Salt air and the smell of the sea greet you at the working waterfront that fed San Francisco for a century. Fisherman's Wharf developed in the 1850s as Italian immigrants — mostly from Genoa and Sicily — established a fishing fleet that harvested the bay and the Pacific for Dungeness crab, shrimp, salmon, and sardine. At its peak, more than 500 fishing boats worked out of this wharf, and the Italian fishing families who crewed them formed one of the most tight-knit communities in the city.
The DiMaggio family — including Joe DiMaggio, who became the greatest hitter in baseball — worked these docks. The sardine industry that supplied the city largely collapsed in the 1940s when the sardine populations crashed due to overfishing and ocean temperature changes, the same collapse that shuttered the canneries of Monterey that John Steinbeck immortalized in Cannery Row. Today the crab pots on the docks are still worked, and the vendors selling sourdough bowls of clam chowder continue a tradition the Italian families established.
The sea lions that colonized Pier 39 in 1989, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, have become the wharf's most popular inhabitants. Listen for them barking from the docks.