Some came for their boots and hard hats. Others for their final paycheck. They stood outside the shipyard gates at Pier 70 with trash bags full of work clothes and talked about stuff people usually talk about when the boss lays everyone off.

Medical insurance. Pensions. Job prospects. Who was responsible for messing up their lives.

At 8 o’clock, a horn blasted in the yard. “Break time!” joked Eric Lee, who spent 12 good years at the shipyard. Of course, there was nobody left to take a break.

After 150 years of continuous operation, the shipyard at Pier 70 shut down Friday, the victim of a legal squabble between a multinational corporation and a much smaller company. The big boy no longer wanted to operate the business while the little guy thought better of taking it over when it became apparent the repair facility itself was in need of millions of dollars of repairs.

Stuck in the middle was the Port of San Francisco, which owns the dry docks, and the men and women for whom the shipyard — and the majestic vessels they repaired — was both a living and a way of life.

For a dozen years, BAE Systems, which has a $27 billion market cap, operated the repair facility, which consists of two dry docks. One, Dry Dock No. 2, is a monumental steel cradle capable of lifting sparkling white 900-foot cruise ships weighing 60,000 tons. The other, named Eureka, is smaller: at 528 feet long, it can hoist ships weighing 14,500 tons.

For most of that time, BAE kept the bigger of the two dry docks busy — it was the largest working dry dock on the West Coast and the only one capable of hoisting the late-model, jumbo cruise ships out of the water. But then a bigger dry dock, with larger cranes, opened near Portland, Ore., and the cruise ships migrated north.

Meanwhile, BAE decided San Francisco didn’t fit into its ship repair plan, which consists mostly of multibillion-dollar contracts with the U.S. Navy at facilities adjacent to Navy yards in the southern United States, Hawaii and Southern California. It sold the Pier 70 business to Puglia Engineering, which is based in Washington state. Puglia paid just $1 for the business but assumed $38 million in pension liabilities.

When Puglia took over, there had consistently been 250 employees at the shipyard, a number that went up when things were busy and down during slow periods. In February, six weeks after assuming control of the yard, Puglia filed notice of imminent closure. In a deal with the port, it agreed to keep it open for 90 days but laid off many workers in February and more in March. On Friday, it was goodbye to the bare-bones crew — fewer than a dozen — that had stayed on to wind things down. But others who had been previously pink-slipped showed up to witness the sad conclusion.

Back to Gallery SF's Pier 70 shipyard closes after 150 years 8 1 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn / Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 3 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 4 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 5 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 6 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 7 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 8 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle















“It’s painful, and it’s frustrating,” said Gerry Roybal, maritime marketing manager for the port. “I’ve developed these relationships with these people. I worry about their future. These people were really harmed by what happened. The port was really harmed by what happened.”

Shipyard workers say Puglia never really showed up at Pier 70. Representatives from company headquarters appeared only a handful of times after taking over the lease. The signs on the property still say BAE. After the U.S. Navy ship Carl Brashear, which was in dry dock when BAE was still in charge, the only business that came in was a minor barge job.

“We don’t know what a person from Puglia looks like,” said Carlisa Coleman, who worked as a painter and sandblaster for 18 years. “We never even met one.”

Instead of putting the shipyard employees to work, Puglia put a team of lawyers to work, suing BAE and alleging in court that it had been misled into thinking the two dry docks were “well-maintained and could be put to immediate use.”

Instead, Puglia said, it discovered the smaller of the two dry docks had “deteriorated to an extent that it would cost $9 million” to make it operational. In addition, the lawsuit says an additional $12 million in dredging is needed.

In a cross complaint, BAE called Puglia a “sophisticated buyer” that spent more than a year conducting its own “due diligence of the business and its assets.” Puglia would not comment.

Workers say they blame both companies.

“We got caught up in a bad business deal,” Coleman said. “We got played by people with money and power. How do you buy a company on Jan. 2 and before the end of May you close it? Who does that? If Puglia didn’t have the money to run the shipyard, they should have left us alone.”

Eric Lee, a San Francisco native who lives in Ingleside Heights, said being a maritime worker is his life. As a high school graduate, he has been able to make a middle-class living — upward of $70,000 and $80,000 a year. He is a homeowner.

“We’re human beings. We’re workers. We’re residents of San Francisco. I was depending on my pension. I was depending on retiring as a maritime worker in San Francisco,” Lee said.

Workers said they will miss the ships as much as the shipyard. On Friday, Lee was wearing a hat with the Carl Brashear insignia on it — one of his favorite vessels along with the Amelia Earhart and the Jeremiah O’Brien.

James White, who grew up in the Sunset District’s Oceanside neighborhood, said that he was in state prison in 2010 when he saw a program about the dry dock on the National Geographic Channel show “World’s Toughest Fixes.” It was about a cruise ship, the Sea Princess. Despite being a city native, he didn’t realize there were still blue-collar jobs on the waterfront. When he was released, he made getting a shipyard job his top priority.

“This yard changed my life,” he said. “I went from sitting in a box to being able to walk around with the captain of a ship and actually know exactly what I was talking about. I understand the language of the shipping industry.”

Coleman said the workers are in a tough spot, going from steady work to no work in a short period of time.

“I don’t have a Plan B, a lot of us don’t have a Plan B,” she said. “We don’t know how we are going to pay our bills, feed or families or get medical insurance.”

But port Director Elaine Forbes said there is some hope for the workers. She said several shipyard operators are interested in taking over the yard. The port hopes to have a new request for proposal issued before the end of July.

“It’s a sad situation, but I’m hoping it’s only temporarily sad,” Forbes said. “We are getting calls from operators who think there is a viable market for ship repair in San Francisco.”

J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen