The Sherman: Burlingame’s floating restaurant

The Sherman, initially named the General Frank M. Coxe when it was first christened, was berthed off Airport Boulevard for 43 years, according to the late Burlingame historian Martha May. May died in April 2020, outliving the ship she chronicled through the decades by just a few months.

“I have a lot of happy memories” about the boat, May told the Daily Journal when tug boats pulled The Sherman to Stockton in 2014. “I am 91 years old, the same age as The Sherman, so I feel a kinship with it.” There were also some sad memories. In 1978, Jim Katsaras, owner of the vessel when it was the “Diamond Jim Showboat,” was shot to death by a business partner, who was later acquitted on grounds of insanity.

The voyage to Stockton was a bit of a homecoming for The Sherman. It first docked in Stockton in 1955 and became a restaurant called “The Showboat.” After the Stockton stay, The Sherman went through several owners and operated under different names in various locations. May estimated that the boat had 11 lives as floating restaurants, nine of them in Burlingame. Among the ports of call was Oakland’s Jack London Square where it was a restaurant for 12 years. The Burlingame reincarnations included the Pattaya Princess, a Thai restaurant that closed in 1990.

How the boat’s name went from Coxe to The Sherman is a story in itself. After the Pattaya Princess closed, the Coxe was a vacant hulk until 2006 when restaurateurs bought it from architect Robert Sherman and renamed the ship The Sherman in his honor. The restaurant failed, however, and in 2008 it went into foreclosure.

As the Coxe, which was named for a Civil War army officer, the boat dated back to the days before bridges spanned the Bay and transportation depended on boats. The Coxe was one of thousands of vessels owned and operated by the Army, not the Navy. It was estimated that the General Frank M. Coxe carried 6 million passengers during its military service.

The Coxe sailed San Francisco Bay from 1922 to 1947, ferrying soldiers who garrisoned the ring of forts stretching from Fort Point and Fort Cronkite at the Golden Gate to the Benicia Arsenal at the mouth of the Delta. The Coxe provided regular service between Fort Mason in San Francisco and Fort McDowell on Angel Island, with occasional stops at Alcatraz. During World War II, the Coxe made as many as eight trips a day between Fort Mason and Fort McDowell, which became a critical processing center for troops headed to the Pacific.

After the war, the Coxe underwent another change in name. The “General” designation was dropped, and the boat was renamed the S.S. Frank M. Coxe. It was purchased by the Golden Gate Steamship Line for ferry tours of San Francisco Bay, a role it played until the 1950s.

May, the Burlingame historian, was able to save some items from the vessel’s Army years, according to Jennifer Pfaff of the Burlingame Historical Society.

“A large part of the collection Martha assembled was donated to the Golden Gate Recreation Area archives,” she said. “We were thrilled and so were they.”

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.