Introduction
We find ourselves at the bow of the San Francisco Peninsula, the outskirts of a city forever pushing northwest into the Pacific. Clothed in a criss-cross of asphalt, concrete, steel beams and glass there are few places in San Francisco where you can clearly see her for who she really is. Even in a city of so many green spaces, Golden Gate Park, Dolores, Washington Square, the true nature of this place is often hidden by green grass and tall Eucalyptus. But here, the façade is incomplete. From this angle it is possible to see the canvas and stretch-bars upon which the color and vibrancy of the city of San Francisco have been gessoed. Traveling from the edge of the city to the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, we will examine the motives and the aspiration of people who have reshaped this landscape in their own image or for what they have imagined and dreamed for this place. We will explore what restoration means and delineate whether restoration is a reflection of nature or if it is a reflection of our human biases. In 1994, this former military installation came under the auspices of the National Park Service, and since then, the National Park Service has been working to balance the cultural and natural history of this space. Walking this way, everything appears under construction. The eight-on-eight windows of the old hospital are being carefully re-glazed. Strips of land are marked off with orange netting and dotted with planting stakes and pin-flags. The buildings, though loosely united by red roofs and white walls speak to many eras. The anti-aircraft artillery and shells perched beside the quaint antebellum verandas feel jarring and anachronistic. This is the Presidio, a jumble of contradicting stories and visions. Before it was a national park, but after the land was seized from the Muwekma Ohlone, for 219 years the Presidio was a playground for war-making. Between 1769 and 1821 the land was held as an important outpost for the Spanish who named this place El Presidio Real de San Francisco, the Royal Fortress of Saint Francis. The word Presidio traces its origin to the Roman Praesidia, a fortification built at the edge of the known world, meant to defend an imperial border. For the Spanish, this spot in Alta California was the edge of what they knew and would be the epicenter for control and expansion. In 1821 the fort was surrendered to the newly formed Mexican Government. It would remain in Mexican hands until the outbreak of the Mexican American War in 1846. Under the Americans, the Presidio grew to be the largest US military base on the West Coast of North America. From the Presidio, troops and artillery were deployed to subjugate indigenous peoples through brutal campaigns such as the Modoc War, and Nez Perce War. The Presidio would be the staging ground for the US invasion of the Philippines in the Spanish American War, as well as a headquarters of the Western Defence Command for the United States during WWII. It was here that a Peace Treaty was signed with the Japanese in 1952, and where 50 nations convened in 1945 optimistically assembled to ratify the United Nations. As a place untouched by the urban development that swept over the rest of San Francisco, the Presidio would also become a sanctuary for many rare and threatened species. And, in the 21st century, the Presidio has been at the vanguard of urban conservation and ecology.
Lover's Lane
For over 100 years, this solitary brick bridge you see before you was all that suggested that there had been a creek and an estuary here. The site was a haven for shore birds and amphibians but its soggy earth made it a poor place for soldiers to drill and parade. During the early 1900’s the US Army filled the land with soil and planted the blue gum eucalyptus which quickly siphoned away the water until the ground was firm and packed hard beneath the boots of marching men. Today, you might never know that history. It appears now as it once did. The Tennessee Hollow Creek and the marsh are much as they were before the soldiers came. In this place, 200 years of occupation might as well have never happened. But that is only because of incredible efforts by the National Park Service and countless volunteers to reshape and reinterpret this landscape. In 2016, the park brought in excavators to terraform the meadow. For the first time since 1904 the creek would see the light of day. Beneath the roads and fields of the Presidio the creek had run as a straight channel through pipes. Or, where it was exposed, it never spent enough time in one place for the waters to seep into the soil and to provide for the plants and animals. So engineers created depressions and berms in the earth as well as twists and bends in the creek channel to slow the flow of the water and restore the water table and the marsh. To assist them in their work, the engineers consulted old photographs and surveyor maps which became the raster for the meadow and stream they would sculpt. After the soil was scraped into place, the bare earth was then covered in jute fabric that looked like a great fishing net cast wide over the fabricated terrain. Into the spaces between the fibers of the jute, rushes, native blackberry, and wax myrtle were planted. Stakes of willow were cut from nearby trees and thrust into the soil. The stakes of willow quickly rooted and began to grow. Beside the creek, wattle—long jute tubes filled with sterile hay—were lain along the slopes topography, to prevent silt from washing into the creek. Over time as the plants grew and their fallen leaves blanketed the earth, the jute began to decompose and other native seeded into the space and flourished.
