You're standing at the oldest building in San Francisco. Mission Dolores — officially Mission San Francisco de Asis — was founded on June twenty-ninth, seventeen seventy-six. Five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed on the other side of the continent. The Spanish were building this chapel while the Americans were still arguing about whether to start a country.
The building is an engineering marvel of making do with nothing. There are no nails. Not one. Iron nails didn't exist in California in seventeen ninety-one. The builders — Ohlone laborers who manufactured thirty-six thousand adobe bricks by hand — lashed the redwood roof beams together with rawhide. I should be clear about what that means. The mission system was not a collaboration. It was forced labor. Five thousand Ohlone people died here over fifty years. The building is extraordinary. The system that built it was not. The walls are four feet thick on three sides and ten feet thick facing Dolores Street. Th
e whole thing is held together with wooden pegs and strips of dried cowhide. It has survived every major earthquake since seventeen ninety-one — including the one in nineteen oh-six that destroyed the brick church standing right next to it.
Look up at the ceiling if you get inside — and you should. The chevron patterns in ochre, red, white, and gray-blue were painted by Ohlone artists in seventee
