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police and National Guard
during the 1934 Longshore Strike, one of the
great breakthroughs for the labor movement.
There were two underlying and linked purposes to this tour.
One was to
view the San Francisco waterfront as a whole, with an eye
to creating a
maritime heritage corridor. The preservation of our
rapidly disappearing
historic maritime sites is by no means an integrated
effort, being
fragmented, e.g.,into the Maritime Museum and Hyde Street pier, the
separate Jeremiah O'Brien Liberty Ship preservation group,
the community
based copra crane and Islais Creek restoration group, while
for other
important sites and artifacts, such as the railroad ferry
piers, no
preservation effort whatever is in place to preserve them.
The other and related purpose was to bring together the
labor history
community with the industrial history community. The two
groups were
roughly equally represented on the tour. The reason for
making a point of
this is that both groups, for a variety of reasons, have a
vested interest in
the preservation of San Francisco's waterfront history.
This unity of interest
was strongly reflected in the rich interplay of commentary
on the boat tour,
extremely informative for everyone on board. The divergent
backgrounds
were perhaps also reflected in some grumbling about "Why do
we have to
put up with all this left-wing stuff!" That "left-wing
stuff" is an important
feature of this particular industrial landscape and had a
tremendous
impact on the evolution of the maritime unions and
industrial practices as
well. The tour was made possible by the donation of the
Harbor King by
the Inland Boatmen's Union. The tickets would have run at
least $80 a head
without labor sponsorship.
The pay off, in terms of demonstrating the potential
synergy of the two
groups came when one of the people from the National Park
Service
remarked that the NPS had put together a task force in
recent years to
create precisely the Heritage Corridor concept proposed
duringthe tour,
which had gotten nowhere. "It never occurred to us that
the labor
movement could be such a powerful ally. This is a brilliant idea." A
coalition effort will inevitably be more effective in the
complex arena of
San Francisco's preservation politics. We hope to see a continuing
effort
evolve from this event. In this regard, we hope to help organize a follow
up bus tour (in historic busses!) to visit the same sites
from the land side in
the near future. In any case, the boat tour is sure to be
repeated next year.
Don't miss it!
We will have a note on our tour of the New Almaden
Quicksilver Mine in
the next issue.
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