The Old Ship Saloon. Two ninety-eight Pacific Avenue. One of the oldest bars in San Francisco. And it's built on a ship.
The Arkansas — a three-masted schooner built in New York in eighteen thirty-three — sailed around Cape Horn and arrived in San Francisco in December eighteen forty-nine. The crew abandoned it, same as everyone else, heading for the gold fields. The ship was towed to the tidal flats, the masts were cut off, and a man named Joe Anthony cut a hole in the bow, laid down a gangplank, and opened a bar inside the hull. You walked through the front of a ship and ordered a drink. As the city filled in the waterfront around it, the ship was gradually buried. They built a building on top. It's still here.
And the Arkansas wasn't alone. During the Gold Rush, over five hundred ships were abandoned in the harbor. Five hundred. San Francisco didn't move them. San Francisco moved the land. The city filled in the entire cove with sand and debris, pushed the shoreline east, and buri
ed the ships where they sat.
There are an estimated forty to seventy ships still under the Financial District. Under office buildings. Under parking garages. Every few years a construction crew digs a foundation and hits a hull. In nineteen seventy-eight, workers building the Mark Twain Plaza — right next to the Transamerica Pyramid — found the Niantic, a whaling ship from eighteen forty-nine. It
