The first time you see Pier 70, really see it, it doesn’t give a damn whether you’re ready or not. It just sits there on the eastern edge of the city, rusting and defiant, refusing to apologize for what it was or what it’s become.
This isn’t some sanitized bullshit monument to the past. This is the real thing. One hundred and thirty-odd years of sweat, steel, and shipbuilding, and it shows in every corroded rivet, every peeling layer of industrial lead paint, every broken window that looks out onto the bay like a dead man’s eye.
Union Iron Works set up shop here in 1883, and for the next century, this place did what San Francisco has mostly forgotten how to do: it actually made things. Real things. Ships that sailed into war. Vessels that moved commerce across the Pacific. The kind of heavy, serious machinery that required men with calloused hands and a certain tolerance for danger. This wasn’t abstract. This wasn’t conceptual. You couldn’t optimize it or disrupt it. You had to show up, put in the hours, and do the work.
Bethlehem Steel, Pacific Rolling Mills, Risdon Iron & Locomotive, these names mean something if you know where to look. They’re not sexy. They’re not on anyone’s pitch deck at some South Park startup. But they built the bones of the American century, one rivet, one weld, one launch at a time.
And let’s be clear: this wasn’t Brando on the docks, all brooding conscience and noble suffering. This was harder than that, dirtier than that, more complicated than that. On the Waterfront gave us a mythology of the working waterfront, all dramatic shadows and moral clarity. Pier 70 gives us the truth, the unglamorous, unromanticized version where the work was just work, brutal and necessary, where men showed up not for redemption but for a paycheck, and where the only nobility was in the showing up itself, day after grinding day.
The thing about Pier 70 is that it wears its history honestly. There’s no attempt to pretty it up for the Instagram crowd, though they come anyway, drawn to authenticity like moths to a flame, even when they can’t quite articulate what they’re looking for. The buildings don’t care. Building 101, where Bethlehem’s administrative types shuffled papers and made decisions that affected thousands of lives, still stands. Not pristine. Not restored to some fantasy version of itself. Just standing.
You walk through here, if you can get in, if you’re lucky enough or connected enough, or you happen to have your bolt cutters, and you feel it. The weight of all those decades. The echo of the yard whistle that called men to work at dawn. The particular quality of light that filters through a broken skylight onto a floor that hasn’t been swept in thirty years. There’s poetry in that decay, but it’s not the kind of poetry that anyone asked for.
Most cities would have torn this down by now. Scraped it clean. Built condos with “industrial chic” exposed brick. Called it progress. Called it revitalization. San Francisco’s trying, the developers have their plans, the Port’s talking transformation, the usual suspects are circling, but for now, for this moment, Pier 70 has been allowed to just… exist. To slowly transform on its own timeline, caught between what it was and what someone, somewhere, thinks it should become.
That’s the thing that gets you, if you’re paying attention. This place is still alive. Not in the way it was when thousands of workers streamed through the gates every morning. But alive in a different way. Artists have colonized parts of it. Light industry still operates in some corners. The bones are still sound, even if the flesh is weathered. It’s not a museum yet. It’s not a memorial. It’s something more complicated than that, something suspended between past and future.
The irony isn’t lost on me that San Francisco, a city now synonymous with disruption and innovation, with moving fast and breaking things, was once a place that built objects designed to last a lifetime. Ships that would cross oceans. Infrastructure that would serve multiple generations. The swing from that mentality to our current disposable, iterative, pivot-on-a-dime culture is almost too on-the-nose to mention.
But Pier 70 doesn’t judge. It just sits there, a massive middle finger to obsolescence, to easy answers, to the idea that everything old must make way for everything new. It’s a reminder that making things, really fucking making things, requires space, and time, and a kind of commitment that we’ve largely traded in for Series B funding rounds and viral moments.
When Bethlehem sold out to the Port of San Francisco in 1980, it marked the end of something. The last major shipbuilding operation in the city. But endings are complicated. What died made room for something else. Not better, necessarily. Not worse. Just different. The creative class moved in. The developers started circling. The preservationists fought back. And through it all, the buildings stood, weathering not just wind and salt air but the much more corrosive forces of progress and politics.
I photograph a place like this, and these photos, they get it right, I’m not just documenting buildings. I’m documenting loss, sure. But also persistence. Dignity. The stubborn refusal of physical matter to simply disappear on command. Every shadow tells a story. Every pattern of rust is a timeline. Every fragment of peeling paint is a historical record that no archive could ever capture.
Pier 70 is proof that beauty doesn’t require permission. That significance doesn’t need a plaque. That the most important spaces are often the ones we almost lost, the ones we nearly forgot, the ones that survived not because someone important decided they should, but because they were too tough, too stubborn, or too useful to die completely.
Whatever happens next, and something will happen, because this is San Francisco and nothing stays still for long, this moment matters. This in-between state. This honest decay. This is what remains when the work stops but the structure endures.
The port of San Francisco……
is a marvel of nature,
and might well be called the harbor of harbors….
And I think if it could be well settled like Europe
there would not be anything more beautiful
in all the world
Juan Bautista de Anza, explorer