Potrero Point

Potrero Point San Francisco is the location of the earliest and most important industrial facilities in the Western United States on the eastern extension of San Francisco's Potrero Hill, a natural land mass extending into San Francisco Bay south of Mission Bay. Potrero Point, the point of Potrero Hill, was systematically blasted and cut, its serpentine cliffs removed. The work yielded two square miles of rock for fill and hundreds of acres of flat industrial land east of Illinois street between 20th Street and Islais Creek.

The region has been in regular industrial use since the 1860s, first as a location of a powder magazine and small maritime industries along the steep shoreline and early industries such as Pacific Rolling Mills, and later the famous Union Iron Works plus shipyards and related production, service and shipping-related industries, coal- and gas-fired power plants and energy generating facilities that eventually became Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E).

Centered along Twentieth Street at Illinois Street, the site contains the most extraordinary example of an historic industrial village still extant in the West. The first locomotive, typewriter, printing press, cable car equipment, the famous battleship Oregon and steel for many of San Francisco's 19th century buildings came from the Potrero.