🚢 Meiggs Wharf for kids

Look toward the water. Long ago, a pier stuck out from this shoreline farther than almost anyone thought a pier should. It was called Meiggs Wharf, and it was shaped like a giant letter L. It stretched somewhere between sixteen hundred and two thousand feet into the bay. That is more than five football fields laid end to end, all built out of wooden poles and planks!

A man from Boston named Henry Meiggs built it. He wanted huge lumber ships to tie up here, so that the land around it, which would become North Beach, would fill up with buyers and businesses. Here's the twist. The wharf cost so much that it bankrupted him. That means he ran out of money completely.

Imagine building the world's longest diving board and then not being able to pay for the wood. But the wharf didn't vanish. It became a big part of North Beach and of San Francisco social life, a place where people came to stroll and gather. Now look out the window and try to guess how far out into the bay you would have to walk to reach the end of it.