MacArthur Meadow
All the plants you see growing in the creek basin beside you came from the Presidio Nursery on a tree covered hill West of the National Cemetery. The Nursery grows all their plants from seeds and cuttings collected in the Presidio. Even though the Presidio has been so greatly impacted and disturbed over its long occupation many native species hold fast to the edges. Other rare and endangered life, like the San Francisco Garter snake that would have at one point been common throughout San Francisco has found refuge in the forgotten places of the Presidio. The nursery staff are careful to collect plants only from the Presidio because they want to preserve the unique genetic lineages of the plants that live here. Even though there are toyon and monkey flowers that grow in abundance just across the straits of the Golden Gate in the Marin Headlands, those trees and flowers have never had to grow in the harsh sandy soils, or in dense salty air that saturates the Presidio bluffs each evening. Even in collecting seeds, the nursery is fastidious in their inventory. They make sure to label every plant they grow by watershed and soil type because within the Presidio there are countless microclimates and soil types to which the local flora is also carefully attuned. Along this creek the meadow and the shape of the earth are almost as it was long ago, and the plants that grow in these soils now are the distant offspring of the very plants that grew here. But even these descendants reflect the impacts of a changing landscape. On serpentine soil beside a concrete overpass that cuts through the park a manzanita, the last of its species, was discovered in 1952. The plant was carefully tended and starts were propagated from its roots. These offspring now grow throughout the park in unmarked areas. No other effort to preserve the floristic diversity in this park has ever had greater fidelity than in the effort to save the last of this species. Yet peering into the genetics of the Raven’s manzanita we find a melting pot of other species of manzanita not native to San Francisco. Within this manzanita is evidence of hybridization with ornamental varieties that have been planted in front yards and strip-mall parking lots. In restoration, nothing can ever be as it was, and we must accept that. Adaptation and assimilation are sometimes a part of survival. The manzanita survived, but as the chimera of the anthropocene. It’s genes mingled with the fractured landscape of this new San Francisco.
El Polin Spring
The Presidio, like most of the peninsula, began as a long sandbar where the waves and wind piled into dunes, forced ever upwards, and ever further North by the collision of the Pacific Plate and the North American continent. Right now, you find yourself on the teetering boundary of these two land masses. In the crossfire of this collision-in-slow-motion was the Farallon Plate. What remains of the Farallon can be seen in a few small granite islands that bear the same name, 30 miles West of the Golden Gate. In parts of the city you may also find a few small crusts of metamorphic rock, as you will find here, hefted up through the earth. In your journey to the Presidio you may have noticed that San Francisco is a city of many hills. Each hill is the crumpled aftermath of the tectonic motion that defines the Pacific Rim. Most of San Francisco rests on soft sediment and sand from an ancient sea floor. Where the sand has had millions of years to compact and crush under the weight of itself, shales and sandstone have formed. See how pale and dusty the earth is beneath your feet? All sand. And what is not sand, is a feeble soil formed from millions of years of plants that grew and then decomposed. If you have ever been to the beach and made a sand castle you know the inevitable fate. The sand will dry and crumble back to a rounded hill. Sand holds neither shape, nor nutrients, nor water. Yet here we are, at the site of a spring. Since the time of the Spaniards, this water has answered to the name of El Polin. For all the many droughts that have stricken this region, the spring has never run dry, a constant, and a beacon for human settlement as long as people have lived on this peninsula. Pushing up through the dry soil of the Presidio, the spring and all the life that flourishes beside it was as much a quiet miracle 200 years ago as it is today amidst our modern urban expanse.The Spaniards were convinced that this water held certain powers. Accounts from the friars and soldiers who settled here speak of fertility to those who drank from the well.The National Park Service, in managing this space set about to bring to this place the native plants that would have grown here before the arrival of the Spanish. They planted orange-flowering sticky-monkey flowers, willow, elderberry and sage. And even without trying, both the coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis) and the coyote also returned as well. The small seeds of the coyote brush grow silver haired like the molting fur of their namesake, blown by the wind and quickly taking hold wherever they fall. Now they crowd this spring in dense thickets. The Coyote is equally cunning, scampering north from a cross-hatch of suburban sprawl and wildlands south of the City. Or even, across the Golden Gate Bridge under the cover of twilight. The Park also restored the spring and the well that sits over it. No one knows what the well looked like or where exactly it sat. This well, which was built in 1940 by city workers gives an idea of what it may have been like to stand at this spot in 1800. But it is just a pleasant fantasy. The original well was probably constructed from limestone quarried south of Pacifica at a place called Rockaway. The limestone was pushed up into a great dome by the subduction of the Farallon Plate between 10 and 20 millions years ago. The Ramaytush Ohlone people, who lived in a village on the high bluffs at Mori Point, had long quarried the limestone and made use of it in sculpture and for white paint. They traded the limestone with their neighbors North and South. When the Spanish learned of this limestone, they pressed the Ramaytush Ohlone into an unending servitude to excavate the limestone. The Spaniards used the limestone cobble to lay the foundations of their colonization. Stonework and whitewash from the limestone of Rockaway quarry are evident throughout the Presidio and across the city, especially in the buildings of North Beach and Chinatown that were constructed after the 1906 earthquake. In 1980, the quarry was finally exhausted and shut down.
