By Amy O’Hair
With research contributed by Kathleen Laderman
Toward the end of a long and severe El Niño, a disaster of epic proportions came to the north end of Foerster Street in Sunnyside. The Foerster Slide filled the streets with an avalanche of mud—up to twenty feet deep—flowing down from Mount Davidson. It destroyed five houses. Tragically, two people lost their lives.
The Red Cross declared it a major disaster. It was probably the single most well-documented event in Sunnyside history in the twentieth century, with many dozens of photographs taken by both newspapers and the Department of Public Works (DPW)—immediately after the event, and then days, weeks, even months later. I’ve assembled them all in this post, giving a fairly complete picture of the slide and its destruction.
The onslaught of mud swept away more than lives and houses—it marked the beginning of the end for a unique enclave of early settlers in this remote corner of Sunnyside at the foot of Mount Davidson. The source of the tons of dirt that slid down to fill the streets was due to the negligence of a contractor at work on future development. In few decades, a new residential district would cover the mountain, to be called Miraloma Park. Two of the crushed houses had been standing there since the 1890s, on large rural lots with chicken houses and vegetable gardens (and even cows for some time)—the homes of early residents who preferred to live in the unpaved and unpopulated wilds on the edge of Mount Davidson.
It was a harrowing time in any case, coming just two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into World War II. This local disaster’s impact was perhaps muted and short-lived, as the City prepared civil defense measures against the unknown threats to come. The general sense of alarm was high; the palpable vulnerability to further attacks on the West Coast was acute. The newspapers gave instruction on how to put out incendiary bombs, should one land on your roof (use a fine spray of water) and how to best cover windows to prevent being killed by shattering glass in a bomb blast, and told people to pack what we now call a go-bag. Get to know your Air Raid Warden! (There was one such volunteer on this very block, at 732 Foerster.) [1]
But for the families here, the Foerster Slide was an upheaval as frightening and disruptive as anything that war might bring to their block (but never did).
A Season of Floods and Landslides
Although running near the historic route of Sunnyside’s tributary of Islais Creek, the source and cause of the disastrous slide was not the creek, but an enormous pile of loose fill that had been left standing up the hill by a contractor working on grading the slope for future streets and houses. Continue reading “Catastrophe on Foerster Street: The Deadly Landslide of 1942”