San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park
Hyde Street Pier, San Francisco

By Patrick Totty

My son, Sam, used to pal around with a kid named Dmitri, who looked like a Ukrainian poster boy – round face, high cheekbones and hair close to platinum in color. “Mitri,” as we all called him, lived in a house built on stilts at the edge of San Francisco Bay. To visit him, you had to walk down a long boardwalk, breathing salt air and passing over tidal flats that alternately glistened under a watery flood at high tide or looked like grass-choked fields of mud when the tide ran low.

Living so close to water, Mitri was an avid fisherman and sailor by the time he was five. His father, also fond of the water, would take him to San Francisco to listen to the sea chanteys at the Maritime National Historical Park at the foot of Hyde St. on the city’s northern waterfront.

The chanteys were rhythmical, mantra-like work songs that sailors would belt out as they hoisted sails and adjusted the miles of rigging that festooned wind-powered ships in the old days. Later, even as strange sail-and-steam hybrids came to dominate late 19^th century shipping, sailors continued calling out chanteys as they worked. In the modern-day reenactments, Mitri and his dad would join others during evenings on one of the park’s old vessels, huddling under blankets and taking nips from thermos bottles filled with coffee or hot chocolate, and sing their hearts out.

Once Sam and I learned about the chanteys, we began regularly visiting the park, which is the best of its type on the West Coast in its breadth of collection, and the beauty of its landmark museum building and physical setting.

The ensemble here is classic San Francisco: a huge turn-of-the-century ferry, the Eureka; an iron-hulled Scottish “deepwaterman,” the Balclutha; a wooden three-masted schooner, the C.A. Thayer; and several smaller steam vessels, including a paddle-wheel tugboat, the Eppleton Hall, the last of its kind. Among them these vessels represent the craft that dominated the bay in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The Eureka moved commuters and their vehicles from Sausalito to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Dubbed the Ukiah when she was built in 1890, she started as a railroad car carrier that plied the waters between Tiburon in Marin County and San Francisco. Tiburon, now one of the wealthiest towns in the U.S., in those days was a blue-collar railroad terminus. Cargo coming down from the North Coast was moved onto the Ukiah and sent to a rail head in San Francisco.

In 1923, Ukiah was retrofitted and emerged as the Eureka, a passenger and car ferry. She was fitted with duplicate openings fore and aft so that traffic could easily roll aboard at one end then roll off the other when she docked at her destination. Her “walking beam” steam engine, still intact, rocked a huge horizontal beam, seesaw style, that pushed down and then pulled up on huge rods that transferred their power to Eureka’s paddle wheels. Visitors can view a delightful miniature model of the engine onboard. (For travelers who’ve never been to San Francisco, the Eureka may look familiar: During its first two seasons, Don Johnson’s TV cop drama, Nash Bridges, had its headquarters on the Eureka.)

It was on boats like the Eureka that the Bay Area’s distinctive culture of studied unhurried and artful living took root. Commuters who depended on the boats enjoyed leisurely rides, surrounded by friends, magnificent bay views and such amenities as onboard, cook-to-order restaurants. There was also an area set aside for a band and dancing.

Hard-working ships

The Thayer, a working ship built in 1895, plied the West Coast for years, hauling mainly lumber, but also other cargoes, such as salmon, whenever the contract called for it. She started as a pure sailing craft but later was equipped with steam power. Going down into the Thayer’s hold is like descending into the guts of a wooden creature. As you straddle the long, rough hewn keel beam, the backbone of the ship, parallel rows of horizontal planks curve upward, forming the interior space. There are no real straight lines here, so it feels like a place where sailors must have always felt a bit off balance and had to rely more on an artist’s eye than straight edges to load their cargo properly. Once sailors filled the hold, they loaded the remainder of the cargo on the decks, too. Her crew would take to sea with little room to spare. 

If the Thayer is the gritty member of Hyde St.’s ensemble, Balclutha is the romantic one. She comes closer in the mind’s eye to the archetype of the tall-masted ship, and though she’s only 82 feet longer than the Thayer, she looks so much longer and sleeker. She was built in 1886 as a high-seas cargo ship that delivered goods between San Francisco and ports all over the world. Given the great distances she sailed, she spent very little of her career in port.  

