Refreshed Wharf
Fisherman’s Wharf, Option A: San Francisco’s theme park with gills. Visitors spill from tour buses and ferry boats like water from a flooded bilge. They stuff shopping bags with cable-car-themed shot glasses and Alcatraz-shaped ashtrays, outfit themselves at three-for-$7.99 T-shirt shops, and dine a-la-chain at the Hard Rock Cafe or Hooters.
Fisherman’s Wharf, Option B: History laps at the imagination. Sturdy masts rise from the decks of retired working ships. Maps chart century-old shipwrecks. Graceful figureheads from long-lost square-riggers, museum pieces now, seem to whisper tales of a waterfront’s untamed days, stories of surly sailors and greed-gripped gold diggers, of gambling joints and opium dens, of seafaring commerce that brought the world to San Francisco and introduced San Francisco to the world.
Good news for travelers who may prefer Option B: Push past the commercial veneer and the city’s colorful maritime history is surfacing as never before in new exhibits, monuments and renovated buildings at the wharf and along the entire bay front.
San Francisco seems to be welcoming its future by celebrating its past. The evidence stretches west to east, from Crissy Field — formerly a deserted military airstrip, now a restored marsh and park featuring the city’s most glorious walking path — to South Beach, a neighborhood once lost beneath the concrete clutter of the Embarcadero Freeway, now dazzlingly redeveloped. Since the freeway was demolished in 1991, this neighborhood’s ship has come in, with chic new housing and restaurants, retro-cool trolleys and SBC Park, bayside home of the Giants.
In between is the Ferry Building, whose classic clock tower rose as a symbol of the city in 1898. In recent years, commuters and tourists skirted its walls on their way to ferry docks. But last year, after an exquisite $100 million restoration, it reopened, filled with intriguing market stalls offering everything from craftsman cheeses to rare wines and culinary antiques. More shops and a restaurant are due to open this year.
Outside its doors, the Embarcadero sidewalk has been reinvented as a wide, palm-lined promenade christened Herb Caen Way in 1996, after the late, great San Francisco Chronicle columnist and man about town.
Along the way, photos and stories engraved in tall metal posts share stories of sailors, sea chanteys and shipwrecks, many of which rest beneath visitors’ feet. Abandoned ships were used as fill from 1878 to 1924, when the city built the seawall there to accommodate ocean-going commerce.
At Fisherman’s Wharf, the newest chapter in the historical renaissance plays out in the whimsical, classy 252-room Argonaut Hotel, which opened last August with all the fanfare of a luxury-liner christening.
The hoopla was appropriate, given that the Argonaut’s arrival is possibly the biggest thing to happen at the west end of the wharf since Ghirardelli Square was redeveloped into a shopping and dining destination in 1964.
The hotel at the corner of Jefferson and Hyde streets not only occupies a historic, renovated warehouse but it also operates in partnership with San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.
“All the great parks have their own four-star hotel,” says John Cunnane, supervisory park ranger, “and now we do, too.”
The park houses its fascinating new 10,000-square-foot visitor center next to the hotel lobby and offers a stately maritime museum two blocks away and the grand old ships of Hyde Street Pier across the street, among other attractions. Last year, 3.8 million visitors stopped by the maritime park, but considering that an estimated 10 million to 14 million tourists flock to Fisherman’s Wharf annually, many are missing the boat.
San Franciscans long have turned up their noses at the wharf’s tourist-trap feel, but for visitors, it’s a nice fit. After all, Fisherman’s Wharf is ideally located — walking distance from such classic neighborhoods as North Beach and a trolley ride away from the ballpark. Hop a cable car and you’re in Union Square, heart of the city’s shopping district. Turn in any direction and the views stun: Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid dominate the cityscape. Alcatraz and Angel Island lure mid-bay. The slopes of Mount Tamalpais hug Marin County to the north. And to the west, of course, the Golden Gate Bridge stands sentinel.
Other area hotels have changed hands and been renovated in recent years, but the Argonaut is the first new hotel to open at the wharf in more than a decade.
It feels decidedly different from its competitors — as it should, considering that it’s run by Kimpton Hotels, a company that built its reputation by offering travelers something special.
The San Francisco-based Kimpton group runs 38 hotels and 39 restaurants across the United States and Canada. The Argonaut represents just the second time the company has partnered with the federal government: Kimpton helped transform the 19th-century Tariff Building in Washington, D.C., into the luxurious Hotel Monaco, which opened in 2002. The cooperative relationship benefits both parties, as the hoteliers take advantage of the unmatched ambience that historic buildings offer and, in San Francisco’s case, the maritime park makes money off the hotel.
