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HAER No. CA-1 <\/strong><\/p>\n San Francisco Fire Department: Pumping Station #2 Jack E. Boucher, Photographer August-September 1975 (Photos 1-53)<\/p>\n Stephen D. Schafer, Photographer October 2017 (Photos 54-73) <\/span><\/p>\n Things have changed since I was a kid in 1975. I had just moved from San Francisco to Ventura where I would soon start kindergarten. Jack Boucher, the main photographer at the Historic American Buildings Survey (known as HABS), had begun to photograph sites for a "new" heritage documentation program called the Historic American Engineering Record known as HAER. HAER was a founded in 1969 to document the vanishing technology, industry and engineering legacy of the United States as America's pioneering industries began their rapid conversion to electronics, computers, hardware and software. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The San Francisco Auxiliary Water Supply System (AWSS) was built "… to prevent the 1906 situation from recurring in a future earthquake of equivalent magnitude." The AWSS was meant to supply water to a network of special pipes and hydrants in case of another fire, first draining city cisterns, reservoirs, lakes and swimming pools, and then sucking in seawater from the bay if all sources of fresh water ware depleted. Two "earthquake proof" waterfront pump houses were constructed to use the bay as a water source using steam-driven boilers, pumps and generators to pump water into the AWSS. Fire Pumping Station #2 was built in 1912 and went online in 1913.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 1975 the city planned to replace the 1912 era steam-driven pump turbines, replacing them with diesel engines, thereafter encasing the pumps and engines with metal compartments to contain the noise.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The boilers were abandoned and left in place as museum pieces along with the Italian marble electrical switchboard, and one of the pump turbines. The smokestack was demolished as part of the modernization.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n While the exact nexus between the modernization and the HAER documentation by Jack Boucher in 1975 is unclear, Pumping Station #2 became the first site documented under the fledgling HAER program in California. The documentation included 23 black and white 5" x 7" large format field views of the interior and exterior of the Station, twenty eight copies of historic drawings, and two color transparencies of gauges on the turbines and switchboard.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 2016, the "earthquake proof" building was no match for 2017 California building codes, and was slated for yet another "modernization" to meet seismic standards that triggered Section 106 and CEQA Review. The abandoned boiler fronts were to remain while their guts were to be removed along with other interior alterations to meet seismic standards.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n This created the need for a documentation mitigation to HABS\/HAER\/HALS standards to be transmitted as an addendum to the 1975 materials. New drawings and report were prepared by historical architecture firm Garavaglia Architecture in Downtown San Francisco and we were brought in to document the exterior and interior before changes were made. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n While we focused on the areas of the structure where the impacts would manifest themselves visually, this also gave us the opportunity to duplicate a few of Jack Boucher's views from 1975, and to document the evolution (or lack thereof) that had taken place at the pumping station since 1975. We also wanted to round out the story and spend a little more time getting some exterior context views to explain the site. It's always an honor to photograph in the tripod divots of generations of HABS\/HAER photographers before us, especially Jack Boucher and Jet Lowe who literally wrote the books on HABS\/HAER photography. We will be documenting Filoli in Woodside California in 2018, recreating Jack's 1971 documentation of the Filoli mansion and gardens when they were first taken over by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Van Ness Avenue at Bay, San Francisco
San Francisco County
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