“This Fort, as is well known, consists of a mass of granite and brick, situated at the entrance of the Golden Gate, presenting a bold front to the Ocean. By most accounts, it was not a nice place to stay. I don’t think it’s a craftsmanship we see much of nowadays.”ĭuring the Civil War, the fort was occupied by dozens of soldiers, cooks, surgeons, laundresses and prisoners with 12-pound balls attached to their legs. It was done without electrical or hydraulic machinery and was just laborious. “I’m such a nerd,” he adds, “that I walk around looking at the arched ceilings and notice how the bricks were hand-cut at very specific angles to form intricate arches. The fact they were able to build the thing as fast as they did – they started in 1853, and it was almost finished in 1861, when the Civil War began – is remarkable,” says Martini. It was all done with portable cranes and either strong backs or wheel power. “They didn’t have diesel-powered machinery swinging around the blocks of granite. It was both a formidable defense and, to this day, an enduring example of the mason’s art. The last was also solid iron, but heated until red-hot in a furnace so it would light ships on fire.Ĭannonballs from enemies would simply ricochet off the fort’s five-foot-thick carapace. Another was a metal eggshell filled with powder that could explode into shrapnel, and a third was a sack of grapeshot that tore up rigging like a giant shotgun blast. The first was a plain ol’ hunk of iron that flew at a thousand feet per second to smash through the oak walls of warships. The fort employed four types of uniquely devastating cannonballs. But in its time, it was a mighty presence, one that might make a Confederate soldier wet his trousers. The four-story building, despite being made from millions of bricks, looks rather humble in the bridge’s massive shadow. National Historic Site, an enormous expanse that invites exploration outdoors – on the grounds, atop the rooftop where cannons were once mounted and in the open air parade grounds at the fort’s center – as well as inside. Hundreds of workers – many of them miners who got skunked in the Gold Rush – physically lowered the ground, excavated the building site to just above Bay level. When the Americans captured California in the mid-1800s, they wanted a fort closer to water level to bounce cannonballs over the waves like deadly skipping stones. It was a funny-shaped adobe structure that could rain down fire from a perch roughly 100 feet above the water. The Spanish, realizing the narrows were key to controlling the region, built one called Castillo de San Joaquin in 1794. None was ever found in the Bay, so supposedly it worked, no doubt to the annoyance of larger marine mammals. There actually was a physical barrier during the 1940s – a retractable metal-mesh net – to snag intruding U-boats. A never-realized idea from the 1860s was to string a cable all the way across the water to clothesline ships, professional-wrestler style. Several measures were proposed to guard this entrance. Then it was the Confederate States Navy – it existed and not just in the South – and then Japanese and German forces during World War II. Early on, the concern was a British invasion. If you look at a map of the San Francisco Bay, it’s like a vast front door left open to anybody who wants to cruise in and poke around. The focus of this paranoia was a mile-wide strip of water below what’s now the Golden Gate Bridge. Among these was paranoia – a fear of others slipping in and disrupting the nice life they were making. Westerners brought many things when they came to the Bay Area, technology, new religion and massive greed.
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