Sailors Union Building
450 Harrison
Andrew Furuseth (1854 – 1938) of Norway was a merchant seaman and an American labor leader. Furuseth was active in the formation of two influential maritime unions: the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific and the International Seamen’s Union, and served as the executive of both for decades.
Furuseth was largely responsible for the passage of four reforms that changed the lives of American mariners. Two of them, the Maguire Act of 1895 and the White Act of 1898, ended corporal punishment and abolished imprisonment for deserting a vessel.
Furuseth was credited as the key figure behind drafting and enacting the Seamen’s Act of 1915, hailed by many as “The Magna Carta of the Sea” and the Jones Act of 1920 which governs the workers’ compensation rights of sailors and the use of foreign vessels in domestic trade. In his later years, he was known as “the Old Viking.”
This statue was done by Hal Bayard Runyon in 1940 and dedicated on Labor Day, 1941. It was a gift of the Sailors Union of the Pacific and is now part of the San Francisco Civic Art Collection.
Hal Bayard Runyon was born in San Francisco, CA on Jan. 31, 1907. Runyon was active in Hollywood during the early 1930s as a portraitist for the movie colony. He later was an architect for the U.S. Navy and then worked for Bechtel as a designer of nuclear power plants in Afganistan and Saudi Arabia. While in this capacity, he sculpted and painted as a hobby. After retiring from Bechtel, he devoted his remaining years to painting. He lived in San Francisco for many years before his death in Sonoma, CA on July 11, 1993.
The Maritime Union Building and its monuments are for me among the most poignant reminders of just how far our city has fallen during the past five decades. i remember when the Port of San Francisco was still booming and Treasure Island was an active US Navy base. The residential hotels of the central city and even the Mission District were full of merchant marines, and the Maritime and Longshoreman Unions were proud and powerful icons of the working class spirit that made San Francisco one of the most vital and trend-setting cities of the twentieth century. And today, most all of that is forgotten. i doubt that many present-day San Franciscans even know that the Maritime Union Building even exists, much less what it once was or what it represents, and that just breaks my heart. I have the deepest love and respect for the fine work you’re doing to document so much of what’s best about San Francisco.
Thank you.
There’s a man I’d like to make acquaintance of!
It’s wonderful that the sailors are keeping their history alive or at least trying to!
Great information to go with the photo.