San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park
	Historic ships on Hyde Street Pier, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park
Location:	California , United States
Next city:	San Francisco
Surface:	0.2 km²
Founding:	June 27, 1988
Visitors:	4,334,752 (2016)
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The San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park (official name in the National Register of Historic Places is San Francisco Maritime National Historic Site ) is a museum and a memorial of the type of a National Historical Park in San Francisco , California . The park includes a historic fleet of ships, a tourist information center, a maritime museum and a scientific library. The park is sometimes referred to as the San Francisco Maritime Museum - this is the name the facility was established under in 1951 and named until 1978 when the collections were acquired by the National Park Service . The park was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 27, 1988 as a National Historic Site ; the Maritime Museum is just one of the many cultural institutions in the park. It also includes the Aquatic Park Historic District , which is bounded by Van Ness Avenue, Polk Street and Hyde Street, and was granted National Historic Landmark status as a Historic District on May 28, 1987 .

Historic fleet of ships

Most of the historic fleet of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park is located on Hyde Street Pier . It consists of the following large ships:

Balclutha , a full ship built in 1886.
Eureka , a ferry built in 1890 with a side paddle wheel.
Alma , a lighter built in 1891.
CA Thayer , a gaff schooner built in 1895.
Hercules , a tugboat built in 1907.
Eppleton Hall , a paddle steamer built in 1914.

The fleet also has over a hundred smaller ships.

Visitor center

The visitor center is housed in a warehouse built in 1909, located on the corner of Hyde Street and Jefferson Street. San Francisco declared the four-story brick building a historic landmark in 1974, and the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. Inside, exhibits, including one of the first Fresnel lighthouse lenses and a shipwrecked boat, preserve the colorful and rich legacy of San Francisco's seafarers. The information center also has a film screenings room, Sailor's Den (part of the park's maritime library) and an information desk run by rangers .

Maritime Museum

The park's maritime museum

The Maritime Museum is located in a building from the Streamline Modern Age in the middle of the Aquatic Park Historic District at the beginning of Polk Street, a few meters from the visitor center and the Hyde Street Pier. The building, which the Works Progress Administration began construction in 1936 , was originally a public bathhouse . The lobby walls are imaginatively decorated with colorful paintings.

The Steamship Room illustrates the technological development in shipping from wind- to steam-powered ships. The exhibition on the second floor includes three screens of the early port area of San Francisco, prints with maritime motifs, carvings and whaling harpoons. The gallery on the third floor is used for traveling exhibitions.

Scientific library

The library focuses on sailing ships and steamers on the west coast of the United States and the Pacific Ocean from 1520 to the present day. The library also contains files from many shipbuilders and ship owners. Lined up next to each other, the documents would be 500 meters long; they contain 120,000 architectural drawings of ships and shipyards as well as around 5,000 tables and maps.

Approach and visit

The visitor center, berths for ships and the Maritime Museum are on Hyde Street at the west end of Fisherman's Wharf . The administration and most of the library are located in Fort Mason to the west .