Look at these pictures. This is where Anderson & Cristofani built ships, real goddamn ships, wooden scows for San Francisco Bay. From the early 1870s to the mid-1930s, right here along Innes Avenue in the India Basin at Hunter’s Point. A row of yards where men who actually knew what the hell they were doing turned timber into something that could carry weight across water.
Henry P. Anderson. Danish shipwright. Shows up in 1893, buys out Dircks’ yard on Innes Avenue, and gets to work. By 1906, he’s building Jack London’s The Snark, and then the whole city shakes itself to pieces. The earthquake hits. And Anderson? He keeps building.
1926, Alf Cristofani joins up. The yard gets a new name. They keep doing what they do, honest work, skilled work, the kind that’s nearly extinct now. Then the 1980s roll around and, because of course they do, property speculators buy the place. But wait, plot twist. The City manages to grab the North part of the yard in 1989, turns it into the India Basin Shoreline Park.
San Francisco likes to tell stories about itself. The Gold Rush. The earthquakes. The Summer of Love. The tech booms. Hell, they’ve got more origin myths than ancient Rome. But drive down Innes Avenue, past the freeway, past where the tourists stop looking at their maps, past where the venture capitalists’ Teslas fear to tread, and you’ll find a different story. One they’d rather you didn’t hear.
India Basin. Hunters Point.
These aren’t neighborhoods that made it onto the postcards. They didn’t get the Ken Burns treatment. But they built the ships that won World War II. They housed the workers, Black families who came west during the Great Migration looking for something better than Jim Crow, who found jobs in the shipyards and made a community in the shadow of cranes and dry docks. Real people doing real work, the kind that gets your hands dirty, the kind that built America while America wasn’t looking.
And then, like clockwork, like it always happens, the work dried up. The shipyard closed in 1974. The Navy left behind more than memories, they left toxins, carcinogens, radioactive waste buried in the ground like a goodbye present. Thanks for your service. Here’s some cancer. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
For decades, decades, this place has been forgotten. Not benignly forgotten, like an old photo album in the attic. Actively, aggressively forgotten. Disinvested. Redlined. Poisoned. The city looked the other way while families lived on contaminated soil. While kids played in parks built on God-knows-what. While a whole community was basically told: you don’t matter enough to clean this up.
Walk down Innes Avenue now and you can still feel it. The weight of all that neglect. Boarded-up storefronts next to century-old Victorians that have seen better days. Chain-link fences around lots that used to be something, that could be something again. The kind of bones of a neighborhood that tell you: this place had life once. This place mattered.
But here’s where the story takes its predictable, infuriating turn.
Because now, now, suddenly the city remembers India Basin exists. Now that the rest of San Francisco is too expensive even for the tech workers, now that every other neighborhood has been strip-mined for condos and artisanal toast shops, the developers have turned their gaze toward Hunters Point. And they’re coming with their renderings and their community meetings and their promises about “revitalization.”
Revitalization. That word does a lot of work, doesn’t it? Makes it sound like you’re bringing something back to life. But you can’t revitalize a community that’s still very much alive, struggling, sure, overlooked, absolutely, but alive. What you’re really doing is replacement. Displacement with a prettier name.
They’ll “clean up” the contamination now. Now that there’s money to be made. Now that waterfront property is worth something to people who can actually afford it. They’ll pour a lawyer of cement over the toxins they ignored for forty years to seal them in, tear down what’s left of the old community, put up glass towers with names like “Shipyard Landing” or “Basin Point Luxury Residences”, some bullshit that commodifies the history without honoring it. Without remembering that real people lived here, died here, built lives here.
The longtime residents, the ones who stayed when everyone else abandoned this place, who made it through the neglect and the poison and the violence and the disinvestment, they’ll get pushed out by rising rents and property taxes. Priced out of their own neighborhood by the very “improvements” that should have been made decades ago when they actually needed them.
And in ten years, some tech bro will be jogging down Innes Avenue past boutique coffee shops and dog spas, and he won’t know a damn thing about the Hunters Point shipyard or the families who built it or the toxic legacy or the community that survived here against all odds. It’ll just be another “up-and-coming” neighborhood. Another success story of urban renewal.
But that history doesn’t disappear just because you built condos on top of it. The ghosts don’t go away because you painted the walls gray and called it “industrial chic.” The people who lived here, who remember, they know. And maybe that’s what this is about. Bearing witness. Saying their names. Remembering that before it was real estate, it was real life.
