

Directing the operation from the rooftop patio was Steve Huff, a burly man with a long brown ponytail trailing down from his green hard hat, who has moved everything from 400-ton transformers to ancient Mexican sculptures. He's always careful -- "That's why I have all my fingers and toes after 30 years," Huff said -- but he was being extra cautious with this job. After all, they were picking up a piece of the Titanic.

This particular piece is a 13-by-30-foot chunk of the hull of the storied British luxury liner that sank in the freezing North Atlantic on April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg. More than 1,500 people perished. Salvaged in 1998 from the wreck site 2 1/2 miles below the ocean surface, the bent hull piece, last seen in Las Vegas, is the centerpiece of "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition," opening June 10 on the fourth floor of the Metreon entertainment center.

Covered with rivets the size of big walnuts and containing all or part of six portholes, three with glass still in them, it's the largest and most dramatic piece in a show featuring 300 objects recovered from the Titanic "debris field" during salvaging dives over the past 18 years -- jewelry, letters, a bowler hat, silverware, a table leg from the veranda cafe, the engine thermometer.

"It's history, and it's priceless in everyone's mind, so you can't have any kind of nicks or damage to it," said Huff, a project foreman for Halbert Bros., a Southern California trucking and rigging firm, who also installed the hull in Vegas and Los Angeles. "I've been looking for the blue diamond to fall out of this thing," he added with a smile, referring to the gem Kate Winslet wore in the movie "Titanic." "Wouldn't that be nice? Then I wouldn't have to do this again."

Working with a crew from Hayward's Golden Gate Crane, Huff's five-man team swung the dark hull fragment -- which was desalinized after its recovery and has been treated with an acid-resistant coating to arrest rust and erosion -- onto wood blocks on the Metreon's fourth-floor roof veranda. A wooden transportation skid, built for the job, was lifted onto the roof, and dollies placed beneath it. The hull was hoisted onto the skid, rolled by forklift into the gallery through double-glass doors, then lifted upright with the big steel gantry from which it will hang for the next seven months.

"When you see this standing up, you feel like you're next to the Titanic," said Tom Zaller, vice president of Premier Exhibitions, the show-producing arm of RMS Titanic Inc. That's the publicly traded Atlanta company that was granted "Salvor-in-Possession" rights to the Titanic wreck by a U.S. federal court in 1994. The company -- founded by a group of investors two years after a joint U.S.-French team found the wreck site in 1985 at the bottom of the ocean 453 miles southeast off the Newfoundland coast -- was given the exclusive right to recover Titanic artifacts, and the responsibility of conserving them. None of the objects can be sold.

The money to cover the cost of recovering and conserving the objects -- each expedition costs between $1 million and $3 million, said Zaller, who went on one of the dives in 2000 -- comes from tickets sales to the exhibition. The company, which has recovered about 5,000 objects, many too fragile to be shown, now fields seven Titanic shows simultaneously, five big ones and two for smaller venues. There are big shows on view now in Miami and Long Beach, but San Francisco got the "big piece," as the hull fragment is called.


"It was covered with sea life, green and mossy, red and all these crazy colors," said Zaller, who saw film footage of the recovery and later had the singular experience of peering through the 6-inch porthole of a Russian sub to see the towering hulk of the Titanic. He used the sub's mechanical arms to gather up artifacts from the ship.

He recalled the excitement, the mix of fear and anticipation, as he, the pilot and co-pilot dropped into the drink. At first, "you're in this beautiful sort of Caribbean blue water, then within 15 minutes, it turns black," Zaller said. "Most of the lights are off in the submersible because you're trying to conserve electricity." When the sub hit bottom, its exterior lights flashed on "and it was very surreal. Because there's very little current or disturbance down there, you see objects that hit the ground over 90 years ago and there's still an impression in the sand where they hit.

"Every single object reminded me of a person, and that's what this exhibition is about -- somebody's story." Seeing a pair of binoculars made Zaller think of Frederick Fleet, the Titanic sailor who was on lookout duty when the ship struck the iceberg. He later testified at a hearing that he didn't have binoculars at the time. If he had, "they wouldn't have hit the iceberg," Zaller said.

Many of the paper items and textiles survived nearly a century underwater because they were in leather suitcases and wallets. Toxic chemicals used in the tanning process "made the leather inedible to the micro-organisms on the bottom of the ocean," said Zaller's brother John, who develops content and designs the exhibitions. "A lot of times we'll discover a steamer trunk that will be deteriorated, but everything inside of it will be in great condition."


The show will also have a 9-by-16-foot "iceberg" made of refrigerated aluminum that draws humidity from the air and freezes it to the metal. Its shape is based on a sketch of the Titanic-sinking iceberg sketched by the ship's lookout. Visitors can't touch the hull fragment but are encouraged to touch this icy block and see how long they can take it.

"They have a choice to take their hand off the iceberg," John Zaller said. "But the people in the water that night didn't have that choice."
