The
cultural assemblage recovered in 1990 from 222 Second Street
offers a glimpse into patterns of day-to-day
life in a predominantly working-class San Francisco neighborhood
during the second half of the 19th Century. Most of the artifacts
were associated with seven redwood-lined subsurface privy vaults
and consisted mainly of a wide range of commonplace domestic
and commercial refuse in the form of glass, ceramic, metal,
leather, and wooden specimens.
The
items range in antiquity between the 1850's and the
1880's, and demonstrate San Francisco's metamorphosis
from a chaotic Gold Rush boomtown into America's principal
west-coast urban center.
