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America’s Last Emperor: Wharf
Chapter Eleven
May 16th, 1853
Norton stood in the crowd at the foot of Honest Harry Meigg’s new wharf and marveled at it.
It was the sheer size of the thing. Harry was proud of boasting that it went 2000 feet out into the bay. This was certainly believable. He’d taken giant redwood trees that he’d fashioned into piles and driven them into the bay mud up to sixty feet deep. Then he’d poured sand between the piles and built an extension of Powell Street out into the bay. On this foundation, he’d built a pier over sixty feet wide that stretched into the sea and a wharf off the end of that.
“A wharf is parallel to the shore, a pier is perpendicular,” Harry said when correcting people who called it a pier. Norton reflected that this probably wasn’t very often, because everyone in San Francisco called all the piers that jutted from the financial district wharves. Norton forgave them the nuance, because only a couple of years before the piers had actually been wharves.
They’d turned off the steam paddy for the ceremony to open the wharf. There were two steam paddies in town now, one in North Beach and one down south of Market Street by Norton’s Genesee Warehouse. They were giant digging contraptions, named that because one bucket could shovel as much earth as a hundred Irishmen. The steam paddies…
