Uncovering Bottles & Battling Toxic Waste: BottleNed’s Passionate Quest

I’m pretty sure that when all is said and done the human race is going to leave a geologic layer of plastics. It didn’t have to be this way. Bay Area resident Ned Clarke (known affectionately as BottleNed) has made trash his life’s passion. He has been trekking to the outer reaches of the Bay on a quest for bottles (or “Botts” as he calls them) since childhood. Instead of going to prom BottleNed went to dig in the mud in front of a state prison to find bottles. The guards were not pleased but BottleNed sure was, he found an acid etched mustard jar from World War II.

BottleNed explores the remains of a Coke bottle processing plant.

I meet him at low tide, he’s found the remains of an old Coke bottling plant. Stories of rare bottles, strange finds and fascinating bits of San Francisco history spill out of him at a rapid pace. His YouTube channel “Digging the Old West with BottleNed” is a reflection of this. It’s engaging, a little silly and the euphoric joy that happens when a beautiful bottle is pulled up is infectious.

Bottle collectors can be a secretive bunch, they don’t want to share where the treasure is buried. I ask Ned why he decided to start his popular channel. “I’m obsessed with the beauty of these historical objects, these bottles that were blown at local glassworks in the 19th century in San Francisco. I love how beautiful the glass is and the crudity in the glass, the bubbles, the texture. I was obsessed with the objects themselves and I wanted to keep my passion a secret. People saw it as as being like a weird thing like, do you collect trash? What are you doing? Why are you trying to find these old bottles?

As the years went by I was having so many amazing experiences and I was learning so much about the history of the area and the history attached to these pieces of glass. They tell a story about the intimate moments of somebody’s life. It became more about the story of the object instead of the object itself. I realized that they’re stories that people should know. That’s why I made this channel.” BottleNed says.

San Francisco glass is especially interesting to collectors during the years of 1859-1885. The reason for this is in the 19^thcentury during the gold rush there was a huge demand for bottles to sustain the rising population. Originally they had to import the bottles by ship either around South America from Europe, Asia, or through the isthmus that would later become the Panama Canal.

As a result of this the first glassworks was established in San Francisco in 1859. Located on Beale Street in San Francisco the Baker & Cutting Glass & Pickle Manufacturers were famed for their gothic cathedral shaped pickle bottles. Apparently it was not very strong glass and only one of these has ever been dug up.

According to BottleNed, the San Francisco and Pacific glassworks who came after this produced some of the most beautiful bottles in the world. The reason for this is that the glassworks were primitive and experimental. Pure sand from Monterey was mixed with broken bottles from all over the world to give the glass a truly unique look. It is prized by bottle collectors around the world.

San Francisco is a city that is actually built on trash. Everything that could be thrown down to level the ground was used. It’s why whole ships are sometimes found when digging in the financial district. BottleNed informs me that he once found a whole grave marker across from Zeitgeist in the Mission District. Under an overpass in San Francisco he found a bottle from the 1880’s with a cork and a victorian condom in it. He kept both the bottle and the relic of either a secret sin or a memento of an especially good time.

Actually, to hear BottleNed talk about his “Quest for the Bott” is to hear another person talk reverently about sports or religion. He tells me that indeed, his search for antique bottles can border on supernatural. I remember I was at Mel’s Diner on Lombard Street, and I was talking to this guy that was 30, 40 years, my senior, and he’d been collecting antique California, San Francisco bottles for his whole life.

I asked him, “What’s the rarest bottle “from San Francisco?” And he said, “Oh, that would be the embossed bottle “from the late 1850s or early 1860s “that has embossed writing that says Bank Exchange Saloon.” And I was like, “I’m sorry, what?” He’s like, “Yeah, there was the first cosmopolitan saloons “in San Francisco. “It was called the Bank Exchange.” There were these paintings on the walls of these Roman centurions. It was one of the first cosmopolitan saloons in San Francisco.

Mark Twain actually lived in the same building that housed this saloon on the ground floor. He would go in this saloon and drink in the early 1860s when he was writing for a San Francisco newspaper. He’d go there and have a drink. That’s where he met a guy named Tom Sawyer, who was a San Francisco firefighter. He obviously used his name in one of his stories eventually.

So this saloon has all this history attached to it. And I learned that day that there was actually a bottle. And I asked my friend, “How many of these bottles exist?” He’s like, “Only one. There’s only one of these bottles in the entire world that’s known to exist.” Somebody, some construction worker in the 1960s found one in San Francisco and he had it. And he still has it in this collection and won’t sell it.

For a couple of weeks afterwards, I was looking around and digging in the mud and every single bottle I found, I pictured it being that bottle. I didn’t know what this bottle looked like. So I was just imagining with each bottle that I found. Was the embossing here? Was it in a circle or arched? What else did it say? What was the color of the bottle? A month later, they were doing some excavations, digging for a big sewer project. They were dumping the piles of this black mud in this lay-down yard, where they were gonna eventually scoop it up and dump it into a truck and haul it to a landfill and break it, destroy, crush it.

This is 17 years ago, so the environmental restrictions weren’t as harsh. So when they were digging this kind of toxic, smelly, oily mud out of downtown San Francisco in these projects, they would dump it for a couple of days and cover it with a plastic tarp before they take it to a landfill in Utah. Now they dump it straight into a truck or a car, and then they put it on the train and it goes straight to be crushed, which is sad. But back then, it was just available. If one had the idea to sneak into the lay-down yard and lift up a corner of the tarp and dig through this toxic black mud. So of course, that’s what I did.

I saw that there was wood and little ironstone china plate fragments sticking out of it. I could tell that this was an area of fill. San Francisco is essentially built on 19th century garbage. They filled in this cove and brought it up to grade and built buildings on it afterwards. I went in there and I was digging through the pile. I exposed a bottle and I pulled it out. It was a bank exchange saloon bottle! This is like within a month of hearing that story! I still have that bottle to this day. It’s pretty much my favorite bottle. Not only because of the history attached to it or how beautiful the actual bottle is. It’s the fact that I psychically manifested it.

I came away from my wander in the bay and talk with BottleNed in a bit of a bottle daze. An overwhelming amount of our history is right under our feet or winking at us from the low tide mud. I’ll be excited to see what BottleNed unearths next.

Find him online via BottleNed’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BottleNed
IG: @bottlened_digs_the_old_west

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