SAN FRANCISCO – Peter Dailey, the Port of San Francisco's veteran maritime director, says he knows exactly when the cruise ship business became cool again in this historic seaport: Feb. 4, 2007.
That was when tens of thousands of cheering San Franciscans lined the city's shores and jammed the Embarcadero to get a glimpse of the massive Cunard ocean liner Queen Mary 2 as it made its maiden call.
"The scene, well. … Let's just say that now I can imagine what it must have been like when the Beatles played Candlestick in '66 – just amazing. Just crazy," Dailey said.
He and his colleagues at the port are on a mission to cement and enhance the cruise industry's presence in San Francisco. The fate of the city's historic waterfront hangs in large part on their success.
"Each time a cruise liner calls here, between $700,000 and $1 million is generated in direct purchases of goods and services," he said. "So, you can see why it's in our best interest to do all that we can to foster and support this industry."
mjones@sacbee.com - Cruise ships such as the Norwegian Sun now dock at Pier 35, but port officials want a new terminal at Pier 27. Federal stimulus dollars would partly fund the project, which would be designed to host special city events when ships aren't visiting.
mjones@sacbee.com - The Norwegian Sun approaches San Francisco's Pier 35 at daybreak earlier this month. Port commissioners are poised to authorize a design team to plan a 120,000-square-foot, $60 million cruise ship terminal at Pier 27. They hope to further entice a tourist industry that brought 175,000 passengers to the city last year.
mjones@sacbee.com - When a cruise ship visits San Francisco, according to a port official, the city's recession-battered tourist economy gets a boost.
To be sure, the cruise business, like all sectors of the economy, has been battered this year by the worldwide recession. But more than 175,000 passengers sailed to or from San Francisco in 2008 aboard about 60 liners, port statistics show.
Port officials say their next priority is to build a first-class cruise ship passenger terminal to replace the existing terminal at Pier 35 – an aging facility lacking the amenities modern passengers are accustomed to.
Dailey said port commissioners are scheduled this month to authorize teams of architects and engineers to design the 120,000-square-foot, $60 million terminal to be located where Pier 27 now stands at the foot of Lombard Street.
Unlike two recent attempts that involved private development money, this time the port – an arm of the city and county of San Francisco – will pay for the ambitious project, using a combination of new bond sales, cash on hand and federal stimulus dollars.
"There is an urgency to do this," Dailey said. "If this doesn't get built, experts tell us that we could be physically shut out by the (cruise line) business."
Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor-in-chief of the Web site CruiseCritic.com, which covers the industry, said she applauds San Francisco's efforts.
"Honestly, I'm a little surprised it's taken them this long to start doing these kinds of things. … You don't want these customers walking through some shop-worn pier shed," she said.
As currently planned, construction on the new terminal would start sometime in 2013 and be finished about 12 months later. The 1,300-foot-long pier and terminal will be designed to serve as a community special-event space when cruise liners are not in port.
To date, the city's biggest cruise partner is Princess Cruises, which started making regular calls in 1969 when its Princess Italia first passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. Since then, the company has made more than 1,000 sailings from the city, mostly to Alaska's Glacier Bay or the Mexican Riviera, port officials said.
But constructing a multimillion-dollar passenger terminal isn't the only thing San Francisco is doing to attract and hold the cruise ship industry.
In 2007, the port joined with BAE Ship Repair Systems and Princess Cruises to take a page from the port's history of ship repair. The public-private consortium spent about $5 million to renovate two massive floating dry docks moored off Pier 70 in the southeastern part of the city.
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