The Good Herb
El Polin Spring is just one reason why Juan De Anza in 1769 selected the flat piece of earth less than one-quarter miles from here to lay the foundation for the Presidio. And it was at this spring, in 1835 that a woman, named Juana Briones de Miranda brought herself and her children here to live after fleeing an abusive husband and her home in the Presidio. Others would soon settle, and a city, Yerba Buena, would germinate beside these spring waters like the small fragrant herb that grows here. As the city grew it would come to be known by another name: San Francisco. And so, this modest spring, now boxed-away between former military barracks and Arguello Boulevard are the natal waters that birthed a city. The umbilical cord connected San Francisco's past and present.
Ecology Trail
Climbing out of the gully we bring ourselves up over an ancient sand dune. As elsewhere in the park, the trees that grow along this trail were planted by the military to hold the shifting soils in place and break the hard wind. The lanky trees beside you are Pinus radiata or Monterey Pine. The bark is dark and fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. Find some of the needles fallen to the ground. Each of the tree's slender needles are packed in clusters of three, known as a fascicle bundle. Count them, and see. Ahead of you on the hill you approach, those dark green trees with the flatten tops and crooked limbs are also from Monterey. Hesperocyparis macrocarpa, (the Monterey cypress) and the Monterey Pine inhabit only a very small native range south of San Francisco. But their capacity to grow quickly and their use for timber made them popular across the west coast. The silhouette of both trees as well as the eucalyptus became ubiquitous and emblematic of California.
Redwood Grove
We leave behind the open sky to enter a dense grove of redwoods Sequoia sempervirens. Another tree native to the California Coast, but not the Presidio. The first of these trees were planted by the US military in the 1940s. But the park has continued to plant redwoods. Throughout the park, where redwoods grow, a different sort of restoration takes shape. At this site, and others like it, the park service has taken a farsighted look at conservation. This is not the loving—if also myopic—view of MacArthur Meadow where every plant is dutifully cataloged and sourced according to watershed. Instead, these groves represent the genetics of redwoods taken from all across the state. These are clones of colossal trees now lost or threatened by climate change. Far away from the old growth forests of Northern California, this is a refuge from sawmill or wildfire. And hidden in plain sight. This grove is a genetic arc, carrying precious information into the future, as scientists and conservationists grapple with how to preserve a landscape increasingly at risk.
Life Imitates Art
As we leave the redwoods, emerging into the sunlight, a twisted black steeple thrusts up through the verdant canopy of the hillslope directly ahead. It appears both organic, and man made, at the same time. This is the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy made this piece from the remains of limbs and branches he repurposed from a restoration project in the Presidio forest in 2005. The wood has been bound and charred to form this spire. Planted around the spire is a ring of young Monterey Cypress. As the young trees grow, the spire will slowly decay and eventually disappear, bowing to the lifting branches of the next generation of Presidio forest. Goldsworthy, who is from England, centers all of his art within its surroundings. In this way, his art has many parallels with the work of the restorationist. The restoration of a landscape is not without its own creativity and aesthetic and therefore subjectivity. Individually, the elements that go into restoration may seem haphazard but they piece together to reveal a picture. The park technicians and architects of restored landscapes in the Presidio and at other NPS sites refer to the nursery stock they work with as a palette. Instead of paint, the medium for an ecosystem is the combination of living and non-living things. It means finding harmony and symmetries among the plants and animals. It is contrived. Some will say that restored lands are unnatural, and are not wild. But the very idea of “wild” denies an important truth. People have a long history of pruning and sculpting the natural world in subtle (and sometimes catastrophic) ways. California had been stewarded by attentive hands for many thousands of years before the Spanish. Contemporary efforts in restoration ecology simply follow this well-worn path. The landscape around you has felt the footprint of humanity for thousands of years. Before this open space was turned to grazing, before the trees were plants, and before the marshes were drained, this was the domain of Ohlone. They lit fires that spread through the dry vegetation, tamping down the brush and clearing the way for new growth in the spring. The Ohlone used their knowledge of the place to persuade favorable harvests and hunting grounds from the landscape. Spaniards brought with them their own form indigenous knowledge, their own way of working the land from what they knew of Spain. As an amateur botanist, a Franciscan Friar by the name of Father Fernando Abello walked this way, every Sunday from Mission Dolores to the Presidio, to perform church service. Fr. Abello, who arrived at the Presidio in 1783, saw the marshland, the thickets of sage and blackberry and the red-berried toyon. In where and how they grew, the plants told him of the soil and the water and the sunlight. By his hands and the hands of the Ohlone who were relocated to the Mission, Fr. Abello re-made this landscape in the image of his homeland. Fields of grain, terraced herb gardens, and sturdy orchards quickly replaced the native vegetation.
