All the same, the gantry crane will be the focal point — fog willing. Built in 1947, it was billed as the “mightiest crane in the world,” capable of lifting hundreds of tons. Five decades after it was decommissioned, redevelopment has brought new parks and residents to the city’s southeast, but much of Hunters Point remains contaminated with radiation, a legacy of ships that returned from atomic tests in the Pacific. The crane site is off-limits to the public, and its history is fraught with racism, as the effects of exposure to hazardous material and the loss of shipyard jobs disproportionately hit Black residents.
To Winters, this is all the more reason to project video art onto a structure many San Franciscans may not even be aware of. “It’s an iconic piece of industrial architecture and, at the same time, almost invisible,” he said. “The same erasure that happened in Bayview as a neighborhood happened to this 45-story structure.”