Aquatic Park was creation of salvaged workers, materials
Aquatic Park almost died before it was born.
Last week’s Portals described how San Francisco started building it during the Depression, but ran out of money. In 1935, with the project on life support, assistant city engineer Clyde Healy went to Washington, D. C., to ask a new federal agency called the Works Progress Administration for help.
The WPA had been created by President Franklin Roosevelt to provide jobs for millions of unemployed Americans. The largest New Deal program, its initial appropriation was for $ 4.9 billion — 6.7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
WPA workers built roads, bridges and other public projects in almost every community in the country. San Francisco would be no exception.
The agency approved Healey’s request and committed $ 1.78 million for the job. Along with the zoo, Aquatic Park would be the most notable of the many public projects carried out by WPA workers in San Francisco.
As Timothy Keegan noted in his article “WPA Construction in San Francisco 1935- 1942,” which appeared in the spring 2003 edition of the Argonaut, 782 WPA workers arrived at the waterfront site in early 1936. Among them was a full team of artists and sculptors. The first order of business was building a seawall. It was made up of salvaged material, including thousands of old basalt cobblestones from streets being repaved and even headstones from closed city cemeteries. The material filled 12 railroad cars and 47 trucks. Workers passed the stones hand to hand, bucket- brigade style, to make the wall.
The signature building of the park was the Bathhouse, designed by official city architect William Mooser Jr. His Streamline Moderne masterpiece looks like a luxury liner, right down to the portholes and funnels — a happy note in the bleak 1930s.
Another cheerful note was the art adorning the interior and exterior of the Bathhouse. The artists, hired by the Federal Art Project, were a fascinating crew, including muralist, psychoanalyst and jazz musician Hilaire Hiler, supremely talented and egotistical sculptor Benjamin Bufano, and pioneering African American mosaic artist Sargent Johnson.
Recycled sand
The park was dedicated in January 1939, but the beach was immediately found to be inadequate. In July 1941, 80 million cubic feet of sand from the excavation of the Union Square parking garage was hauled to the shoreline and deposited to make a new beach.
Composed of 1906 debris from the Palace Hotel and Chinatown, cobblestones from city streets, tombstones from cemeteries, and sand from Union Square — Aquatic Park is literally a cross- section of the city.
The city leased the Bathhouse to brothers Leo and Kenneth Gordon, who opened it as the Aquatic Park Casino. The brothers were soon accused of improprieties, however, and after a federal investigation were kicked out.
In one of the odder changes of tenancy in city history, the former casino reopened in 1941 as the headquarters of the 4th Army antiaircraft command. Roulette- wheelspinning croupiers were replaced by sergeants barking into telephones about muzzle velocities and angles of fire.
Storming the beach
The antiaircraft unit didn’t have occasion to fire its guns in anger, but after the war the military did blast theatrically away at Aquatic Park. In October 1948, the beach below the Bathhouse served as a fake beachhead when Navy and Marine reserves celebrated Navy Day by staging a “night amphibious assault.”
The show, which would probably not be greenlighted by city liability lawyers today, featured “flamethrowers, underwater demolition experts, machine guns and a re- enactment of the Iwo Jima flag raising,” according to press reports.
After the Army departed, the city didn’t have enough funds to do much except keep up the Bathhouse, and its decks were used for sunbathing. In 1947 the San Francisco Senior Center opened in the building. It remains the oldest private nonprofit senior center in the U. S.
Creating a landmark
Aquatic Park was beautiful, but its surroundings were utilitarian and the Bathhouse underused. That all changed because of a man named Karl Kortum.
In 1950, the city leased the Bathhouse to Kortum for $ 1 a year. The following year, he opened the Maritime Museum.
Kortum also succeeded in beautifying the park’s surroundings. In the 1950s, the foot of Hyde Street was a barren space with a large parking lot. Kortum pushed for the creation of Victorian Park, the landscaped area around the cable car turnaround.
In 1954, he brought in the square- rigged three-master Balclutha, and in following years the Thayer, Alma and other historic ships were acquired for the park.
During the 1960s, the park fell into disrepair and had problems with crime. In 1978, the city transferred it to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Today it is the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. Beautifully restored, it is one of the city’s crown jewels.
Riverboat arson
Over the years, the cove below the Fort Mason bluffs has had its ups and downs. But from the beginning, the city’s swimming hole has always been a place for fun. So it’s only fitting that this story concludes with perhaps the most lighthearted act of arson ever pulled off in San Francisco.
In 1953, an associate of Kortum’s named Barney Gould had a massive old riverboat hulk, the Fort Sutter, hauled into the cove and docked right next to the Dolphin and South End swimming clubs. The clubs had not been consulted, and they were none too pleased to find a decrepit 240- foot ship towering above them.
Gould was ordered to remove it, but the tugs he hired to haul it out damaged it so badly it had to be docked again at the west end of the beach. There it rotted away for six years until May 9, 1959, when four men raced up the gangplank, poured gasoline on the deck and ignited the ship.
The four men were said to be members of the South End club. The flames could be seen in Berkeley. When the city fire chief saw the hulk being consumed, he said, “Let her burn. We’ll save money on it.”
No one was ever punished. A member of the South End club told me recently, “We all know the guys who did it. We named a boat after them.”