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It may seem like you've wandered off the beaten path, but rest
assured, it's just the end of the road. These are the last of the
shipyards of San Francisco. The Noonan building now houses several
artists studios that are open in the fall.
Cache is a regular altoids container.
It's super lonely around here at night, so best to come in the
daytime... Congratulations to dyknomight (heyheyhey!) for FTF!
if you're interested in the buildings you're looking at, check out:
http://pier70sf.org/mappage/mappage.htm History of Potrero Point
Shipyards and Industry from http://pier70sf.org/
Potrero Point, where Pier 70 sits on San Francisco's eastern
waterfront, was the most important center of western U.S. heavy
industry for well over 100 years.
Before Potrero Point saw its first industrial development, it was
part of the pasturage for Mission Dolores, later part of the large
DeHaro ranch. After the conquest of California by the United States
in the U.S. - Mexico War, a protracted legal struggle ensued and
the DeHaro family eventually lost their claim to the land.
The area attracted early industrial operations because of its cheap
land, deep-water access, and isolation from the more populated
sections of the fast-growing city. This small cape of land, much
enlarged and flattened over the decades, was the home of at least a
half dozen major manufacturing and utility companies that played
significant roles in the western and national economies, and in
military and labor history. Shipbuilding
Ships were built in the area around Potrero Point and nearby
Mission Bay as far back as the Gold Rush.
The most famous early shipyard at Potrero Point was North's Ship
Yard, owned by a Norwegian immigrant named John G. North (born
Johan Gunder Nordtvedt). North came to California from Norway in
1850, worked the gold fields briefly but soon began building boats
and ships (including river steamboats, bay and ocean schooners).
His boat building operations lasted from 1852 to 1872 - from 1862
or so at Potrero Point. North had a great reputation for the
quality of his boats and his integrity. Unfortunately, no pictures
of North's Ship Yard have been found.
Small boatbuilding and repair operations continued near Pier 70
even after the arrival of large-scale steel ship building in the
1880s. One significant boatbuilding operation was that of George
Kneass & Sons, whose shed is still standing just north of Pier
70.
Early Industry at the Potrero (1850s - 1870s)
From the 1850s Potrero Point was also the site of two or three
blasting powder manufacturers. As the area became more crowded the
powder companies had to leave.
Also dating from the 1850s was the thousand foot long ropewalk of
the Tubbs Cordage Company at the southern edge of Potrero Point. It
was founded by two brothers in the ship chandlery business who
realized the west needed rope for its growing maritime and other
industries. They recruited a group of skilled workers from New
England who formed the core of the Tubbs workforce for decades.
Tubbs imported raw materials from the Phillipines and became a
world-wide concern.
Other heavy industrial companies were located here as well. Pacific
Rolling Mills operated at Potrero Point from 1866 until 1900. The
first significant iron and steel mill in the west, it also produced
mining machinery, ships, rail equipment and locomotives.
The Risdon Iron & Locomotive Company operated on the same
property from 1900 until 1911. Risdon produced much mining
equipment and developed some of the first and most successful gold
dredgers.
Later the Spreckels Sugar refinery was built nearby, as was a
gasworks that later evolved into PG&E, a barrel manufacturer,
and several other companies.
Union Iron Works
In 1849 Irish immigrant Peter Donahue and two brothers established
the first iron casting foundry in California, Union Iron and Brass
Co. Soon known as Union Iron Works, it made many things, including
architectural iron work used in many local buildings and powerful
mining machinery that did much environmental damage in the gold
country. Union Iron also produced marine engines at their shops
near what is now First and Mission Streets. (In the early days,
before Union Iron moved to Potrero, maritime operations were
performed at Steamboat Cove near the present SBC Park).
Peter Donahue sold the Union Iron Works in 1864. With the profits
he founded San Francisco's first gas works, later to become
PG&E, and developed local railroad lines.
Irving Scott's Big Gamble
The Union Iron Works was then managed by Irving M. Scott, a
talented and ambitious engineer whom Peter Donahue had recruited
years earlier. Irving Scott put his brother, Henry Tiffany Scott,
in charge of the business side of the operation. Irving Scott
designed innovative equipment used to mine the silver of the
Comstock Lode in Nevada. It's estimated that Union Iron Works built
most of the machinery used in the Comstock.
But Scott knew that the mining boom would not last forever, and
that environmental curbs being put on the mining industry would
also curb its need for his products. He also saw that the
development of the west and the Pacific trade, along with the
expansion of the railroads would soon lead to the need for
large-scale local shipbuilding. He decided to gamble on building
the first great west coast shipyard.