Kimpton, its affiliate Maritime Hotel Associates and Susan Caruso, a Southern California designer, seem to have steeped themselves in San Francisco’s seafaring history before digging into the massive renovation job required to build the Argonaut.
Part of The Cannery shopping complex familiar to many visitors, the hotel rises from the red-brick bones of the old Haslett Warehouse, built between 1907 and 1909 by the California Fruit Canners Association. The four-story, 198,000-square-foot warehouse once was part of the world’s largest fruit and vegetable cannery.
In those days, before fill dirt pushed the shoreline half a block farther out into San Francisco Bay, the warehouse was so close to the water’s edge that ships heavy with produce could unload their cargo directly into the building. Railroad tracks between the warehouse and cannery made way for trains that carried Del Monte-brand canned fruits and vegetables across the country.
Don’t worry: The scent of spent cabbage is long gone. But colorful advertising art from the cannery’s heyday graces hallway walls.
Renovators have crafted guest rooms that feel cozy even in their industrial wrapping — the building’s original exposed brick walls, black tin canning doors and old-growth Douglas fir beams charred in a 2002 fire.
With whitewashed wood furniture, overstuffed chairs upholstered in palm-tree patterns and brass telescopes in the suites, guests are meant to feel as if they had boarded a cruise ship.
Designers paid excruciating attention to detail, from compass-themed chandeliers that point true north to public restrooms awash in ocean-blue granite. Neon-rimmed mirrors resembling portholes dot common areas, and deck chairs in the lobby look ideal for lounging during the hotel’s complimentary evening wine reception and morning coffee service.
Historical detail aside, the hotel offers abundant 21st-century amenities: high-speed Internet access, in-room laptop computer safes, flat-screen TVs with Nintendo, and a 24-hour yoga channel.
History, though, is blissfully inescapable at the Argonaut, particularly for guests — or any travelers — who spend time in the maritime park’s visitor center, next to the hotel lobby. Admission is free; it’s a great place to start any visit to the city’s waterfront.
A map outlines when and where 60 ships wrecked or sank in the bay and along the city’s ocean beaches, their remains periodically exposed by shifting sand.
Some relics offer telling glimpses into San Franciscans’ early life. The remains of the Niantic held everything from a French champagne bottle to a percussion pistol fragment. The Niantic was hauled ashore in 1849 and converted into a storeship. On-board merchants sold wine and stationery. Buried since a huge fire in 1851, it was uncovered in San Francisco’s financial district in 1978.
The visitor center’s most spectacular relic is the lens that once guided tall clippers, side-paddle steamers carrying passengers and schooners hauling lumber from the Northwest through churning seas and dense fog into the safety of the Golden Gate. It shone from the lighthouse on South Farallon Island, a windswept outcrop 26 miles outside the gate, where keepers and their families kept watch from 1855 to 1972.
The lens, an eight-sided tower of prisms built in Paris, focused and magnified a lamp flame to 280,000 candlepower, producing a flash 4.5 seconds long from the lamp, which made one revolution every eight minutes. In 1961, it was replaced by a modern electric beacon.
Across the street, a number of vessels — including five floating National Historic Landmarks — tie up at Hyde Street Pier. Visitors can watch riggers climbing as nimbly as monkeys among the 256-foot-long Balclutha’s towering masts, or can check out the sturdy 139-foot steam-powered tug Hercules. Built in 1907, it pushed barges carrying railroad cars across the bay, towed log rafts and even the enormous lock structures used to build the Panama Canal.
Two blocks west, at the corner of Polk and Beach streets, the gracious Sala Burton Building houses more of the city’s seafaring lore in the national park’s Maritime Museum.
A ghostly white figurehead, for instance, appears to observe most of the memorabilia from her perch on the bay-side wall. She began her shipboard life at the prow of the Annie Johnson, an iron sailing ship that was carrying coal from Scotland to San Francisco when the cargo caught fire. The ship burned at sea for almost a year before it — and its figurehead — were salvaged.
Elsewhere, photos depict everything from whalers to early sailboat races to Gold Rush days and their aftermath. One shot, for instance, shows Yerba Buena cove, the city’s original harbor, packed with hundreds of sailing ships deserted by their crews, who had charged toward the Sierra foothills in search of riches.
Those sailors-turned-miners probably didn’t realize that more than 150 years later, visitors might look upon all they left behind as pure gold — at least when compared with tourism’s more common clutter, Alcatraz-shaped ashtrays and all.