Redwood City port celebrated 70th anniversary

Redwood City port celebrated 70th anniversary    The Port of Redwood City, one of a handful of ports lining the Bay Area waterfront, celebrated its 70th anniversary with a weekend festival.
   Operating in southern San Francisco Bay since before the Civil War, the port became an official part of the city in the summer of 1937. Beginning life in 1850 as a redwood timber port and the later as a Gold Rush goods center, the port became the nucleus around which the city of Redwood City was built.
   It is also one of the birthplaces of the California shipbuilding industry, with massive wooden vessels built at its dry docks through the early 1880s. Numerous dredging projects through the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries allowed the port to continue operations as ship traffic in the Bay Area grew and vessels became larger.
   By the 1930s, the port had become a center for fish products and cement. In 1936, city bond money paid for the centralization of the port's facilities to their current location and formalized the port's place in the city government the following year.
   Today Redwood City's facilities are heavily focused on construction material imports including cement and gypsum, used to manufacture wallboard. The recent slowdown in the housing market resulted in a 21.6 percent decrease in tonnage in the fiscal year that ended June 30, but the port continues to be profitable and remains an important piece of the region’s economy.
   Sunday's celebration included a visit from the World War II-era vessel Jeremiah O’Brien. A veteran of the Normandy invasion on D-Day and 16 months in the Pacific Theater, the O’Brien is a National Historic Landmark.