There's something deeply humbling — and a little bit hilarious — about the fact that San Francisco's founding generation looked at a bunch of abandoned ships rotting in the harbor and said, "You know what? Those are buildings now."

During the Gold Rush era of the 1850s, hundreds of vessels were abandoned in Yerba Buena Cove as crews deserted for the gold fields. Rather than let them sit and decay, early San Franciscans did what resourceful people do when government isn't around to stop them: they improvised. Ships were dragged ashore, converted into hotels, saloons, warehouses, and jails. The city literally built itself on top of its own harbor.

One of the most famous examples is the Niantic, a Gold Rush-era storeship that was beached near what is now Clay and Montgomery Streets. Parts of the Niantic are still buried underground next to the Transamerica Pyramid — a ghost of frontier pragmatism entombed beneath one of modern San Francisco's most iconic structures. As one local history buff noted, "The Niantic is actually what the company that makes Pokémon Go is named after. Parts of the ship are still buried underground, and the Maritime Museum has pieces on display." Even Muni's tunnel near the Ferry Building reportedly passes through the remains of another old ship. Your morning commute is more historic than you thought.

Here's what strikes us: these early San Franciscans didn't convene a task force. They didn't spend three years on an environmental impact report. They didn't hire consultants to study whether repurposing a ship might cast an unacceptable shadow on a neighboring tent. They saw a resource and they used it.

We're not saying modern building codes are useless — nobody wants a saloon collapsing on them. But there's a lesson buried in the mud alongside the Niantic. San Francisco was built by people who moved fast, solved problems creatively, and didn't wait for permission. Somewhere between 1850 and 2025, we traded that energy for a bureaucratic apparatus that takes longer to approve a housing project than it took to build an entire city out of shipwrecks.

Maybe it's time to channel a little more of that Gold Rush spirit — minus the scurvy.