Thursday, May 1, 2014

Pier 70: Once a Naval Shipyard Now a Place of Beautiful Ruins

The second place that I chose to shoot at for my project was another place full of military and naval history, but also another abandoned space that has been neglected due to the fact that it is located at the edges of San Francisco.  It is right on the water near AT&T park, and unfortunately many people don't have the desire to renovate the space or revitalize it to be a part of the fruitful, cultural, and thriving center that San Francisco is today.

I don't want to say much about Pier 70 because I would rather let the pictures speak for themselves, but it was a former dry dock that housed ships such as the famous SS Oceanic.  It also housed many prominent businesses such as Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation's administrative offices and Union Iron Works.  The dock has been in little use since then, but there has been talk of reparation plans to restore the pier back to the importance and usefulness it once had and to also fix up the historical buildings that surround the pier.

Today, many of these buildings are vacant, just like the ones on Treasure Island, but the people of San Francisco have been trying to re-create these spaces into community centers in which ideas, goods, and conversation can be shared amongst our own.

For example, the Forest City Project is working with San Francisco to help develop this area to restore it as a creative working and living space that reflect types of communities that we want to live in and the types of environments that we want to live in.  Here's a link to their website and the work that they are doing: http://pier70sf.com/

So here's the 2nd part of my project, in which I shot at and around Pier 70 so that I could understand the significance of this space and why it exists in the current state that it does today.


The Apocalyptic Buildings and Landscapes of Pier 70















Here's also a link to my Flickr for more photos at Pier 70:



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