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This year marks the 53rd anniversary of the beginnings of  negotiations between the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union and the Pacific Maritime Association over what came to be known as the “Mechanization and Modernization Agreement.”  Signed in October, 1960, after months of talks,  the “M and M agreement” transformed San Francisco’s economy forever, moving its founding industry — shipping and trans shipping — to the East Bay, opening up the land once devoted to maritime uses to real estate development, and setting off the modern political era of San Francisco.

The agreement allowed containerization to come into the San Francisco Bay, making obsolete  the finger piers along San Francisco’s waterfront and the ILWU’s “gangs” that worked on them, hand-loading “break bulk” cargo into the holds of cargo ships. The new technology of shipping cargo in a single  container that could be transported by truck, train, and ship without unloading  transformed maritime trade.

During World War II, shipbuilding and shipping were  fundamental in the effort to move billions of tons of supplies and millions of troops across the global battlefield. In both cases the  San Francisco Bay was ground zero in that in that effort.

Kaiser and Bechtel, two Bay Area-based construction companies, wildly successful in undertaking huge construction projects during the New Deal, were urged to build ships during the war. Kaiser in Richmond and Bechtel in Sausalito constructed  huge shipyards that  built cargo ships by the hundreds, bringing tens of thousands of workers to the Bay Area and changing the demographics of the region for ever. These huge industrial centers didn’t last after the war, and while they transformed who lived in the region, they didn’t really have a lasting economic impact.

But wartime changes in cargo handling did.

For as long as San Francisco had been a city, it depended on its port as the base of its economy. The Gold Rush happened here in part because we had a port and the world rushed in on ships. The enduring fortunes were made during that period by merchants and shipping companies were totally dependent on shipping and cargo handling.

At the heart of the maritime economy was the longshoreman who, by hand, loaded and unloaded ships’ holds. The demand for speed during WWII saw the then-revolutionary introduction of the fork lift truck on the piers of San Francisco, replacing hands with a machine for the first time in the history of the San Francisco waterfront.

But that was only the beginning. New ship designs and new shipping techniques were invented to meet the needs of global war. Since most of the Pacific islands that were the military objectives of the war had no ports or piers, ships were designed that could land directly on a beach and unload preloaded trucks.  Preloaded containers were simply stacked on the decks of Liberty ships, avoiding the need to load the cargo below decks.  By the Korean War these containers were in such regular use by the Army that ships were modified to carry only them, replacing below-deck cargo entirely.

Since ports and piers had been major targets during the war and required extensive rebuilding in both Europe and Asia,  new cargo handling techniques were built into these new facilities, making US ports, undamaged by the war, outmoded and old fashioned.  If US ports were to keep up they had to be modernized.  But who would pay for these new facilities: the shipping business or the government?

San Francisco was still governed by an unbroken line of Republican Mayors during this key period: the anti-New Deal, pro-Mussolini Angelo Rossi; the shipping line owner and anti- ILWU leader Roger Lapham; the pro-real-estate development Elmer Robinson; and finally, the last Republican Mayor of San Francisco, the pro-urban-renewal stalwart George Christopher. These four had no desire to rebuild the waterfront and make the ILWU even stronger. Indeed, Robinson and his successor Christopher had a vision of the waterfront as prime real estate, not working waterfront.

And so, with no commitment to the maritime industry from the city’s leadership and with technological change making the status quo impossible to maintain, Harry Bridges and the leadership of the ILWU cut the best deal they could for their existing members: the 1960 M and M agreement, which gave all existing longshore workers lifetime jobs and very good pay — but sealed the fate of San Francisco waterfront.

By 1962 the Port of Oakland had built its first container facility, and that same year, the first containership, the S.S. Elizabethport, docked and begin loading. By the mid 1970’s, the ILWU was no longer a force in the San Francesco labor movement, its leadership taken by the Building Trades unions  whose  numbers increased as the development boom, fueled by land made vacant by the loss of the maritime industry, grew.

For the rest of the Bay Area, it was San Francisco’s model of waterfront as real estate development that was followed, not Oakland’s investment in cargo shipping. By 1965, development of the Bay was so intense that the McAteer-Petris Act was passed, creating the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a regional body aimed at limiting the powers of local governments (like San Francisco) in filling and over-developing the Bay.

