of San Francisco, was 1836 to 1846.  Juana stood out in Yerba Buena, early San Francisco history, not just to the others who lived here, but also to visitors.

For being a rare sight as a single mother and businesswoman who lived on a remote piece of land away from the Presidio, the Mission, and the Pueblo.  Through my talk with Jonathan, I learned that the Ojo de Agua property, now on Lyon Street, contained ruins of her home up until 1905,  which is amazing!  To a geek like me. 

I learned exactly where her Loma Alta property stood, facing Saints Peter and Paul Church, in the middle of today's block.  Her Loma Alta farm, just outside of a triangle shape made up of the Presidio, the Mission, and the eventual Yerba Buena Road.  Juana's property was just outside of that triangle, where the three worlds of early San Francisco met. 

It's poetic.  She was just on the outside. Yet very much an important part of early San Francisco history.  She had a front row seat and was involved as much as she wanted to be up until she didn't want to be.  Well, this seems embarrassingly obvious now. The original name for North Beach was not North Beach. 

As of 1836, it was called the Playa de Juana Briones until probably 1846, the year she left Yerba Buena. And the same year, the United States took possession of California and the Pueblo.  You can see the map where Jonathan Lammers has pinpointed Guana's Loma Alta North Beach house and additional structure.

You can also see his approximation based on topographical maps where the mission, the Presidio and the Yerba Buena roads met. If you go to Facebook.com forward slash monkey block SF and look for the posts in December of 2023.  I'd like to thank Jonathan Lammers for his time, for geeking out with me, and especially for his patience regarding my lack of internal compass and ability to read a map. 

It was a pleasure to trade information, Jonathan. Keep doing what you're doing. I'm here for it. Oh, and dear listeners, I'm a historian.  

Please revisit the episode on Juana Briones, Season 1, Episode 4, The Third Map of Yerba Buena.  You can interact with MonkeyBlock at Facebook. com forward slash MonkeyBlockSF, where I post photos and comments about upcoming episodes and other early San Francisco randomness. 

Please share this podcast with just one like minded friend and help spread the word.  If you would like to donate to the monkey block project and possibly fund a new sound effect, you can do so at buymeacoffee.com forward slash monkey block SF.  Thank you for listening. This is monkey block retelling forgotten stories about the place, the people and their role in San Francisco's golden past.