PIER 39

Before this was a bustling waterfront destination, the location sat as a quiet, dilapidated cargo pier built in nineteen hundred and five. It remained largely unused until nineteen seventy-eight, when entrepreneur Warren Simmons transformed the site into a massive forty-five acre shopping and dining complex. He salvaged wood from old, decommissioned piers like pier three and pier thirty-four to construct the new marketplace, literally weaving pieces of the city's maritime history into the building's framework. This project was the first commercial development on the San Francisco waterfront since the second world war, and it paved the way for the transformation of the entire Embarcadero area.