96 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM Olivia explains. “Spring Valley Water Company buys up a lot of the land south of San Francisco, and it’s this private company that's providing water to San Francisco, at what a lot of people say were not very fair prices.” Their stranglehold on this essential commodity became a serious problem. Around the same time, a resort village with a dairy, farms and several hotels rose up in a luscious valley south of the city, according to Redwood City Pulse. They called it Crystal Springs. For a time, well-to-do San Franciscans planned their getaways here. But it was on leased land Fast-forward to the catastrophic San Francisco 1906 earthquake and fire. It was estimated that the fires caused somewhere between 80% and 95% of the disaster’s destruction. “There was difficulty putting some of the fires out,” Olivia notes. “Sourcing water becomes a hot topic.” After a long battle, the city finally managed to buy out the water company in 1930, acquiring 62,500 acres of watershed land. Four years later, San Francisco began pumping in millions of gallons from Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy reservoir. PHOTOGRAPHY OF COURTESY OF: SPRING VALLEY WATER / THE SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY ABOVE: (clockwise from left) Water pours over Crystal Springs Dam in 1911; the dam under construction; Spring Valley Water Company's directors pose by the dam project in 1887. belonging to … Spring Valley Water Company. Looking to expand its watery empire, the company started planning a reservoir where the village stood. The hotels were demolished and by the late 1870s, the area had been completely abandoned. In 1888, the water company completed construction of the dam—at the time, the largest concrete structure in the world—and what was left of this ghost town was consigned to a watery grave.
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