page_title: Hunters Point Naval Shipyard
section_title: Navy purchase
hierarchical_section_title: Hunters Point Naval Shipyard / History / Navy purchase
caption_attribution_description: An aerial photograph of the San Francisco Naval Shipyard at Hunters' Point, San Francisco, California (USA), taken by a plane from the U.S. Navy photographic squadron VJ-1 from an altitude of 2.300 m on 24 May 1945. The aircraft carrier USS Intrepid (CV-11) is visible in the center, with the Crane Ship No. 1 (ex-USS Kearsarge (BB-5)) on her port side. The light aircraft carrier USS Cabot (CVL-28) is visible in the drydock in the lower half of the picture. The battleship USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) is visible at the pier in the upper part of the picture. USS Drum (SS-228), one of two submarines, is visible bottom right.
context_page_description: The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was a United States Navy shipyard in San Francisco, California, located on 638 acres of waterfront at Hunters Point in the southeast corner of the city.
  Originally, Hunters Point was a commercial shipyard established in 1870, consisting of two graving docks. It was purchased and built up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by the Union Iron Works company, later owned by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company and named Hunters Point Drydocks, located at Potrero Point.
  Known as "The World's Greatest Shipping Yard", President Theodore Roosevelt trusted his Great White Fleet of battleships to be serviced at Hunters Point in 1907 according to historical records.
  The shipyard was purchased by the Navy in 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It began operations the next year as the San Francisco Naval Shipyard, and operated until 1974 when it was deactivated and renamed Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Used commercially for a time, in 1986 it was taken over by the Navy again as the home port of the USS Missouri battlegroup, under the name Treasure Island Naval Station Hunters Point Annex.
context_section_description: At the start of World War II the Navy recognized the need for greatly increased naval shipbuilding and repair facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in 1940 acquired the property from the private owners, naming it Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. A bill that would have set aside $6 million for the purchase of the Hunters Point property from Bethlehem Steel was deferred in March 1939. The property became one of the major shipyards of the west coast. It was later renamed Treasure Island Naval Station Hunters Point Annex.  During the 1940s, many workers moved into the area to work at this shipyard and other wartime related industries.
  The key fissile components of the first atomic bomb were loaded onto USS Indianapolis in July 1945 at Hunters Point for transfer to Tinian. After World War II and until 1969, the Hunters Point shipyard was the site of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the US military's largest facility for applied nuclear research. The yard was used after the war to decontaminate ships from Operation Crossroads. Because of all the testing, there is widespread radiological contamination of the site. After the war, with an influx of blue collar industry, the area remained a naval base and commercial shipyard.
  In 1947 an enormous gantry crane with a 450-long-ton (460 t) capacity was completed at the site by the American Bridge Company. It was the largest crane in the world, and was intended to be used to remove the turrets of battleships so the guns could be quickly replaced while the old set was being refurbished on land. The Hunter's Point crane succeeded YD-171, better known as Herman the German, as the largest crane in America.
  In 1959 the gantry crane was the site of Operation Skycatch, where dummy Polaris missiles were fired and caught via a string of arresting cables, before being lowered to the ground for testing. Previous versions of the test had the missiles flung out into the bay and retrieved from the ocean floor. The crane dominates the landscape in the area as it is easily visible from miles around.
  A large frame was erected atop the gantry crane for the UGM-73 Poseidon missile test facility; the structural members were lifted by Marine Boss in 1967. According to Peri Cosseboom, who served as supervising project civil engineer, the trapezoid shaped frame atop the gantry crane was constructed in 1985 as a system design feature for the Trident missile test launch tubes, bringing the total height of the crane to nearly 500 feet (150 m). This made the gantry crane one of the tallest man-made structures in San Francisco surpassed in height by the Golden Gate Bridge.
caption: Aerial photograph taken on 24 May 1945.
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