Camp Sharp Park
CAMP SHARP PARK by Gary Kamiya (edited article from the San Francisco Chronicle, August 19, 2022)
The 417-acre property in Pacifica owned by the City and County of San Francisco has a fascinating history — not least because during World War II it held an “alien enemy” internment camp that has been almost entirely forgotten today.
Sharp Park is named after George Sharp, who arrived in San Francisco in 1849. A wealthy lawyer, Sharp acquired the land in the 1870s before dropping dead in the courtroom in 1882. His widow, Honora, died in 1905 and left the land to her executors, who turned it over to San Francisco in 1917, with the stipulation that it be used for park and recreational purposes. Legendary Golden Gate Park Superintendent John McLaren proposed a golf course on part of Sharp’s land. Officials agreed and hired famed course designer Alister MacKenzie as architect.
The 120-acre course, formerly an artichoke farm, was dominated by sand dunes surrounding a brackish lagoon. With the help of McLaren, who planted trees, MacKenzie created an 18-hole gem. It opened in 1932 and is considered one of the finest municipal courses in the country.
But that was only the beginning of the long, strange saga of Sharp Park. During the Depression, a State Emergency Relief Administration camp was established in the canyon to the east of the course to house indigent San Franciscans. In 1933, the Civil Works Administration employed 600 men to construct the camp in just two months. Residents received food, lodging, medical care and 25 cents a day.
Then World War II broke out. Observing how the Nazis successfully used German loyalists as fifth columnists in Norway and other countries, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover lobbied the government prepare to imprison potentially dangerous foreigners if the United States entered the war — the start of an enemy alien control program that would ultimately result in the imprisonment of 31,275 people deemed enemy foreigners, most of them citizens of Germany, Japan and Italy. (This program was distinct from the better-known “relocation” program that sent 112,000 people of Japanese descent, nearly 70,000 of them U.S. citizens, to desolate internment camps.)
A month after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Proclamation 2537, requiring non-U.S. citizens from enemy nations to register with the Justice Department. The FBI began rounding up thousands of foreigners it deemed dangerous. In 1942, about two dozen Immigration and Naturalization Service internment camps across the country were hastily built, including in the former state relief camp at Sharp Park. It was called Camp Sharp Park.
Enemy foreigners arrested in San Francisco were taken to an INS center on Silver Avenue for questioning. If found suspicious, they were sent to the INS detention center on Angel Island. On March 30, 1942, 193 foreigners, mostly Japanese, were transferred from Angel Island to Sharp Park. The San Francisco News wrote, “Within sight of old Salada Beach, where many of them used to spend Sundays fishing, taking snapshots (and possibly making note of reefs, currents, and landmarks for the Japanese Navy), scores of alien Japanese today were housed in an internment camp at Sharp Park. … Opening of the camp was made necessary by overcrowding of the Immigration Station (on Angel Island) into which the FBI has been pouring a steady stream of Japanese, Germans, and Italians known, or suspected to be, members of secret groups and to have possessed weapons, explosives, signal lights, short wave receiving sets and other contraband.”
The News’ acceptance of the supposed threat posed by these enemy foreigners was typical journalistic practice during the war. In fact, it is likely that virtually all, if not all, of the men, women and children locked up at Camp Sharp Park were innocent victims of wartime paranoia.
Camp Sharp Park initially had about 10 barracks, with a capacity of 450. It was later expanded to hold as many as 1,200, although an Issei (first-generation Japanese) leader named Yamato Ichihashi wrote that during the six weeks he was imprisoned at Sharp Park there were never more than 500 people. According to an article about Camp Sharp Park by Lewis Kawahara in the Densho Encylopedia, the camp was one of a number of holding stations constructed to temporary hold enemy foreigners until they could be transferred to permanent internment camps. During the war a total of more than 2,500 German, Italian and Japanese internees were held here.
In addition to Japanese Americans, a large number of Japanese Latin Americans were rounded up and sent to be interned in the United States, following U.S. offers to Latin American countries to imprison their supposedly dangerous enemy foreigners. More than 15 Latin American countries accepted the U.S. offers and deported more than 6,000 people of Japanese, German and Italian descent to U.S. internment camps. On July 15, 1943, 119 Peruvian Japanese arrived at Camp Sharp Park, from where they were shipped off to internment at Fort Missoula, Mont.
Camp Sharp Park was not closed until 1946. The only camp structure known to still exist is a Quonset hut, used by the Pacifica Co-op Nursery School. Other than that, some stonework and concrete foundations are the only signs that a dark and little-known chapter of World War II history took place here. Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.” His most recent book is “Spirits of San Francisco.”
