Museum co-director Peter Linenthal shows off pieces of San Francisco history at the Pier 70 Time Machine, a free museum in an old World War II shipbuilding plant on the southern waterfront.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
The Pier 70 Time Machine is located inside an old World War II shipbuilding plant on San Francisco’s southern waterfront.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Museum co-founder Bill Perez, left, shows off shipbuilding tools in the Pier 70 Time Machine.
Sam Whiting/S.F. Chronicle
In her 10 years living in San Francisco’s Dogpatch, after moving from New York, Karen Moore has picked up bits and pieces of its history as an industrial center on the working waterfront, but she hadn’t pieced it all together until a college friend came from the East Coast needing a tour and they found themselves among the vast collection of bits and pieces put together by two history nuts.
“I love museums, and this really ties it together,” she said Sunday after coming to Pier 70 Building 12, home of Breadbelly Bakery and Standard Deviant Brewing, and noticing a sandwich board. It directed her to the Pier 70 Time Machine, up a flight of stairs to a large unfinished room with a concrete floor and an open-beam ceiling.
Pier 70 Time Machine: 5-8 p.m. Fridays, noon-4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Free. Pier 70, Building 12, Suite 2.35. https://pier70timemachine.com
“There really hasn’t been a place that tells the story of Dogpatch,” said Moore, who is 49 and works at Genentech. “There was so much that was built here that wasn’t just ships. The BART tube was built here.”
Article continues below this ad
Moore now knows this tidbit because the Pier 70 Time Machine contains a display about construction of BART. There is a display case full of tools that came out of the garage of Bill Perez, a retired boilermaker at Bethlehem Steel and now a collector of maritime artifacts and self-taught historian of the working waterfront in San Francisco, where he was born and raised.
Artifacts of San Francisco history fill the Pier 70 Time Machine, which preserves the history of the Potrero Hill and Dopatch neighborhoods.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
“It’s what other people would call junk and we call treasures,” said Perez, who spent many years lugging his bulky curiosities to San Francisco History Day at the Old Mint.
Manning his booth, he got to chatting with the operator of the next booth over, Peter Linenthal, who had binders of 19th century photos from Dogpatch. “I was impressed by Bill’s original full-size blueprints of ships built in the 1880s at Union Ironworks,” he said. “These were ships built in our neighborhood.”
Their conversation would resume every year at History Day until it ended with COVID-19. But they kept talking and collecting, and trying to figure where they could show their stuff more than one day a year, and that search finally brought them to Building 12 at Pier 70, which was being restored as part of a 28-acre neighborhood in Dogpatch, being developed by BGRE.
Article continues below this ad
On Sept. 11, they opened the Time Machine in 4,000 square feet of space in a 1941 factory that was part of “Destroyer Alley” during the war. The museum brings together two nonprofits — the Bethlehem Shipyard Museum, which is Perez’s side project, and the Potrero Hill Archives project, which is Linenthal’s passion. Both of those organizations are under the umbrella of the Pier 70 Time Machine, bringing together thousands of items. When the museum is open, on Friday evenings and weekends, one or both of them are on location as curators and tour guides.
Museum co-director Bill Perez chats with visitors at the Pier 70 Time Machine, which pays tribute to San Francisco’s industrial past.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
“We are the last connection to the World War II stories as told to us by shipyard workers,” said Perez, 73, who graduated from Mission High in 1972. “These are the people who worked with steel right here at Pier 70. We are talking about 18,000 people.”
The museum is about a lot more than shipbuilding, and that delves into the expertise of Linenthal, 75, a graduate of Mission High in 1969. A retired art teacher and children’s book illustrator, he collects everything from family photos to dental equipment, as long as it has to do with Potrero Hill or Dogpatch.
Their museum is not easy because it is on the second floor, marked by a red beacon that sits in the window. That glowing lantern is now seeing its first working duty since it served as a warning light for low-flying airplanes and sat high atop a gas tank near Pennsylvania Street.
