Sign Hill

Look up at the hill ahead of you and to the left, and read what's written across it in letters the size of buildings: “SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO — THE INDUSTRIAL CITY.” You don't have to climb; the sign was built to be read from right down here, where you are, in the town below.

The Chamber of Commerce first whitewashed those words onto the hillside in 1923, and in 1929 they poured them in permanent concrete — letters up to sixty-five feet tall, the whole slogan running more than six hundred feet across the slope. And it was simply true. This was a company town built for industry: meatpacking, then steel, then wartime shipyards down on the bay flats. The sign wasn't bragging so much as labeling.

Then the industry left, the way it left everywhere in postwar America. The slaughterhouses closed, the steelworks wound down. A city with any embarrassment about its blue-collar past might have quietly let the sign fade. South San Francisco did the opposite — it got the sign listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 and has kept repainting it ever since. The boast outlived the smokestacks and became heritage.

So now the sign means something its makers never intended. It no longer describes what the city does; it commemorates what the city was — and, as you'll see in a couple of stops, it presides over what the city became instead, which is something no one in 1923 could have imagined. Roll down into the old downtown just below the sign; the next stop is the main street that industry built, and it's a place to park.