Free day brings out the sailor in visitors
Park Service turns 101, gifts admission to Hyde Street Pier
It was a great day to look at old ships in San Francisco, especially because you didn’t have to pay $10 to do it.
On Friday, walking on the vintage vessels at the Hyde Street Pier cost absolutely nothing. The National Park Service, in honor of its birthday, waived all entrance fees at the 124 parks that ask visitors to pony up.
Hardly anyone knew the Park Service was having its 101st birthday, which made the $10 bonanza a nice thing. It was also free to visit places like Muir Woods, Yosemite and Yellowstone, but none of those places comes with a tall ship like the C.A. Thayer, which a lot of people were climbing on and grabbing the ropes of. Some visitors were probably calling themselves Ishmael; it was that kind of morning.
“This is lovely,” said Malcom Skerratt, a visitor from Stratford-on-Avon in England. “I prefer visiting a place like this to visiting Disneyland. I think this has got a little real life to it, and some history.”
His wife, Lynda, said the Skerratts would use the $20 that they didn’t spend on park tickets to buy lunch and a beer.
“We’ve spent so much in the U.S. already,” she said. “It’s nice to get a little break.”
The antique ships, some with their paint jobs more intact than others, bobbed in the morning sun. Missing was the Balclutha, the 256-foot square rigger that’s the pride of the pier and that’s in dry dock for repairs for another couple of months. But on a free day, it would hardly have been good form to complain that she wasn’t in the lineup.
The splendid side-wheel ferry Eureka was there, and you could walk on her and pretend you were crossing the bay in the days before the big orange bridge to the north and the big gray span to the east put her out of business.
Also free to visit was the pier’s historical bathroom, or head, which comes complete with an informative sign explaining that sailors generally attended to sanitary chores by perching
perilously above the waves while sitting on a special seat in the front — or head — of the vessel. The sign explained that sailors preferred doing that to using indoor bathrooms, where geysers of sea water would gush up through pipes from below, catching seated sailors unaware. The Hyde Street Pier is an educational place.
Armin Schaffer and Claudia Steiner, two visitors from Graz, Austria, climbed aboard the steam-powered tugboat Hercules and gazed at the engine room and the galley and the wardroom where the captain hung out when he wasn’t telling everyone else on the ship what to do. They said they never would have visited the Hercules if it hadn’t been a free day.
“We’re students,” Schaffer said. “You know how students are. The same, everywhere in the world.”
The National Park Service offers 10 free days a year. The next free day falls on Sept. 30, in honor of something called National Public Lands Day.
Nobody at Hyde Street Pier seemed to know that there was any such thing as a National Public Lands Day, but nobody at the pier knew it was the Park Service’s birthday, either.
It was pretty much an ordinary day at the pier for volunteer Paul LaChapelle, who was spending his morning scraping the paint off a metal cleat, in preparation for painting it. LaChapelle does not use power tools, to add authenticity to the historical stuff.
“I like painting things,” he said. “It’s satisfying. And if you don’t do it, the place falls apart.”
Park Ranger Terry Dorman, in charge of the pier’s 1,600 volunteers, said you need that much free labor to make up for the lack of paid painters.
“All these ships need is a little bit of tender loving care,” he said. “Actually, all these ships need is a lot of tender loving care.”