Point below Telegraph Hill to present-day Montgomery Street and eastward toward Rincon Point, enclosing a cove named Yerba Buena Cove. As the city grew, the cove was filled. Over 50 years a large offshore Seawall was built and the mudflats filled, creating what today is San Francisco's Financial District. The roadway follows the Seawall, a boundary first established in the 1860s and not completed until the 1920s. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 20, 2002. History of the Embarcadero Seawall Constructed between 1879 and 1916, the Embarcadero Seawall was built by dredging a trench through the mud, filling that trench with rock and rubble, covering the filled land with a timber pile bulkhead wall and wharf, then filling the tidal marshland area behind the Seawall. More than 500 acres of land were filled behind the Seawall, thus extending the footprint of the city. The Seawall acts as a retaining wall for the filled land behind it. The Seawall is the foundation of the Embarcadero Historic District, which includes the bulkhead buildings and finger piers that extend into the Bay. After the Seawall was built, in 1900 alone, six million tons of goods passed through the Port of San Francisco. To support the demand, the Port constructed new piers – by 1908, 23 new piers were built. In 1922, with the new Seawall and piers in place, 14.5 million tons of goods passed through the Port of San Francisco. In 1898, the Ferry Building was built and served as the headquarters for the Harbor Commission. Modern developments According to port historian Edward Morphy, the achievement of building a great port, "was rendered possible solely by the fact that its harbor commissioners, through the succeeding of generations, not only had behind them the credit of the state of California but also were in a position to rise superior to the narrow influences of local politics... The development of the waterfront itself, the Embarcadero, the Seawall and piers, the Belt Railroad and the Seawall lots, could not have been carried out under private or municipal auspices in the manner so beneficial, so efficient, and so economical as is now apparent." With the fire after the 1906 earthquake, a new era of port development began on the San Francisco waterfront. In 1909, the San Francisco Harbor Improvement Act was passed. A total of $9 million was allocated by