Tubbs Cordage Company, makers of maritime and mining rope, was founded in 1857 at Potrero Point. By 1889, it was one of the largest employers in the industrial Dogpatch neighborhood. The 1899 Sanborn Insurance Maps show the famous Tubbs Cordage Rope Walk, a covered pier over one thousand feet long that extended into San Francisco Bay allowing cordage workers to twist fiber strands into very long ropes.

After a more than a century in business, Tubbs Cordage ceased operations in 1962. Much of the rope making machinery was donated to the Maritime Museum, and the Tubbs Cordage Company Office Building was moved from Dogpatch to its present location on the Hyde Street Pier.

Aquatic Park and Vicinity

• Pumping Station No. 2, Van Ness Avenue
• Aquatic Park Historic District
• Site of the First Ship into San Francisco Bay
• Ghirardelli Square, North Point at Larkin
• Haslett Warehouse, 680 Beach Street

• Alma Scow Schooner
• Balclutha Square-Rigged Sailing Ship
• C.A. Thayer Lumber Schooner
• Eppleton Hall Paddlewheel Tugboat
• Eureka Steam Ferryboat
• Hercules Steam Tugboat
• Lewis Ark Houseboat
• Tubbs Cordage Company Office Building

• USS Pampanito Submarine
• SS Jeremiah O'Brien Liberty Ship

Buildings that Moved

It's not just that the people of the American West are restless, the buildings themselves sometimes pack up and move when - for one reason or another - the neighborhood no longer suits them or the neighbors no longer want them or opportunity waits down the road.

And when buildings remain in place, they are often searching for their identities.

Of the buildings and structures we have visited, the original Reno Arch holds the record for number of moves. It has been moved five times since it was built in 1926.

Jax Truckee Diner holds the distance title. The building moved from New Jersry to Pennsylvanis in 1948, then from Pennsylvania to Califonia in 1992.

Probably the most ambitious relocation occurred on July 4th 1904, when the Southern Pacific Railroad loaded most of the town of Wadsworth, Nevada, onto rail cars and transported the town thirty miles west to create a new town which became known as Sparks.