Sharp Park: Japanese Internment
Shortly after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed the military to force people of Japanese descent, including American citizens, into internment centers, a shameful chapter of American history.
Japanese Americans that the government considered “highly dangerous” were assembled at Sharp Park, which opened in a former Depression-era relief camp. They were community leaders, Buddhist priests, scholars and others deemed influential by the government.
The most comprehensive account by a Japanese internee of Sharp Park comes from Yamato Ichihashi. He was 16 years old when he immigrated from Japan to San Francisco in 1894, a time when Asians faced heavy racism. Ichihashi was a determined scholar, attending Lowell High School, then Stanford, and eventually Harvard, where he got his doctorate. He accepted a position at Stanford, teaching international relations and Japanese studies.
“He may have been the most esteemed or certainly one of the most esteemed members of the Japanese American community nationally,” said Gordon Chang, a Stanford professor who has studied Ichihashi’s life.
According to Chang, Ichihashi thought of himself as an American, naming his son Woodrow, after President Woodrow Wilson. When the war began, he publicly condemned the Japanese military for starting conflict with the United States and purchased $100 U.S. war bonds every month.
In May 1942, Ichihashi and his wife, Kei, saw signs around Stanford’s campus instructing people of Japanese ancestry to report to a spot with only what they could carry. When they arrived, they were taken to the Santa Anita Racetrack near Los Angeles. After they were shuffled to different camps, Ichihashi was informed he alone would be transferred back to the Bay Area — to Sharp Park.
He was separated from Kei and Woodrow for two months while incarcerated at Sharp Park. According to his diaries, there were tall iron net fences that surrounded the camp with 10 army barracks within it.
“I was pleasantly surprised at the make-up of this camp, particularly [after] my experience at the crowded Santa Anita Center. When I reached there, the flowers were in full bloom; the sight was delightful to the eye. Treatment was satisfactory– food abundant though often too greasy and powerfully seasoned with garlic; supplies were freely given such as toothbrush and paste. Sheets and pillowcases were changed every Monday, blankets were clean.”
Because Sharp Park specifically held Japanese Americans with supposed influence, the U.S. government treated them carefully for fear of Japanese armies treating American prisoners poorly. Sharp Park held about 500 prisoners, compared to the thousands at other camps. Ichihashi was held at Sharp Park from late August to late October 1942 before being reunited with his family at Tule Lake.
Over the next three years that Ichihashi was incarcerated, he continued to keep diaries of the day-to-day happenings inside the camps. As the years went on, he wrote less.
“He accumulated a substantial portion [of his experiences] but this material became less rich because he’s sort of reduced to just an internee and no longer a scholar,” said Chang. “He very much felt this was a challenge to his dignity and his prestige and he tried to recreate for himself a sort of world in which he was highly regarded, but in a prison camp, he’s just a number.”
When the imprisonment of Japanese Americans ended in 1945, the Ichihashis were released, but they did not look forward to returning. Anti-Japanese sentiment was still high, and leaving the camps felt dangerous. While imprisoned, many Japanese Americans lost their homes and businesses, and their possessions were stolen.
Ichihashi was a changed man. “His professional career had been crushed and he was no longer an active faculty member,” Chang said. “His marriage fell apart; he was disaffected with his son. After he got out, he was very much a broken person, as many of the older Japanese Americans were.”
Ichihashi had worked hard to assimilate and achieve the supposed American dream. But it wasn’t enough. “There is this long history in the United States of those from Asia being held as somehow perpetually foreign,” said Chang. In the eyes of the U.S. government, Ichihashi was a dangerous foreigner, and that classification destroyed him.
--Excerpted from KQED Bay Curious 2022
Sharp Park: Italian Internment
When the former Depression-era relief camp at Sharp Park opened as an internment center on March 30, 1942 to house “enemy aliens,” Italians were confined along with Japanese and Germans.
Italians had been living under restrictions since after the Pearl Harbor attack when Franklin D. Roosevelt on Dec. 8, 1941 signed Proclamation 2527 declaring Italian immigrants “alien enemies.” Among the restrictions: they could no longer possess cameras, firearms and short-wave radios. They could be searched, arrested and detained.
More restrictions were ordered in February 1942: an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, a prohibition from traveling more than a five-mile radius of home and forced re-location from the coast. In California, 10,000 Italians had to leave their homes because they lived in prohibited zones. In Monterey, 75 boats owned by Italian fishermen were seized by the Navy. In Half Moon Bay and surrounding area, more than 100 Italians who lived and farmed in the prohibited zone west of Highway 1 had to abandon their farms and houses. Luckily for the Pedro Valley Italians (today, Linda Mar), their land was to the east of Highway 1 and they could continue to work their fields.