India Basin. Hunters Point. Innes Avenue.
A place that built warships and raised families and survived everything the city could throw at it. A place that deserved better fifty years ago and deserves better now than to be just another casualty of the only war San Francisco really cares about anymore: the one for square footage.
From Jack London’s Cruise of the Snark:
“Spare no money,” I said to Roscoe. “Let everything on the Snark be of the best. And never mind decoration. Plain pine boards is good enough finishing for me. But put the money into the construction. Let the Snark be as staunch and strong as any boat afloat. Never mind what it costs to make her staunch and strong; you see that she is made staunch and strong, and I’ll go on writing and earning the money to pay for it.”
And I did . . . as well as I could; for the Snark ate up money faster than I could earn it. In fact, every little while I had to borrow money with which to supplement my earnings. Now I borrowed one thousand dollars, now I borrowed two thousand dollars, and now I borrowed five thousand dollars. And all the time I went on working every day and sinking the earnings in the venture. I worked Sundays as well, and I took no holidays. But it was worth it. Every time I thought of the Snark I knew she was worth it.
For know, gentle reader, the staunchness of the Snark. She is forty-five feet long on the waterline. Her garboard strake is three inches thick; her planking two and one-half inches thick; her deck-planking two inches thick and in all her planking there are no butts. I know, for I ordered that planking especially from Puget Sound. Then the Snark has four water-tight compartments, which is to say that her length is broken by three water-tight bulkheads. Thus, no matter how large a leak the Snark may spring, Only one compartment can fill with water. The other three compartments will keep her afloat, anyway, and, besides, will enable us to mend the leak. There is another virtue in these bulkheads. The last compartment of all, in the very stern, contains six tanks that carry over one thousand gallons of gasolene. Now gasolene is a very dangerous article to carry in bulk on a small craft far out on the wide ocean. But when the six tanks that do not leak are themselves contained in a compartment hermetically sealed off from the rest of the boat, the danger will be seen to be very small indeed.
The Snark is a sail-boat. She was built primarily to sail. But incidentally, as an auxiliary, a seventy-horse-power engine was installed. This is a good, strong engine. I ought to know. I paid for it to come out all the way from New York City. Then, on deck, above the engine, is a windlass. It is a magnificent affair. It weighs several hundred pounds and takes up no end of deck-room. You see, it is ridiculous to hoist up anchor by hand-power when there is a seventy-horse-power engine on board. So we installed the windlass, transmitting power to it from the engine by means of a gear and castings specially made in a San Francisco foundry.
The Snark was made for comfort, and no expense was spared in this regard. There is the bath-room, for instance, small and compact, it is true, but containing all the conveniences of any bath-room upon land. The bath-room is a beautiful dream of schemes and devices, pumps, and levers, and sea-valves. Why, in the course of its building, I used to lie awake nights thinking about that bath-room. And next to the bath-room come the life-boat and the launch. They are carried on deck, and they take up what little space might have been left us for exercise. But then, they beat life insurance; and the prudent man, even if he has built as staunch and strong a craft as the Snark, will see to it that he has a good life-boat as well. And ours is a good one. It is a dandy. It was stipulated to cost one hundred and fifty dollars, and when I came to pay the bill, it turned out to be three hundred and ninety-five dollars. That shows how good a life-boat it is.
I could go on at great length relating the various virtues and excellences of the Snark, but I refrain. I have bragged enough as it is, and I have bragged to a purpose, as will be seen before my tale is ended. And please remember its title, “The Inconceivable and Monstrous.” It was planned that the Snark should sail on October 1, 1906. That she did not so sail was inconceivable and monstrous. There was no valid reason for not sailing except that she was not ready to sail, and there was no conceivable reason why she was not ready. She was promised on November first, on November fifteenth, on December first; and yet she was never ready. On December first Charmian and I left the sweet, clean Sonoma country and came down to live in the stifling city—but not for long, oh, no, only for two weeks, for we would sail on December fifteenth. And I guess we ought to know, for Roscoe said so, and it was on his advice that we came to the city to stay two weeks. Alas, the two weeks went by, four weeks went by, six weeks went by, eight weeks went by, and we were farther away from sailing than ever. Explain it? Who?—me? I can’t. It is the one thing in all my life that I have backed down on. There is no explaining it; if there were, I’d do it. I, who am an artisan of speech, confess my inability to explain why the Snark was not ready. As I have said, and as I must repeat, it was inconceivable and monstrous.
Jack London, The Cruise of The Snark