With its Depression-era structures and historic vessels, San Francisco’s Aquatic Park is home to countless memories for some visitors. For other’s it’s a place to get sunshine, fresh air and recreation. In this story we take a trip there to understand how these competing interests are shaping the park’s future.
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I walk past the revelry and tourist attractions near Fisherman’s Wharf, headed for Pier 45.
I’ve come to this strip of commercial fishing warehouses to meet Kirk Lombard, the founder of the sustainable seafood company Sea Forager. When I walk up to him, his whole crew has gathered around to be informed and/or entertained by his slightly exaggerated thoughts on the dangers of late-season crabbing.
Lombard says, “People die. I mean these guys are out there and it’s like crab pods swinging. I mean what’s that? 125 pounds? 150 pounds? Yeah, he’s stepping away.”
Lombard’s also an educator, and he used to lead tours of local fishing spots. I’m here to talk to him about the Municipal Pier in Aquatic Park, just a couple of blocks away from Sea Forager’s warehouse. The public pier had been free to use and popular with recreational fishers. But it was closed in 2022, because of damage that’s left it structurally unsound. After he’s done talking to his crew, Lombard and I walk over to Aquatic Park. On the way, he recalls fishing off the Muni.
Lombard says, “When I worked as a fisheries checker, when my shift ended, I would go out to Muni Pier, and I would chill out. I think I only ever caught leopard sharks and bat rays. Always threw them back. But then I had some monster days fishing surf perch there. Rubber lips and black perch and pile perch, white perch. Off the pilings, you can catch these little bait perch called shiners. It was such — It was a really fun pier. I miss it.
As we leave the street and enter the Park, we walk past the white, wood-paneled building that houses the Dolphin and Southend Rowing Clubs. Members of both athletic organizations have been swimming and rowing in the area for more than a hundred years. Here, Lombard and I have a good view of Muni Pier. The arcing concrete structure curves east from the western end of Aquatic Park, partially separating the water in the Cove from the rest of the Bay.
Lombard says, “Now, my one criticism of this pier as a fishing place is that the pilings are kind of blocked. You see where the waterline is? It doesn’t go all the way through.”
The Pier incorporates a baffle system that shelters Aquatic Park Cove. Concrete slabs break the tide and keep the water inside calm for swimmers and rowers.
That might explain why Diane Walton, the president of the Dolphin Club, is more enthusiastic about the baffle system than Lombard is. She’s been regularly swimming and rowing in the Cove for years now. Standing at the locked gate that currently blocks access to Muni Pier, she tells me, with a conspiratorial smile, “You can actually go down underneath it. There’s a pathway that you can take a kayak. I don’t know if you’re supposed to. Anyway. But it’s really kind of thrilling just to see those slabs and the action against them. So it’s really an engineering marvel, and we need it for the beauty of it, the grace of it, but also for the protection.”
Walton sees repairing Muni Pier and its baffle system as essential for the park’s continued existence as a recreational space. As president of the Dolphin Club, Walton feels responsibility as a steward of this space.
She says, “We were here when it was built, and we’re proud of that, and we want to make sure that we keep Aquatic Park for the people in the future.”
But the Dolphin Club isn’t in charge of the space. All Walton can do is advocate for the repairs she believes are necessary. Right now the estimated cost of repairing the pier exceeds a hundred million dollars, and no one knows where the money will come from. Muni Pier is part of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, and although the National Park Service received funding for this park through 2020’s Great American Outdoors Act, it opted to repair Hyde Street Pier instead.
Hyde Street Pier sticks straight out from Aquatic Park Cove’s eastern end, just behind the Dolphin and Southend Rowing Clubhouses. This is where the National Park Service docks its historic vessels, so that visitors can access them. Near the shore, a seagull perches on the bowsprit of a wood-hulled schooner that used to carry lumber.
At the far end of the pier, ramps slope down to waterline platforms where sea lions congregate and sailors pressure wash their small boats. But I’m interested in the middle stretch of the pier, where a steam-powered ferry boat floats opposite a three-masted, steel-hulled square-rigger, both massive vessels held in place by thick, groaning chains.
For bespectacled Ranger Christopher Edwards, these boats are what the park is all about. Decked out in his uniform and armed with a tablet full of historical images, he’s got something to show me on the square-rigger.
Edwards says, “On board the Balclutha, I thought we might start down below deck, highlight one of the programs that’s focused on the last career of the ship, which is kind of an undertold story.”
The Balclutha launched in the late nineteenth century, and much of the structure has been restored to reflect its original form, when it frequently carried goods around South America’s Cape Horn. But in the early twentieth century, a San Francisco-based fishing conglomeration, called the Alaska Packers’ Association, bought the vessel and refitted it to transport cannery workers north to can salmon and bring it back south.
Edwards takes me to a narrow room near the front of the boat. There are 15 wooden bunks lining the walls, three rows of three on one side and two rows of three on the other. On one of the bunks, there’s an informational placard with a button for immersive audio. Spoken Chinese rises above the clamor.
Edwards shows me a historical blueprint of the ship on his tablet and says, “The reason I brought us below deck and I’m showing you this drawing here is that this was for the cannery workers, and you’ll notice it says ‘Orientals quarters.’”
Edwards brings visitors here to start discussions about how the Alaska Packers trapped Chinese immigrants and other people of color in a system of debt peonage, using tactics like those employed by white southerners against Black sharecroppers after the Civil War. Sometimes visitors engage.
“But the challenge is always Fisherman’s Wharf,” says Edwards. “Because people are, they’re here in the area because they want their Boudin’s bread bowl with clam chowder, and they don’t want to deal with social responsibility and heavy duty, hard to appreciate pieces of history that are not positive. It’s stuff that’s worth knowing about that will help steer you in your own steps as you go through life.”
Back above deck, near the captain’s quarters, I ask Edwards about Muni Pier. He says the government only has so much funding, and the projects here on Hyde Street Pier are massive undertakings, in and of themselves. He can’t say officially what will happen, but personally he says, “I’m looking forward to the day that that gets the TLC that it really needs, not just because it’s a great place to experience and for locals to go, but it’s part of the WPA story of how this whole cove area got developed, including the Maritime Museum.”
In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration took over construction of Aquatic Park Cove, Muni Pier, and the nautically-inspired bathhouse building that would become the Maritime Museum. The City of San Francisco had started the project at the behest of its citizens, including members of the Dolphin Club, who wanted to clean up their polluted swimming spot, but the federal government had to step in when money got tight during the Great Depression.
That history might explain why Diane Walton is confident that advocates like her will succeed in their mission to find an alternative source of funding for the Muni Pier repairs. After all, it’s been done before. Walton thinks it’s just a matter of reminding people in leadership of how spectacular this living piece of history truly is. We stand together on the cove’s beach and look out at Alcatraz and Angel Island, reaching up from the dark blue Bay towards the low clouds resting on the rolling green hills to the north.
She says, “Imagine if you came here from somewhere else — I don’t know where else — and you got to be in the middle of this. How could you not be thrilled?”
This story aired in the March 19, 2023 episode of Crosscurrents.