Italians who were arrested and interned at Sharp Park came from all over northern California. We know one Italian farmer in Pedro Valley, Remigio Lazzarini, was interned at Sharp Park but do not know the circumstances.
Pacifica Historical Society member Laura Del Rosso interviewed family members who lived through World War II on their Pedro Valley artichoke farm. They remembered being under close observation by the FBI, which tapped their phone and visited the Peralta Road farmhouse to question them and confiscate radios and firearms. The family visited their friend Lazzarini at the Sharp Park camp. Laura’s father, Silvio, who had filed naturalization paperwork in 1940 but was still an Italian citizen in 1942, was forced to comply with the curfew and stay within a five-mile radius of his house. It prevented him from driving artichoke crates to the San Francisco Produce Market as he did each morning. His partner in the farm, Louie Benedetti, an Italian citizen, received an exemption from restrictions because his son, Reno, was serving in the U.S. military in Europe. Silvio’s brother, Abramo, a naturalized American citizen and Pedro Valley farmer, joined the local Defense Committee volunteers who patrolled Pacifica’s coast and hills as lookouts against enemy attacks, in part to demonstrate the family’s American patriotism as they came under more scrutiny from neighbors.
Some Italian immigrants had supported the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini whose propaganda was popular among people who had left a destitute homeland and believed Mussolini was reviving Italy to greatness again. Some, however, were avowed anti Fascists. Others were not political and had barely any connection with the “old country,” having arrived in the U.S. with their parents as infants.
Although prejudice against Italians in the United States was common at the time, Italians in San Mateo County had been respected community members. The agricultural industry relied on Italian farmworkers who were now forbidden to work in the prohibited zones. Some county leaders, aware of the economic toll the restrictions would have, protested before the board of supervisors. Their efforts went nowhere and, as war raged, fears of a “fifth column” of enemy agents grew.
The Sharp Park Breakers, the newspaper for today’s Pacifica, expressed strong approval of the restrictions and said only “citizen labor” should be used for the artichoke fields in the restricted zone. “At this time, we say, an alien is an alien regardless of good intentions,” the newspaper said. “If this country is good enough to live in for years and years, it is deserving of being supported by citizenship and loyalty.” (Sharp Park Breakers Feb. 20, 1942)
Some Italians were interned at Sharp Park simply for minor violations, such as missing curfew. Aristide Bertolini, a Santa Rosa farmer, was arrested because he had an important order of tomatoes to deliver and was delayed. He spent several weeks at Sharp Park. Marino Sichi of Arcata, who stayed out late courting his wife-to-be, was interned at Sharp Park. He recalled “I remember the camp was divided in half. The Japanese were on the left side, and we were on the right…There were guard towers at every corner and all around the perimeter. Those guards were armed; I found out the hard way.” While playing baseball one day in camp, Sichi chased the ball and got too close to the barbed wire fence, finding himself “looking at a barrel of the .30-caliber machine gun aimed at my head.”
A friend visited Sichi and said “It does something to you. It’s just like looking at animals caged in a pen. We’d visit with him, and then come back and report on his condition to his folks. When I left, there he was on the other side of the wire. You could just read his thoughts: ‘Why?’” (Branded: How Italian Immigrants Became ‘Enemies’ During World War II by Lawrence W. DiStasi).
President Roosevelt lifted the restrictions against Italians on October 12, 1942. Though it can’t be compared to what Japanese Americans endured, many Italians suffered financially and emotionally. At least five Italian “enemy aliens” died by suicide. Some Italian Americans said they felt humiliated and grew up discouraged from speaking Italian or having pride in their heritage. Most lived the rest of their lives preferring to not discuss what they had endured as “enemy aliens.”
By Laura Del Rosso
Sharp Park: German Internment
By Kurt Voster, son of Sharp Park internee Alfred Voester
It was Friday, February 13, 1942, when the doorbell rang as our family was eating dinner. My father answered it and came back into the kitchen accompanied by two strangers and a San Francisco policeman. We were told that the men were FBI agents. The agent in charge said that they were going to search the house for any contraband items even though they had no search warrant. Short wave radios, signaling devices and weapons were to have been turned in to the police at the outbreak of the war. After the search they announced that they were arresting my father. We pleaded that they not lead him away in handcuffs. They didn’t, but a feeling of terror pervaded the family.