Article continues below this ad
Once in the door, visitors are met by a display case full of artifacts that were unearthed during construction of Mission Bay, and a scale model of the Hamm’s Brewery. Behind that is a set of green wooden seats from Seals Stadium, original home of the San Francisco Giants at 16th and Bryant streets.
Seats from the Seals Stadium are on display at the Pier 70 Time Machine.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
“Can you imagine sitting in one of these for a whole game,” said Perez, who has a vague memory of being taken to a Giants game by his father in 1958. “I’m just not sure how true that is. I might be hallucinating.”
Also uncomfortable is a pew from St. Teresa Church dating to the 1890s, before the cathedral was cut in half and dragged uphill from Dogpatch to Potrero Hill.
The biggest installation is the full dental suite of Dr. Jean Cantou, who was the neighborhood dentist from the 1930s through the 1960s, operating out of a home office at 19th and Connecticut streets. Linenthal was given the whole setup by family members looking to remodel the family home.
Article continues below this ad
“It’s object-based learning,” Linenthal said. “It tells the story of changing technology as well as family life in the neighborhood. At least one woman who has visited the museum remembered being a patient of Dr. Cantou in the 1960s.”
The Time Machine is financed by the two founders. Linenthal has been collecting for 30 years, and Perez has been at it since Bethlehem Steel closed in 1982. “At times I spent like a drunken sailor,” Perez said, “and that’s no disrespect to drunken sailors.”
The Bethlehem Shipyard Museum, precursor to the Time Machine, had a brief life in 2015 as a standalone along the Powell Street cable car line. It was operated by its founders, Rudolph Brito and Gary Moss, who eventually turned operations over to Perez.
Bill Perez, left, and Peter Linenthal, co-directors of the Pier 70 Time Machine, merged two nonprofits for the museum.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
He’s a natural as a tour guide, wandering around and noticing what people are interested in. Brian Attiyeh, an engineer who lives in Moraga, came over to hear the Sunday afternoon band at Standard Deviant and wandered upstairs while exploring the building and saw a vintage shipyard sign through the window. Soon enough, Perez was showing him 3D photos of the U.S. Navy battleship Oregon, built in 1898, on a stereoscope from the 1840s.
Article continues below this ad
“This was big entertainment before radio and TV. People didn’t have much to do,” he explained to Attiyeh, who found the whole place entertaining.
“I’m pleasantly surprised,” he said. “I’m interested in shipbuilding and didn’t expect to stumble into this place.”
Several hundred people have signed the guest registrar in its first month of operation, and they expect to double that on Potrero Hill and Dogpatch History Night, to be held on the ground floor. The Time Machine is the sponsor and will bring a highlight of artifacts downstairs to be set up on easels and tables. Anybody who wants to see more can come back the next day.
“People don’t just pop in and spend a few minutes,” Perez said. “They take time to peruse and take it all in. There are so many different stops.” One stop is a 22-minute film produced by Bethlehem Steel, which built the crane used to put up sections of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Artifacts of San Francisco history fill the Pier 70 Time Machine, which documents San Francisco’s past as an industrial powerhouse.
Camille Cohen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Another video details the Potrero Hill Rescue Squad, which was formed in World War II to bring first aid to the neighborhood in the event of an attack. Cantou was a key element of the 15-minute instructional film, which was shown at the New Potrero Theatre, known by neighbors as the Flea Bag.
Karen Moore spent about an hour in the Time Machine, only because that is the amount of time allotted during her tour. A history major at the University of Maryland, she now knows about Irish Hill, which is what her neighborhood was called before Dogpatch. Anything beyond that will require a return visit, which she plans to make. “I’m a lifelong learner, and I would love to learn more about the shipbuilding in the neighborhood.”
Visitors to the Time Machine have offered to donate stuff to clear out their own garages, and there are still blueprints and photos dating back to the 1880s in Perez’s garage waiting for space to open up on the showroom floor, which occupies 4,000 square feet.
“I can get my car into the garage,” said Perez, who lives in the Portola district, in a house above the garage, built in 1932. “It’s a one-car garage,” he said. “But for 16 of the last 17 years, it was a no-car garage.”