Historical landmarkSan Francisco · US
Irish Hill
Irish Hill was a neighborhood that literally disappeared. For roughly sixty years, from the late 1850s through World War I, a crowded, rowdy community of workingmen perched on a low hill at Potrero Point, wedged between today's Dogpatch and the San Francisco Bay. Its residents were mostly single Irish immigrant men who walked to jobs at the shipyards and iron works below, drank at its dozens of saloons, and fought in its muddy streets. By the 1920s the neighborhood had been cleared away for industrial expansion, leaving behind only a craggy stump of blue-green rock that gives this Google Maps landmark its name. Visiting Irish Hill today is less about seeing a site than reading a ghost. The surviving fragment sits near 20th and Illinois Street, a shorn slope of serpentine rock among shipyards, storage lots, and freeway ramps. The real magic is in imagination and in the richly preserved surroundings: the oldest surviving wooden schoolhouse in San Francisco, clusters of identical Victorian worker cottages, and the vast waterfront campus of historic Pier 70. Together they let you trace exactly the kind of industrial Potrero Point that created Irish Hill and then erased it.