Scott travelled around the world to learn the most advanced
shipbuilding technology. Back in San Francisco, he moved Union Iron
in 1883 to the shoreline of San Francisco around Potrero Point on
bay land that had been recently created by filling in the bay. (The
land was acquired from the Pacific Rolling Mill Company in exchange
for mining equipment.)
Scott used what he had learned during his travels to create
state-of-the-art machine shops, foundries, and launching
facilities. The layout of the shipyard was carefully designed to
make the flow of work from workshops to shipways as efficient as
possible.
Because it was isolated from the eastern manufacturing centers,
Union Iron needed to be highly self-sufficient: it could produce
virtually anything needed to build large steel ships in its own
shops. It used steel and iron from the nearby Pacific Rolling
Mills, but had to import armor plate from eastern mills.
Scott hired James Dickie, one of a family of local boatbuilders, to
supervise shipbuilding operations.
The plant built its first ship, a coal carrier called the Arago, in
1885. It was the first steel hulled ship built anywhere on the
Pacific Rim.
It was hard to find craftsmen with the skills to produce steel
ships in a place where it had never been done before. Scott
recruited machinists and other skilled workers from abroad, many
from Scotland. He also created an apprenticeship program that
employed young boys for four years at low wages in return for the
promise of learning a skilled trade. The rules stated the boys must
be 16, but many were as young as 14.
Many of the workers of the Union Iron Works and nearby plants lived
in the immediate vicinity. The rough and tumble neighborhood of
Irish Hill surrounded the plants and housed many immigrant Irish
workers and some families who let rooms. A nearby section of
Potrero Hill would later be referred to as "Scotch Hill" because
many of these Scottish shipbuilders settled there. Dogpatch was
home of many of the foremen and skilled workers.
Working conditions were tough for industrial workers in the 19th
and early 20th century, at the Union Iron Works shipyard as at
other plants. Sixty hour weeks were the norm. Unionization was
resisted fiercely by management. Pay was a little better at Union
Iron Works than at most east coast yards because of the shortage of
qualified workers. Management encouraged loyalty through
sponsorship of athletic and social activities.
Scott was a talented politician and businessman as well as
technologist. He used political clout and pursuasion to convince
Washington politicians that his new west coast yard could handle
the challenge of building big, modern warships—something that
had only been done in the east. He got his first government
contract to build the U.S.S. Charleston, and went on to win dozens
of other naval shipbuilding contracts. Many of the ships of the
Spanish-American War, including Admiral Dewey's flagship, the
U.S.S. Olympia, were built here. Scott, politically active and a
prominent speaker, promoted American expansionism (which,
incidently, would require more war ships from his plant.) The
Olympia still exists, the oldest steel ship in the world, as a
museum ship in Philadelphia.
Another still-floating survivor of Union Iron Works production is
the ferry Berkeley, one of 15 ferries built here, now a mainstay of
the San Diego Maritime Museum.
Though the company built many civilian ships, the heyday of the
Union Iron Works coincided with the expansion of the United States
Navy from a modest, coastal defense force to a major multi-ocean
naval force. Many great warships were built at the Potrero Yard,
including the famed battleships Oregon, California, and Ohio.
President McKinley, a friend of Irving Scott, visited the yard in
1901 to participate in the ceremonial launch of the U.S.S.
Ohio.
Ships were built for other countries as well; especially famous was
the cruiser Chitose built for the Japanese navy.
Even though the Union Iron Works was successfully proving its
ability to build world-class warships and civilian vessels, a
significant amount of its business continued to be from mining and
other non-maritime industry.
Schwab of Bethlehem Steel Buys the Union Iron Works
At the turn of the 20th century, Union Iron Works was sold to the
United States Shipbuilding Corporation, a shadowy combine that had
bought several U.S. shipyards. It soon went into receivership in
what one observer called “one of the most amazing and
disgraceful chapters in American Business History.” The
assets of the combine, including Union Iron Works, were put up for
sale.
The Union Iron Works was sold to Charles M. Schwab of the Bethlehem
Steel Corporation in 1905 for $1 million. The sale took place in a
public auction held on 20th Street. Schwab was widely believed to
have engineered the demise of the U.S. Shipbuilding Corp. Whether
or not that was true, he certainly benefitted from its
collapse.
Shortly after the purchase of the shipyard, the 1906 San Francisco
Earthquake struck, doing considerable damage to the plant. The
biggest loss was the destruction of a specially constructed
hydraulic drydock that had been the pride of the shipyard: a large
ship, the S.S. Columbia, was in the drydock when the earthquake
struck and was knocked off its supports— the drydock was
irreparably damaged.
