Western Pipe and Steel began as a manufacturing company producing steel pipe and structural components. In World War I, the company expanded into shipbuilding, constructing vessels for the U.S. Shipping Board. Between the wars, WPS participated in the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, one of the New Deal's most ambitious public works projects. The dam required massive quantities of steel pipe and structural steel -- exactly the kind of work WPS was built to do. This diversification between infrastructure and shipbuilding gave the company the industrial base it would need when war returned.

During World War II, Western Pipe and Steel constructed ships for the Maritime Commission at a pace that reflected the industrial mobilization of the entire country. The shipyard built cargo vessels, tankers, and warships, contributing to the enormous fleet that sustained Allied operations across two oceans. Like other Bay Area shipyards -- Bethlehem Steel, Marinship, Kaiser's Richmond yards -- WPS drew workers from across the country, including African Americans from the South and women entering industrial work for the first time. The wartime shipbuilding boom transformed the demographics and economics of the San Francisco Bay Area.

After the war, declining military orders and changing industrial economics led to the contraction of the Bay Area's shipbuilding industry. Western Pipe and Steel, like many wartime industrial companies, found that the peacetime economy could not sustain wartime production levels. The company's legacy lives in the ships it built -- cargo vessels that carried American goods across the Pacific, warships that projected American power, and the dam that still generates electricity for the Pacific Northwest. The San Francisco Bay shoreline where WPS operated has been redeveloped, the shipyard buildings replaced by commercial and residential construction that shows no trace of the welding torches and launch cradles that once defined the waterfront.