The 8 Washington battle, the struggle over the Hunters Point shipyard, and the looming battle over the use of a port pier for the Warriors arena all have their history deeply rooted in the 1960 M and M agreement.

In this second decade of the 21st century, our greatest challenge is creating and sustaining meaningful employment. Would our prospects be better if we had somehow been able to keep some maritime uses at the port? Would families in Bay View-Hunters Point be more able to buy homes in their own neighborhood if the same kinds of jobs that allowed their grandparents to buy theirs still existed? Would the boom-or-bust cycle of our real-estate dependent local economy been so disruptive if we had a more steady state base of a maritime sector — which kept the Great Depression from being so devastating in San Francisco in the1930s?

These questions are real — and should show that the shape of our economy is made by us and the decisions we make, locally, not solely by techological change, global trends or the far-too-palsied invisible hand of the free market.

Article source: http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/06/29/guardian-voices-labor-agreement-changed-sf

In 1912, Richard Schirrmann, a teacher, created the hostel industry at the medieval Altena Castle in western Germany; the hostel is still operating today. The first hostel in the United States opened in 1934, and now more than 4,000 are operated by Hostel International. The one at Fort Mason, with 170 beds, opened in 1980.

WHO, WHERE, WHEN

Fort Mason, which was built in the 1800s to defend the coast, was named for Richard Barnes Mason, the first and only military governor. The Golden Gate was given its name for its similarity to the Golden Horn in Istanbul; it was named before gold was discovered in California. During World War II, the fort was responsible for shipping 1.5 million soldiers to the South Pacific .

RISE AND FALL

In front of the hostel, a “bridge thermometer,” created by the nearby Exploratorium science museum, measures the height of the Golden Gate Bridge. In cold weather, the steel suspension cables tighten and may cause a rise of up to 5 feet; in warm weather the bridge can drop 11 feet.

WILLING TO DIE FOR IT

East of the hostel, a sign commemorates the death of Senator David Broderick in a duel with David Terry, chief justice of California, in 1859. Broderick was staunchly antislavery. The pro-slavery Terry blamed Broderick for his loss in an election. Duels were illegal in San Francisco, so the match was held outside city limits, though Broderick died here three days later.

HOSTEL NEIGHBORS

A private room at the 10-bed hostel runs from $65 to over $100. Homes neighboring the hostel in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area rent for up to $12,000 per month.

AMBIENCE

In the common room, visitors chat in several languages, though many stare at cellphones or laptops. Quiet time begins at 11 p.m., but foghorns sound through the night. Jeff Coquery, 23, from Paris, wore a T-shirt reading “no phone, no address.” It was the first day of his first solo trip abroad, and he was deliberately off the grid.

lrafkin@baycitizen.org

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/us/fishermans-wharf-youth-hostel-in-san-francisco.html

The earthquake anecdote is telling because, even though Michael was more conventional in many of his tastes than Sarah, Leo or Gertrude — herself then a budding literary artist — all the Steins were so deeply immersed in new art that sharing their enthusiasms was simply integral to their understanding of the pleasure and purpose of the activity. Sarah went so far as to help Matisse open a Paris art school. Proselytizing give and take — intellectually and emotionally — was part of what it was all about.

The Modern art battle, of course, is long since won. However, Matisse is also of special importance to SFMOMA.

The permanent collection is generally weak in art made prior to World War II, but easily its greatest early 20th-century masterpiece is Matisse’s half-length portrait of his wife, Amélie, looking over her shoulder. She clutches a fan and wears a great pile of a hat, as if sporting a bourgeois crown (Erykah Badu, eat your heart out). Leo Stein famously described it as “the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.” The Steins, pooling resources, bought it from the 1905 Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais, where the painting’s delirious chromatic splendor was a sensation. Its brilliant, unorthodox palette was key to coining the negative critical term Fauves — “wild beasts” — for Matisse and his cohorts.

Michael and Sarah (“Sally” to her friends) brought it to the Bay Area in 1935– coincidentally, the same year the San Francisco museum was founded; as fascism and anti-Semitism darkened the European landscape, they returned to stay for good. Eventually, SFMOMA benefactors Walter and Elise Haas bought “Woman with a Hat” and 20 years ago bequeathed it to the museum. Indeed, “The Steins  Collect,” with this picture and the circuitous tale of its arrival in town as a hinge, almost seems pitched as exemplary historical encouragement for the substantial base of contemporary art collectors now in San Francisco.