As handsome as her profile is, there are touches of beauty within, too. In the aft of the ship is a house-like structure where the captain and his wife lived. Even with so little space to work with, the ship’s designers managed to evoke a middle-class life. Stuffed chairs, ornately carved tables and etched glass, china and silverware, fat quilts and raised beds, and a privy all crowd efficiently into small quarters. Of course the crew lived and slept in far less congenial surroundings. If you walk to the prow of the ship, where its long sides join in a curved vee, you’ll see bunks attached to the walls. Here, in the part of the ship that most dramatically experienced the rise, fall and thump of the waves, sailors tried to sleep as best they could.  

A five-minute walk west of the Hyde St. Pier is the park’s museum building. Its style is what the architecture historian Martin Greif dubbed “Depression Modern” in a 1975 book designed to rescue the robust, streamlined architecture of the 1930s from being described as Art Deco. While incorporating Art Deco’s love of curves, Depression Modern (a.k.a. “Streamline Moderne”) stripped away Deco’s tendency to over-ornamentation and added long horizontal lines that bespoke speed and modernity. The building rises from its site like the bridge of a streamlined passenger ship that might have come out of the workshop of the great 1930s industrial designer, Norman Bel Geddes. Its porthole windows, curved picture windows and long bayside promenade mimic the architecture of the great ocean liners of the pre-WWII era. 

Inside, the building houses several exhibits, including a permanent one on the development of steam power and historic artifacts from the history of San Francisco Bay. Colorful WPA-style murals chronicle the legend of Atlantis. Two large round rooms, one at each end of the building, each with huge picture windows, have become a hit with associations and societies looking for an unusual venue for luncheons and dinners.   

Not to mention the setting 

The museum’s setting couldn’t be nicer. Located on the waterfront at the base of Russian Hill, the view from the Hyde Street Pier takes in the Golden Gate Bridge to the west, Sausalito, Tiburon, Belvedere and Angel Island to the north, Berkeley, Oakland and the Bay Bridge on the east, and the high-rise towers of downtown peeking from behind Telegraph Hill and North Beach to the southeast. Closer in, the concrete arc of the Municipal Pier, a favorite fishing and rendezvous spot for locals, juts into the bay on one side, while dozens of small working boats bob at the piers along Fisherman’s Wharf on the other. 

Many visitors catch the Hyde St. cable car at the foot of Powell St. downtown and ride up and over Nob and Russian hills to the museum. The last leg of the trip clatters through a neighborhood of posh apartment houses, then stops at a clogged intersection where cars and pedestrians are queued up to descend Lombard St., the rhododendron-lined second crookedest street in San Francisco.* If riders have any regrets that they won’t be taking a plunge, they’re instantly dispelled as the cable car starts up again and abruptly dips over the crest of a steep hill. Riders suddenly have a vista of the entire northern waterfront, with its panoply of famous landmarks, from the Golden Gate, to Alcatraz to Treasure Island. 

For newcomers, the view is so unexpected that it bestows the same kind of emotional glow you get when somebody you’ve secretly liked suddenly asks you out on a date, or you win a fancy raffle prize. It’s a lagniappe, and all the more enjoyable because it’s such a surprise. Riders unconsciously lean back as the car descends the grade, resisting gravity, happy to not be driving so that they can gaze where they want.  

When the hill finally runs out and they are on a flat, passengers alight next door to the Buena Vista, the bar that invented Irish Whiskey half a century ago, then stroll past a little park along the final block to the park. 

Other visitors approach in a less conscious fashion after working their way through Fisherman’s Wharf. With its many tourists, tschotke shops and sideshow attractions, the jostle and noise of the wharf can be fun. But at some point people begin looking for a quiet place to sit down. That’s when many of them catch sight of the small park opposite the Hyde Street Pier. After resting there and looking across the street to the maritime park’s collection of nautical goodies, many of them realize that here’s a nice way to experience another side of San Francisco.

*A curvier street runs down the west side of Potrero Hill, south of Downtown, but has nowhere near the view, character or  location of Lombard.

To access the park’s web site, go here: http://www.nps.gov/safr/local/mus.html