• Islais Creek Copra Crane (Port Landmark)
• Third Street Bridge
• Islais Creek Channel
• Heron's Head Park

Islais Creek takes its name from the Ohlone word 'islay,' referring to the Prunus ilicifolia hollyleaf cherry that grew along the banks of the creek before European settlement. The name appeared on Mexican maps by 1834 as Los Islais, and Spanish colonizers adapted the Salinan word for the creek that once provided up to 85 percent of San Francisco's drinking water and drained a watershed reaching from Glen Canyon across much of the city's southern half. By 1871, more than one hundred slaughterhouses had been established along the creek's banks in the industrial zone known as New Butchertown, and the waterway deteriorated steadily under the weight of meat processing, tanneries, and industrial waste. After the 1906 earthquake, the city used the creek basin as a dumping ground for debris; in 1925 the California Legislature created a reclamation district to drain and industrialize the basin, forcing the creek into culverts that would ultimately bury most of its length underground.

In the 1940s and 1950s the Islais Creek channel was home to the largest sardine canning industry in the world. The historic Copra Crane — a five-story steel structure built in 1947 to unload dried coconut from ships at the creek's copra dock — operated until 1974 and has been preserved as a San Francisco landmark by the Port of San Francisco. Today the Islais Creek Channel provides an outlet for the city's largest remaining watershed, and the Third Street Bridge carries the T Third Street Muni line across it.

Islais Creek's transformation from Ohlone food source to industrial channel to preserved landmark is the kind of layered urban history MY-NHD apparel is built to carry.