The San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park has announced that in 2021 it surpassed a visitation milestone of 125 million accumulated recreation visits since its establishment in 1988.

A spokesperson for the park said that last year alone, the park had over 2.8 million visitors, up one million from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The park is located at the west end of Fisherman’s Wharf and includes historic ships, a visitor center, a maritime museum, a research center, and an aquatic park historic district.

Dale Dualan, a management analyst for the park, said that of America’s 423 parks in the National Park system, just 25 received more than 50 percent of the system’s total 297.1 million recreation visits in 2021.

Dualan said that the Maritime National Historical Park’s 1.9 million visitors in 2020 spent $49.2 million in “gateway” communities which supported 500 local jobs, according to a National Park Service Visitor Spending Effects Report.

Katy St. Clair got her start in journalism by working in the classifieds department at the East Bay Express during the height of alt weeklies, then sweet talked her way into becoming staff writer, submissions editor, and music editor. She has been a columnist in the East Bay Express, SF Weekly, and the San Francisco Examiner. Starting in 2015, she begrudgingly scaled the inverted pyramid at dailies such as the Vallejo Times-Herald, The Vacaville Reporter, and the Daily Republic. She has her own independent news site and blog that covers the delightfully dysfunctional town of Vallejo, California, where she also collaborates with the investigative team at Open Vallejo. A passionate advocate for people with developmental disabilities, she serves on both the Board of the Arc of Solano and the Arc of California. She lives in Vallejo.