Path To The Past

Located at the south-eastern corner of the Dogpatch historic district in San Francisco is the Dogpatch Ropewalk, completed in 2018 with a budget of $1.2 million. An engaging public passageway, it functions as a large-scale green infrastructure as well as an outdoor museum to the site’s industrial maritime history.

- David Fletcher

The project is situated on a site that once mediated the boundary between land and bay over 1.2 acres and was once home to the Tubbs Cordage Company, a maritime ropemaking factory whose pier extended far out into the waters of the San Francisco Bay. Taking inspiration from the site’s industrial past and connections to maritime history, Fletcher Studio designed an engaging public passageway that revives the historic pier and offers the public opportunities to engage with the history of Tubbs Cordage.

The design consists of an elevated boardwalk, which floats over a constructed bioretention wetland and connects two public plazas. These plazas feature an outdoor museum, interactive art, and a variety of custom-designed furnishings. There are many layers of contemporary history to experience such as the intersection of Third and 23rd streets. Here, the uncharacteristic angle of historic homes hint at the site’s heritage, the location of the Tubbs Cordage Company Ropewalk, whose slanted pier once pierced the traditionally gridded fabric of the neighbourhood, extending more than one-thousand feet into the Bay, and connecting the ropemaking factory with its maritime customers.