CALIFORNIA SHIPS
The San Francisco Renaissance
The artist John Stobart spent time in San Francisco learning the sluiJs and ways of the old port Ji-om Karl Kortum of the Maritime Museum and others. Here, at the Vallejo Street Wha1j in 1863, he shows the tall windships at rest, masts and rigging catching the night air like giant harps in faint echo of the screaming Cape Horn gales they fought through to get here. Gaslight spills from chandleries and taverns, men wrangle in the street, while a few lat e workers wrestle barrels onto drays on the wharf. Behind the tall Down Easter lies a Bay schooner, part of the varied sea traffics that built the city and nourished the thriving life of the port. In 1951 the San Francisco Maritime Mu seum was founded to recapture that life. "The concept to which the ne w museum people were dedicated, " says Kortum, "was to present the whole of the maritime story of San Francisco . .. "Jn doing so, in the past quarter centwy, they changed the wate1jront th ey came to honor.
Karl Kortum had difficulty settling down on the family farm in Petaluma after World War II. It had been his plan to write of the last voyage of the Yankee square-rigger Kaiulani under sail, in which he and a few other young men had signed on as greenhorns in a shellback crew, in 1941-42. It was a hell of a challenge to write about. And there were distractions - the fight to stop a freeway being driven through the chicken-farming lands (which succeeded), and the long-held dream of seeing a maritime museum established and historic ships saved in San Francisco. A letter to Scott Newhall, brother of Hall Newhall who had sailed with Kortum in Kaiulani, written in March 1949, expressed Kortum 's views on this, including exasperated reference to public officials who " know nothing about ships and can think only in terms of bronze effigies and flower beds. " But, he suggested , the success of Mystic Seaport in rural Connecticut showed how ships - real ships, with a real story to tell - interested people, and this represented an opportunity for San Francisco, the city which had ¡' i,1spired the building of the Yankee clippers and the Down East Cape Homers, sent whaling ships to the Arctic, sealing vessels to the western Pacific, lumber schooners to the South Seas and had , in the salmon-packing fleet, the last great gathering of sailing ships on the face of the earth .'' Scott Newhall , an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, took the bait after his own fashion. He said if Kortum picked up the project himself, he would support him in it. Farming flew out the window, and the Kauilani story was laid
aside . Within a year, a nonprofit San Francisco Maritime Museum Associatio n was set up , and soon after it took possession of the abandoned Aquatic Park Casino, on the north shore of the city, between Fisherman 's Wharf and Fort Mason, not far inside the Golden Gate . Scott Newhall used his welding skills to help construct some of the displays, which consisted not merely of models and paintings, but gear and parts of old ships abandoned in the Bay and elsewhere . But that was only a beg inning . In 1949, before the Museum was formed , Kortum had written of his plan to bring in a major square-rigged sailing ship , and to add , at the nearby Hyde Street Pier, a lumber schooner, a steam schooner, the last walking-beam ferry ; to convert the abandoned lot at the foot of Hyde Street into a gaslit park , to see the cable car that came down the hill turn around in the park , and to see the great Haslett Warehouse building on the other side ¡o f the street turned to museum use, for a full presentation of the maritime cultural inheritance of the city. Nearly all these things have come to pass in the succeeding quarter century. The fight to bring in the Balclutha, a British-built full-rigger of 1886, was the first challenge and it was one that nearly dismembered the Museum. A labor leader, Mario Grossetti , turned the battle on the board of trustees (who understandably were divided over acquiring a 1700ton artifact) , and 18 labor unions jo ined with over 90 corporatio ns to make possible her restoration and opening to the public in 1955. The Museum then immediately turned to a campaign to recover the schooner C.A . Thayer, steam schooner Wapama , and ferry Eure ka for the Hyde Street Pier. Kortum 's able aide Dave Nelson went to work to secure the whole of the $2 million pot offered by the State as San Francisco's share of offshore oil revenues. The city planners , of course , had othe r uses in mind , but stage by stage , the Museum plan won through, the Museum 's president Stanley Dollar, Jr. , not being one to back down in the face of Establishment fiats, and the public constantly siding with the Museum as the issue became public through attacks on the Museum 's plan. The ships were brought in , and restored under the direcTiny against the sky, me n o/ K aiul ani 's crew examine the hulk of Joseph Conrad 's sh1jJ Otago in 1942. A ge neration late r, th ey reached out to bring her ste rn back .fi'om Tasmania to San Fran cisco. Ph oto: Karl Kortum.
SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1977