Over the weekend, winter storm Kori sent record high waves smashing into the California coast. The National Weather Service said a new wave record was set as the Monterey Bay buoy recorded 34-foot waves. At Seacliff State Beach in Aptos, California, the storm waves tore the stern off the SS Palo Alto, a concrete ship built as a tanker in 1919, at the end of World War I. A storm last winter had rolled the ship to starboard and had cracked the hull. This weekend’s storm may have delivered the coup de grâce.
The SS Palo Alto had a strange but interesting career. Although she was built as a tanker, by the time she was delivered, World War I had ended, so the ship was laid up for a decade, until it was purchased as an “amusement” ship. The Palo Alto was towed to Aptos, California on Monterrey bay. In 1930, the ship was sunk in a few feet in the water off the beach and a pier was built to the ship. Operated by the Seacliff Amusement Corporation, she was refitted a dance floor, a swimming pool and a café.
In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, the company went bankrupt. The state of California took over the ship, stripped her and turned her into a fishing pier, which operated until 1950, when the deteriorating condition of the ship made her unsafe. An attempt at restoration in the 1980s allowed her to be reopened as a fishing pier for a few more years, but then she was shut down again. The ship was briefly opened for foot traffic in 2016.
SS Palo Alto is known locally as the “Cement Boat.” She is one of a dozen ferrocement ships under construction during World War I. None were completed in time to serve in the war. Concrete ships were constructed in both World War I and World War II when steel was in short supply. They were not notably successful, as they were limited in deadweight and had a tendency to crack.
While working at the Santa Cruz Heart Institute (part of the Santa Cruz Community Hospital, now defunct, subsequent to a ‘battle royale’ SCHI was engaged in with Dominican Med Center for cardiac market share at the time…Dominican won, but that’s another very interesting and notorious story that the passage of time has swallowed up, for anyone interested in investigating it by digging into the news story files of the ‘Santa Cruz Senile’ newspaper) in the late 80s, I well recall occasional visits to the SS Palo Alto. It was a rather fascinating anomaly, even then (so many years after she’d been put there) and quite a well-known aspect of the Aptos coastal area. The concept of ferro-cement ship construction was to me a previously unknown technology, although I later came to understand the role this type of hull construction played in marine architecture. It’s sad that recent storms have now rendered her to the point of total destruction, given her long and curiously fascinating history as a notable icon of the Santa Cruz Coast.
As a child I played on there, the last time I was there was in 1985, I was in my 20’s staying at the Maas Hotel in a very un-gentrified Mt. View, waiting for a berth from an SF Hall, one weekend rather than further running up my tab at the 101 bar my and some friends fished there, we caught enough to feed ourselves and the rest of the MFOW/SUP members for a week