They knew it was coming. Life on San Francisco’s Pier 54 was borrowed time.
The old pier, which juts into the bay across the street from the gleaming Chase Center, is one of the few relics of the waterfront neighborhood that hasn’t gotten an upgrade in the past decade or so. And it never will.
“Internally, it’s been on the ‘do not resuscitate’ list,” Port of San Francisco executive director Elaine Forbes said at the agency’s August meeting. Unlike many of the city’s piers that have become tech offices, cruise ship terminals, and science museums, it’s too structurally unsound to restore.
Now Pier 54 tenants must move by the end of the year. The largest one is the Parade Guys, which is also by far the biggest maker of parade floats for all the big SF festivities, including Pride, Carnaval, Juneteenth, Italian Heritage, and more.
They were the exclusive float maker for this year’s Chinese New Year Parade – 20 floats in all. Concerned clients are well aware of the situation.
“We are exploring ways to help Stephanie with other parades in town. There isn’t another parade float builder locally that we are aware of,” says Robyn Adams, in charge of social media and creative services for SF Pride.
New digs
The Port is offering new digs for The Parade Guys about three miles north, inside Pier 19 near the Exploratorium. The question, though, is whether it offers enough space for the company to store all its wares.n the past 12 years at Pier 54, have sprawled beyond its jam-packed indoor shed to take up much of the pier’s outdoor space.
There are flatbed chassis, wooden frames, tiki huts, Olmec heads – a multitude of funhouse figures, corporate logos, and dance platforms waiting silently for the next party.
Being outdoors has its glitches — “We’ve had some signs fly into the bay,” says the Parade Guys owner Stephanie Mufson – but has perks as well. Mufson sweeps her arms in an arc as she leads an impromptu tour of the pier’s outer reaches, with spectacular views of the Bay Bridge, the East Bay hills, and more.
Mufson came to SF in 2004 after studying fine arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and loved the city’s openness to art. She still does: “I think that San Francisco is still more creative than most places. It’s in the air here.”
Parade Guys having to scale down could certainly mean fewer floats in our parade.
Robyn Adams, sf pride
When the Parade Guys moved in 2012 from Pier 27, giving way to the cruise ship terminal, their Port landlords told them, “This is temporary, there are structural issues with the pier, we’ll monitor it and let you know,” says Mufson. “Then a month ago they called and said it’s officially no longer suitable.”
To help the Parade Guys and 10 other tenants, including a theater group and a cleaning company, the Port is offering new five-year deals to those who want to stay on Port property. The first year, the rent would remain at this year’s level. The second year would bring a 5 percent bump. Years three to five, the rent would scale up to the market rate from the year the lease was signed.
This arrangement lets the Port keep stability with tenants and continue a revenue stream that would “otherwise end with the closure of the pier,” said Kimberley Beal, the Port’s assistant deputy director of real estate, at last month’s public meeting.
The Parade Guys is actually subleasing the Pier 54 space from the SF Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which runs the Chinese New Year Parade. Harlan Wong, who is retiring as director of the parade, says the chamber is “in negotiation” with the Port for a similar arrangement: “We are exploring options with Stephanie so that it will not be necessary to look for another float maker. There will be enough space at Pier 19.”
Mufson said last week there was “nothing on paper yet” but the Port was “doing their best to work with me.”
‘We used to sell out for Pride’
The move comes at a delicate moment. Materials like plywood and foam cost more than ever. Ten years ago, a sheet of foam was about $60, and now it’s $150, says Mufson. She points to a metallic dog statue. “That’s about $1,000 in material cost before I hire anyone to carve it, paint it, and install it.”
Hiring is her biggest expense. According to Mufson, the company paid out $600,000 last year, mostly to freelance artists who join the team during parade season.
While expenses rise, revenues still haven’t returned to pre-COVID levels as organizations and companies try to justify spending money on parade floats: “We used to sell out for Pride,” says Mufson. “I used to have people banging down the doors.”
(If you’re cheering the idea of less corporate involvement in Pride, Mufson doesn’t want to hear it: “When you complain about the corporate money, it’s funding creatives to do what they love. The work we do helps provide a community and a little stability to people who are used to the gig life.”)
For a quirky small business, the Parade Guys occupy an outsized economic niche at a fraught moment. The city is desperate to show everyone that it’s a great place to have fun, and downtown events are a cornerstone of the strategy: Street festivals, party zones, outdoor concerts, and, yes, good old parades.
In 2014, the city’s most recent economic analysis, outdoor events brought in 3.3 million visitors, who dropped nearly $300 million into the city’s economy. Adding indirect impact, the events contributed $1.1 billion to SF’s economy. Despite the pandemic lull, these figures have undoubtedly gone up. Some outlets have reported this year’s Pride contributed $500 million to the local economy, which The Frisc could not immediately confirm.
Even if the city’s No. 1 – make that only – float maker hits a production bottleneck, parades will continue. The show must go on, after all. But it could be a step backward in San Francisco’s long haul toward recovery.
As SF Pride’s Robyn Adams acknowledges, “Parade Guys having to scale down could certainly mean fewer floats in our parade” – and right at the moment when San Francisco needs more, not less, of what brings people together to celebrate.
The Parade Guys have had to, not only move their operations more than once in the last 25 years I have had the pleasure of working with them as SF Pride Parade manager and more, they’ve also had to downsize both their storage and working space within that time. Stephanie and her crew do masterful work that has been complimented as rivaling even that of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, which she might be too modest to mention! She and previous builder, Dave Thomas, have outlasted some of the longest in a challenging business, in the San Francisco Bay Area. A loss of their venue would be detrimental, not only to the Parades that contract them, it would also have a dramatic change on the face of our largest parades, that help bring tourism to San Francisco.