A San Francisco History Tour You’ll Feel in Your Quads

If there’s a lesser-known corner of San Francisco history, chances are Chris Carlsson has peeked into it. The historian, author, director of Shaping San Francisco and co-director of the history archive FoundSF is particularly interested in the city’s labor movements. Signs of those movements can still be spotted across the urban landscape, he says — if you know where to look.

On Nov. 1, Carlsson will lead a free, two-hour bike tour on San Francisco’s labor history as part of the Wattis Institute’s six-month-long research program “Labor is on our mind.” Not only is this a labor-ful way to hit even more historically significant spots, Carlsson has bike bona fides: He helped co-found Critical Mass in 1992.

The tour will kick off at Mission Dolores and end at the Wattis. (Carlsson says there’s so much labor history in San Francisco it’s usually a four-hour tour.) One stop will be Esprit Park in the Dogpatch, in honor of the 1974 Jung Sai garment workers strike; a group of Chinese immigrant women protested their treatment at an Esprit clothing factory in Chinatown. Another stop is Alameda and Bryant, for a taste of just how industrial the Mission used to be; on that corner, a former Hostess factory is now a U-Haul storage center.

“We’ll stop at the shipyards at Pier 70,” Carlsson says, “and talk about the history of militarism and seafaring.” The tour will also touch on legacies of slavery, how 19th-century stories about San Francisco continue to shape our understanding of the city and, of course, the 1934 General Strike.

If time allows, Carlsson hopes to make it to Steuart and Mission Streets to visit the memorial to the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, created in 1985 by an art collective called M.E.T.A.L. (Mural Environmentalists Together in Art Labor).

The Wattis program, which technically started earlier this month with a talk by curator Makeda Best, will include research exhibitions, reading groups, talks and screenings. The entire six-month period is split into three parts, per the 19th-century workers’ slogan: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, 8 hours of what you will. The first exhibition, which features materials from the San Francisco Labor Archives and ephemera from the California Labor School, will host an opening reception on Nov. 8.

For his part, Carlsson encourages everyone — not just those on his tour — to contemplate their own role in “waking up in the morning and producing this world instead of, potentially, a different world.”

“How might that different world look if you could really make the decisions that influence the shape of that world, in terms of the labor you do, the technologies you employ, the relationship we have with nature, the way we relate to each other and other populations from other places?” he asks.

San Francisco, Carlsson writes in the essay “The Progress Club—1934 and Class Memory” (recommended reading before Saturday’s tour), “has been an important test site for our society’s most advanced techniques for improving and extending the control of capitalism.” The city’s once-vaunted labor movement has been reduced, he writes, from a roar to a whisper.

But perhaps the movements and tactics of the past, hiding in former industrial sites, under ballparks and along redeveloped waterfronts, can help us start to visualize what these organizers were working towards. Here in the present, we can try to picture, as Carlsson puts it, “a profoundly humanistic and engaged life on this planet.”

‘Hidden San Francisco: A labor history tour with Chris Carlsson’ takes place Nov. 1, 2025, 1–3 p.m., starting at Chula Lane and Dolores Street. The tour is free with RSVP. Participants must bring their own bikes.