Some days after my father’s arrest we found out that he had been taken to the Immigration and Naturalization Service Station at 801 Silver Avenue where my mother could visit him. The rations were so small that detainees were constantly hungry. Those who had visitors welcomed food brought in. The arrests of civilian “enemy aliens” from Northern California soon filled the facility to capacity. Sharp Park Detention Station opened in March 1942 and my father was moved there shortly after.
On March 13, 1942, just one month after my father had been arrested, three FBI agents pushed their way in without showing any identification. They searched the house without a warrant and the senior agent questioned my mother. I was sent to my second story bedroom. I remembered that my toy soldiers included a set of SS troops with Swastika armbands. The area below my bedroom window had been searched so with a piece of rope or string I carefully lowered the two boxes of soldiers. They were never discovered.
The agents confiscated items, none of which were contraband for enemy aliens. Among these were my father’s army medals, stamps from his stamp collection that had Hitler’s visage. No receipt was given but all confiscated items were returned after the war.
The agents then told us children to report to school. The FBI must have interviewed the principal because she greeted us with the defensive remark,” Well, I had to tell them the truth.” My sister’s class had been given an assignment to write an essay entitled “My Hero”. Having visited Germany in 1934, Julie, with the endorsement of my parents, chose to write about Hitler. This turned out to have been a black mark against our family. The FBI had interviewed our teachers.
Detainees were given hearings without benefit of due process. Having an attorney was out of the question and no formal charges were made. My father was accused of having received “official” mail from the German government. Later he figured out that this was the death notice of a family member in Germany.
My mother obtained special permission to travel to Sharp Park to visit my father. On Wednesdays she would get on a streetcar and then take a bus to Sharp Park. On Sundays the entire family would drive to Camp Sharp Park to visit. Since gasoline was severely rationed, we had to budget for this trip. We would arrive in the morning, visit, go back out to the car for lunch while the visiting room was closed for the lunch break and return to the visitation area for the afternoon visit.
My father was granted free access as he had to paint the fence and buildings on the outside as well as on the inside. Despite sufficient food and the painting to occupy his mind he started to slide downhill emotionally as the Board had not yet decided. After about six months at Camp Sharp Park the camp commander thought that my father might slip over the edge and asked the authorities to hurry their decision. It came down: internment. Orders were sent to move him to Fort Lincoln, ND, a freezing camp in the winter and one where visitations from us would have been impossible. The Camp Sharp Park Superintendent realized that there would be no one to do the camp painting. He sent a telegram to Washington, D.C. to request that the transfer be reversed. During my father’s changeover from a bus to a ferry boat in San Francisco on his way to North Dakota the answering telegram arrived, and he was assigned to Camp Sharp Park on an “until we release you” basis.
Camp Sharp Park housed Germans, Italians and Japanese. All seemed to get along very well. The weather was cool with wind and fog on many days, but generally mild and quite comfortable. Erich, my brother, joined my father at Camp Sharp Park in 1943 as a summer “volunteer internee”. This was by no means a routine situation. My father petitioned the camp superintendent and permission was granted. Erich slept with the other internees in the barracks, ate in the dining hall, all behind a 12-foot fence. My father was kept at Camp Sharp Park until his parole on January 21, 1944; a detention just shy of two years.
Support for the family during this difficult time came from several sources. After graduating from high school my sister began to work. I went to school under what was known as the 4/4 plan: four hours of school followed by four hours of work. My paycheck from the sausage factory was meager but also helped with the income. Bread was donated by a neighborhood bakery, while milk, delivered to the house, was provided by a charity. A second charity gave us groceries which were also brought to the house once or twice a week.
After the war and as late as 1947 former and present internees were deported to Germany without recourse to due process. It appears that our family was listed for deportation but when interviewing neighbors, the FBI came across one who strongly argued that we were loyal Americans.
Upon his release my father was, psychologically, not quite whole. Today, I believe, we would refer to his condition as some sort of traumatic stress syndrome. Returning to freedom, a normal family life and employment waiting for him, he slowly improved and was back to his old self in about three years. He died just shy of 100 years. My mother, on the other hand, had become embittered and was unable to let go of these feelings for about 20 years. The last years of her life were spent happily, and she died at age 88.
Once our family returned to being stable and normal, the subject of internment was not discussed; it was simply too difficult. The pain resulting from the injustice, from the separation, from the financial stress, from the loss of church, the loss of friends, from the humility at having to accept charity was better left sleeping. However, our lives would forever be affected by this experience. Our government has never acknowledged what happened to almost 11,000 German American internees.
-- Written by Kurt Voester. Excerpted from The German American Internee Coalition. August 2009.
