Slaughterhouse.

In the mid 1800s, local slaughterhouse owners got the city’s permission to build Butchertown on stilts above Islais Creek here in the Bayview, which was considered an appropriate distance from the city center. The meat from these slaughterhouses was tainted with tuberculosis & other diseases & was sold to the city’s poorest citizens. When a cow or pig was butchered, slaughterhouse workers used trap doors to dump their guts – those animal parts that can’t be converted into profit – straight into Islais Creek. In the watershed, the guts mingled with the city’s sewage & flowed into Hunter’s Point where a Chinese community lived and farmed shrimp. The Chinese workers, unable to farm shrimp in a watershed turned blood-shed, complained to the city’s government. The city sided with the slaughterhouse owners, who only employed white workers, & forced the Chinese farmers out of Bayview. The slaughterhouses fed on & fed the city’s poor: killing the poorest animals, employing the poorest workers, displacing the poorest communities, & selling diseased meat to the poorest people. 

 

(Source: Susana Guerrero, “'Loathsome dungeons': Remembering San Francisco’s disturbing slaughterhouses”, SF Gate, 2022). 

 

Bull.

In the slaughterhouse, the bull is the raw material on the killing floor, the waste in the river, & the meat product in the market. The bull is not an animal; the bull is always-already meat. Likewise, today, we very rarely encounter a living bull face to face. Slaughterhouses remain hidden in exploited places most Americans never see. We encounter the bull for the first time in the grocery store, where he is already dismembered meat, packaged nicely in plastic with a label describing how valuable his parts are. But the bull is a creature. Even on the killing floor, the bull is a creature who lives, who dies, who suffers. A creature who hears you with his ears, who feels you with his skin, who smells you with his nose, who sees you with his eyes, who could, if he opened his mouth, taste you. 

 

Consider: what does he see? Who are we — and who is the Bayview — through the bull’s eyes? 

 

Shipyard.

Butchertown collapsed into Islais creek during the 1906 earthquake. While some slaughterhouses reopened, the Bayview’s became, primarily, the US Navy’s shipyard. The military employed a primarily black workforce to disarm their nuclear weapons, workers who arrived during the Great Migration. The shipyard leaked military waste & radiation into the Bay’s watershed & the workers’ bodies, waste that continues to damage the Bayview’s ecology & residents. The slaughterhouse is replaced by the shipyard and, once again, the city uses the Bayview as a dumping ground for bloodshed’s waste.  

 

Heron.

A few blocks from Rise, in a park called Heron’s Head, toxic waters have been made clean. Because of the collaboration of Literacy for Environmental Justice, a community-based nonprofit restoration organization, & the Port of San Francisco, Heron’s Head is now a thriving ecological sanctuary. At Heron’s Head, creatures displaced by Burtchertown & the US Navy return and make their homeland a home again: crabs and cormorants and avocets and plovers and terns, and sagebrush, and yarrow, and that tall broody fisherbird – the great blue heron. 

 

Consider: what does the heron see? Who are we — and who is the Bayview — through the heron’s eyes?