Aquatic Park Historic District

Aquatic Park Historic District is a National Historic Landmark and building complex located on the San Francisco Bay waterfront within San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.The district includes a beach, bathhouse, municipal pier, restrooms, concessions stand, stadia, and two speaker towers.The District's San Francisco Maritime Museum building was built as a bathhouse in 1936 by the WPA; in Streamline Moderne style, its interior is decorated with fantastic and colorful murals. The Steamship Room illustrates the evolution of maritime technology from wind to steam, and there are displays of lithographic stones, scrimshaw, and whaling guns and photo-murals of San Francisco's early waterfront. A visiting-attractions gallery hosts such exhibition as Sparks (2005), which showcased shipboard radio, radiotelephone, and radioteletype equipment from over the years.In front of the Maritime Museum is a man-made lagoon on the site of the former Black Point Cove. To the west is the horseshoe-shaped Municipal Pier, which was voted SFWeeklys Best Place to Go Fish 2009. The lagoon is fronted by a sandy beach and a stepped concrete seawall. To the south is a grassy area known as Victorian Park, which contains the Hyde Street cable car turnaround. Hyde Street Pier, though part of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, is not part of Aquatic Park Historic District.It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987, and added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 26, 1984.