(Market St. Railway mural) SECTION 3: 1930's Labor Day Parade

This green-tinted section shows a Labor Day Parade on Market Street in the late thirties or fourties.

Marching in single file, with their characteristic white hats,  are rank and file longshoremen of the ILWU.

This yearly event on San Francisco's Market Street was suppressed during the McCarthy era. 

While poring over historic photographs of all sorts of parades on Market Street, I was struck by the unusual choreography of this parade: the single files of people marching parallel to the street differs from typical parades, which tend to have perpendicular rows of people, moving as "fronts". I felt instinctively that the more rigidly perpendicular to the street the people walk, the more martial the event feels, somehow. So as an example of a formal parade on Market street, I chose this unusual, and forgotten, solemn but not martial looking one.