Leo was the first Stein sibling to go to Paris, in 1903, after a few years living in Florence, Italy. There he had visited another American ex-pat — Charles Loeser, who was one of Cézanne’s first and most prolific collectors. The visit was fateful.

The show’s first room lays out Leo’s initial collecting interests, including five Cézanne paintings and lithographs. Among them is his beloved little still life of five apples, plus a primitive scene of six bathers in a pastoral landscape — which belonged not to Leo but to Loeser.

The Cézanne painting of naked bathers is a subtle bud, which soon blossoms. Amid modest works by Manet, Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec is a voluptuous 1875 Renoir nude, sunlight sparkling through foliage to dapple her fleshy torso. Nearby hangs Felix Vallotton’s sleek, 1904 pastiche of Manet’s shocking prostitute-on-display, “Olympia,” which upset the French Academy 40 years before. The Vallotton simplifies her reclining nude body into flattened areas of hard-edge color, while her dark-haired head is haloed by a bright, brushy yellow pillow.

Nudes, male and female, continue to dominate the first half of the show, which is installed chronologically — roughly according to when the Steins acquired specific works. A nude set in a landscape (or sometimes an interior) turns up again and again — from Picasso’s rose-period “Boy Leading a Horse” through a barren landscape, where the artist is tentatively assimilating Cézanne, to Matisse’s ferocious and frankly radical “Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra,” her twisting muscular body writhing in a primordial jungle.

A traditional voluptuary image, the nude in a landscape is, for a convulsively modernizing urban world, also a metaphor of Eden lost. I counted nearly 50 examples in the first nine rooms. These galleries radiate the intense desire to navigate a rambunctious new society in extremist flux — not only by the European artists, but by the inquisitive American collectors — and to build something marvelous from scratch.

The show does include some mostly forgotten figures, such as the German Fauvist Hans Purrmann and the Polish-born Cubist Louis Marcoussis. But it’s heavy on Matisse (around 60 works) and Picasso (around 40). Friendly but determined competitors, the two artists were championed by various Steins.

Generally, Michael and Sarah favored Henri, while Leo and Gertrude settled on Pablo.

Eventually Leo and Gertrude had a falling out and divvied up their collection– he taking the Renoirs, she the Picassos. In fact, of the four Steins, the two women seem the ones most committed to exploration through adventurous art collecting — perhaps because society relegated women to second-class citizenship as painters and sculptors themselves. Collecting was one way for them to participate and influence.

It’s worth noting, too, that the Stein family did it without huge wealth. Yes, they were comfortable; if they watched their expenses they could live off Bay Area investments and buy art if they pooled their resources. But we’re not talking the wealth of an H.O. Havemeyer, who controlled the entire U.S. sugar market, or a Loeser and his Brooklyn department-store fortune.

Or, for that matter, the Haas family and Levi Strauss.

Art dealers also liked the Steins, which helped. As James R. Mellow noted in his indispensable 2003 book, “Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company,” the wily dealer Ambroise Vollard said they were his only clients who bought pictures “not because they were rich, but despite the fact that they weren’t.”

The Steins instead were on a mission — to promote and encourage new art and boost the artists they admired. Generally it worked out, if not always in the particulars, as this show makes clear. But certainly it looks like they had a whole lot of fun.

“The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant Garde,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., San Francisco, (415) 357-4000, through Sept. 6. Closed Weds. www.sfmoma.org

ALSO:

Art review: “Michael McMillen” at the Oakland Museum

Critic’s Notebook: The Getty’s Stubborn Politics

Art review: “Paris: Life Luxury in the 18th Century” at the Getty Museum

– Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Photos, from top: Henri Matisse, “Woman with a Hat,” 1905, oil on canvas; Pablo Picasso, “Gertrude Stein,” 1906, oil on canvas; Henri Matisse, “Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra,” 1907, oil on canvas; Pablo Picasso, “The Architect’s Table,” 1912, oil on canvas.

Article source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/05/art-review-the-steins-collect-matisse-picasso-and-the-parisian-avant-garde-at-the-san-francisco-muse.html