Charles Schwab
Charles Schwab was a brilliant steel man who had gone from being a
mill hand to president of a major steel company in a few short
years. He loved gambling, receiving great notoriety for his
escapades in Monte Carlo. But he was also a serious and
hard-driving businessman who intended to dominate west coast
shipbuilding. In 1908, Bethlehem bought the Hunters Point drydocks,
and eight years later purchased the 90 acre Alameda shipyard. In
1910, major improvements began on the Potrero yard that continued
until World War I.
In 1911, Bethlehem's bought out its adjacent competition, the
Risdon Iron Company, acquiring Risdon's drawings, patents,
patterns, and hardware. Particularly valuable were Risdon's gold
dredge designs and patents. (Risdon's land was sold to the United
States Steel Corporation for a storage yard, though it was later
acquired by the U.S. government and operated by Bethlehem as a
shipyard.)
World War I
World War I was a great opportunity for Bethlehem: Its Bay Area
shipyards were among the biggest producers of ships during the war.
(Coincidentally, during the war Charles Schwab took a leave from
Bethlehem and served as the head of the U.S. agency that managed
naval production.)
The Potrero yard launched an average of three destroyers a month,
and Bethlehem built a total of 66 destroyers and 18 submarines
during the first world war.
After WWI shipbuilding continued but at a much slower pace. By the
late 1930s, though, with war looming, Bethlehem began to modernize
and upgrade the Potrero Yard. A number of new buildings were
constructed, and by the time World War II began Potrero was one of
most productive shipyards in the country.
World War II
During the war, up to 10,000 men and women were employed here,
working three shifts a day. Finding skilled workers during war time
was a huge challenge, and much was done to train new workers, and
to organize shipbuilding so that less skilled people could do what
the highly skilled people had done before.
At the height of the war effort productivity was tremendous: the
destroyer escort Fieberling was built in 24 days, start to finish.
Though Liberty ships and other simpler ships could be built faster,
to build a modern warship in that amount of time was an incredible
achievement.
During the war, Bethlehem's Potrero yard produced 72 vessels (52
for combat) and repaired over 2500 navy and commercial craft.
Bethlehem Shipyards at Pier 70 (along with Alameda and Hunters
Point, both also managed by Bethlehem) was one of several major
yards that made the San Francisco Bay Area the most productive
shipbuilding area in the U.S. during World War II, and probably the
most productive in world history. Other sites included Marinship in
Marin, the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, and Mare Island in
Vallejo. Many smaller yards were active as well, producing smaller
craft.
Labor Organizing at the Shipyard
The labor history of the shipyards at Potrero is not
well-documented. Bethlehem Shipbuilding, like the Union Iron Works,
fought hard to keep unionization out of the shipyards. Strikes,
some of them protracted, occurred periodically throughout the
active shipbuilding period, including during the war years and
immediately after. One important strike in the spring of 1941
halted major naval shipbuilding for a month and a half, leading to
the intervention of President Roosevelt in efforts to end the
strike. Members of the machinist union's local resisted the federal
government and their own national leaders and persisted in the
strike. They succeeded for the first time in achieving a closed
shop at Bethlehem.
The Post-War Years
Shipbuilding went into immediate decline after the war, but picked
up somewhat in the mid-1950s. In all, seventeen ships were built
after the war, including several tankers, freighters, and four
frigates for the U.S. Navy. The last ship built was the frigate
U.S.S. Bradley, delivered on May 11, 1965.
Though shipbuilding had come to an end, the Potrero yard continued
to build large barges well into the seventies. Another significant
project was making the large steel tubes that would take BART
trains under the Bay. In 1967, 57 sections, each 325 feet long and
weighing 800 tons, were fabricated here.
Ship repair continued, but by the 1970s the Potrero yard was
suffering from the depressed shipping industry in the U.S. In 1979,
the Bethlehem Corporation celebrated its 75th anniversary and the
Potrero yard was recognized as the oldest active civilian shipyard
in the US, but active shipbuilding would no longer take place
here.
On November 1, 1982, the City of San Francisco became owner of the
Potrero yard property, paying Bethlehem one dollar. Todd Shipyards
purchased the machinery and other assets of Bethlehem's San
Francisco operation for $14 million. Todd repaired ships here for
some years.
Today, BAE Systems San Francisco Ship Repair continues the ship
repair business on land leased from the Port of San Francisco. One
of the largest repair facilities on the west coast, it can handle
ships of almost any size, including very large cruise ships. Over
175 union shipworkers are employed here on an average working
day.
Much of the historical architecture built to support shipyard
operations over the years is still standing. One of these
buildings, the machine shop, dating from 1883, was used
continuously until early 2004, when seismic concerns forced the
Port to close the building.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
RYRPGEB-zntargvp!