As part of the Navy’s effort to evaluate America’s waterfront industrial inventory, a “senior member” from the Secretary of the Navy’s staff quietly surveyed the industrial “capability and capacity” of an underutilized portion of the San Francisco Bay waterfront earlier this month, evaluating a long-abandoned World War II-era shipyard for possible naval use.
While the Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro’s infrastructure-boosting visit to the now privatized former Naval Shipyard on Mare Island was widely publicized, the Navy’s visit to the shipyard portion of the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park was apparently low-key and largely overlooked.
News of the visit, detailed in an October 3 Navy press release was not included in an almost identical October 2 release from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.
The visit was unique in that the site is a relatively newly-established National Park. Created in October 2000, the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park celebrates both the World War II home front and San Francisco Bay Area’s contributions to the war effort.
The Navy’s interest in the site’s potential is obvious. While the park encompasses the largest U.S. concentration of intact civilian World War II historic structures and sites, the long-dormant Kaiser Richmond Shipyard (Shipyard No. 3) is one of the few remaining unused waterfront industrial sites in San Francisco Bay still administered by the U.S. government
The shipyard, owned by the City of Richmond and managed by the National Park Service is aging, but still largely intact. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the shipyard is the sole remaining example of the four shipyards shipbuilder-industrialist Henry J. Kaiser constructed in Richmond California.
While active, those four shipyards sprawled over almost 880 acres, where they pioneered new manufacturing techniques and produced some 747 “Liberty” ships, “Victory” ships and other vessels for the war effort.
The Navy’s visit came just days after Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro advocated for an “all-of-government” effort to improve America’s waterfront industrial base.
According to the Navy, a “senior member from SECNAV’s staff conducted a site inspection of Richmond Shipyard to assess its capability and capacity including Richmond’s six graving docks, large railhead and expansive modular assembly area.”
While this visit may have been a simple effort to better understand how America developed the waterfront before World War II, and easily dismissed as something of a traditional military education “staff ride” through a battlefield in on of America’s National Battlefield Memorial Parks, the Navy’s statement certainly gives the impression the Navy was evaluating the potential to redevelop the shipyard.
The Navy deferred any additional comments, emphasizing that the visit was part of an ongoing effort to visit and evaluate America’s diverse industrial capabilities on the waterfront.
Reactivating the Richmond Shipyard is an interesting gambit. In itself, the Richmond site, as a government-administered piece of industrial waterfront, has real potential—easy access to the ocean and existing, albeit old, infrastructure.
That said, reactivating a shipyard in a National Park would be a fascinating spin on “living history.” But, appropriating an irreplaceable Bay Area National Park resource for a new naval or private shipyard poses both a daunting engineering task and, potentially, an enormously controversial political lift.
A greenfield site, farther up the San Juaquin/Sacramento River delta and nearer to a viable labor pool, might be a better option.
Difficult But Not Unprecedented
Both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of the Interior have a long history of supporting the Department of Defense, offering their vast wild-land holdings for military training, operational uses and other national purposes.
In World War I, the Gettysburg National Military Park became an infantry training camp, and later, the site of the first Tank School in the United States. Other soldiers used National Park property to ready for trench warfare, practicing in and around the trenches preserved on the fields of the Petersburg National Battlefield Park.
In World War II, General George S. Patton established the Desert Training Center in part of the Mojave National Park Service Preserve. Members of the U.S. Army Signal Corps trained at Yosemite. In Washington, the National Park Service-managed Fort Hunt became an intelligence center while the nearby Catoctin Mountain and Prince William Forrest Parks became training areas for shadowy members of the Office of Strategic Services. Many other parks served as rest and recovery centers, test areas, or training sites.
In the Cold War, the government continued to use a number of National Park Service facilities for military purposes. In Florida, the HM-69 Nike missile base was located within the grounds of the Everglades National Park, home to a mix of nuclear-tipped and conventional air-defense missiles. Outside of air defense, National Parks in southern Florida served as CIA training grounds, radio transmitter sites, SIGINT facilities, weapons caches and were host to many other interesting activities critical for the national defense.
The collaborations aren’t always seamless. In the past, Defense Department requests for special use National Park permits have sparked public outcry and political standoffs. A 1950’s-era proposal to convert Virginia’s Prince William Forrest Park into a clandestine training area provoked opposition from “local civic leaders including the editor of the Washington Star and the district’s influential member of Congress, Representative Howard W. Smith.”
The intra-governmental partnerships haven’t always ended well, either. At Prince William Forrest Park, World War II-era property disputes between the National Park Service and the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia went unresolved for more than sixty years, with bickering over the contested area taking up more of the local Park administrator’s time “than anything else.”
It is an effective relationship. Quiet Department of Defense activities undoubtably continue today in National Parks, Forrest Service properties, National Wildlife Refuges and in many other federal government properties, but these efforts are likely smaller, transient and far more easily “rolled back” than the establishment of a shipyard or other major industrial site.
Can Richmond Become America’s Shipyard Again?
In the Bay area, a Navy-directed restoration of Richmond Shipyard #3 to active service as a shipyard is possible, but the initiative would likely present a multifaceted challenge versus a greenfield or brownfield site somewhere else in the Bay Area.
While the Richmond shipyard offers the Navy a railway, easy sea access and several other potential logistical advantages, industrial development at the site would likely be constrained, pricey and controversial.
Any future operator of the shipyard would need to update and rebuild aging World War II-era graving docks and shoreside facilities, and, with the active Hayward Fault a few miles away, shipyard docks, cranes and other facilities would need to be built strong enough to withstand a major earthquake.
The shipyard is also a historical site, and the Navy—or the Navy’s development parter—would be pressed to preserve the remaining historically-relevant structures. The legacy cafeteria, first aid station, forge, machine ship, warehouse and paint shop all still exist, and would need to either be incorporated into an active yard or preserved in place.
Given the National Park Service’s preservation-oriented mandate, the Navy may even be forced to return the site to its original state after use.
Now, this isn’t quite a new thing for the Navy—many of the Navy’s own shipyards are historical sites in themselves, and some key Navy-owned drydocks and buildings are nationally recognized for their historical significance. But historical preservation requirements, accompanied by intrusive oversight and higher costs, can complicate and even limit development options.
It’s hard to make a modern, super-efficient shipyard when historical structures are in the way. It is one of the reasons the Navy’s multi-billion-dollar shipyard recapitalization project is over budget and behind schedule.
Management of the site might also prove a challenge. As a City of Richmond-owned and National Park Service-managed site, coordinating with both entities to modernize and reactivate the shipyard may pose a daunting challenge for Navy industrial managers and partners.
For the Navy, the challenge of leveraging this unique piece of real estate is obvious. But, for an organization desperate for more waterfront help, the temptation is hard to resist.
On the West Coast, few viable sites are open for industrial development. And, while an old shipyard, under the administration of the National Park Service, might offer some interesting potential, the Navy has an obligation to look at other options, be it Mare Island or other greenfield or brownfield openings further inland, where labor and West Coast land are more easily accessed.
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