Eucalyptus Grove
The US military would replace those orchards and farms with the forests of cypress, pine and eucalyptus that now cloak much of the park. This eucalyptus grove was probably planted in 1900, though it’s unlikely any of these trees have stood for that long. Because of the age of this grove, trees like these ones are protected, even though they are seen as invasive within the park. In the story of the Presidio these trees become more than trees, no longer a natural resource, but a cultural resource. The eucalyptus here becomes a marker for the choices of the past. Ecologically, this area shows us what an unrestored Presidio looks like. Most of the plants here are invasives. Climbing up the trees and crawling out into the shrubbery are two types of aggressive vines, English Ivy and Cape Ivy. Bunchy plumes of panic veldt grass from South Africa form rows along the trailside. Even still, this grove is full of native animal life. Small mammals find shelter in the dense cover of the leafy plants, and song birds are heard here in great abundance. Though not a native ecosystem, the blended family of European, Australian and African plants make a home for wildlife nonetheless. Eucalyptus which predominate the forests of the Presidio form an important habitat that provides forage, nesting and cover for more than 30 species of raptor. In many ways, humans, more than any of these introduced plants, bring a greater threat to wildlife. Trails cut by visitors into the meadows and groves as well as dogs off leash offer the greatest harm to the sensitive life in the Presidio. Small plants are easily trampled underfoot, and precarious soil microclimates thrown out of balance. Urine and feces left by dog walkers introduced nitrogen and phosphorus that is more than many of these plants (adapted to a life of poverty) can handle. Shoes, bike-treads, pant legs, fur and paws bring with them an assortment of invasive species including plants, molluscs and pathogens like sudden oak death. And the city beyond, with its traffic and high buildings, becomes a dangerous and disorienting gauntlet for both the prowling hawk and the song sparrow. Species like the Bay Checkerspot butterfly and Marin Dwarf Flax have both waned under these and other pressures of human habitation and would have gone extinct were it not for efforts to conserve these once neglected lands.
Main Post
Leaving the forest behind, we now enter the heart of the Presidio. Walking Moraga Avenue we can see the squared forms of adobe that are all that remains of the Spanish settlement that once stood here. This long even esplanade you now approach is known as the Parade grounds. Once a staging area for military exercise, now, it is a place for early morning yoga and picnickers looking to escape the brisk wind that tears up from the San Francisco Bay.At the top of this strip is the Officer’s club also known as the Main Post. Like so much of the Presidio, the Main Post hides in plain sight a long history, beneath countless revisions. The foundation and the oldest walls were constructed in 1776, and the building housed first Spanish and later Mexican soldiers before the adobe fell into disrepair. Later, American soldiers rebuilt the post. But their work was hackneyed and the building appeared unremarkable against a backdrop of balloon-track housing that was rapidly constructed to provide quarters for a growing population of infantry.
The “O” Club
It was in 1930 that Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration WPA remodeled the building to restore its historic Spanish character. But, this restoration is not faithful to any truth other than a misguided romanticism of an early California. Look close, and you can see some of the brittle adobe emerging from the base of the building and within a square metal basin constructed to delineate the different eras of construction at this site.In the restoration of the Officer’s Club, the utilitarian adobe that the Spanish built blossomed in the architect's imagination to include wrought iron, ornate molding, and a bell tower. So the Officers Club is not a vision of the Presidio’s as it was. Rather, it is a day-dreamed recollection of something that never existed. Whitewashed of its past in Rockaway limestone, the brilliance of the building's walls are perhaps the post's few tangible connections to its heritage as a vise-grip of Spanish imperialism. That, and the two great cannons parked beside the doors to the post. These are two of nine cannons that once defended the Spanish claim to the Presidio. The oldest of the cannons was forged in Lima, Peru in 1628, making it the oldest cannon in the United States. The two that sit before you were brought from Mexico to discourage the English who hoped to expand into the region. Tension mounted, and in 1776 King Carlos III of Spain levied a tax on the people of California and the other New World territories to supply goods to support the American Revolution, rebuffing British reach, by proxy of George Washington. By 1779, Spain is at war with England. Other than these few vestiges, the Officer’s Club's exterior can tell us very little of the times of the Spanish and Mexican occupation of this fort. But it does offer a doorway into the minds of statesmen and early 20th century Californians who created for themselves a rose-tinted mythology and identity seen in Mission and Spanish revival architecture once ubiquitous in the Bay Area and Southern California.
The Parade Grounds
To the West, brick buildings were constructed while this was a US military base and before Americans who settled in San Francisco had a notion for the turbulent earth beneath their feet. In front of these buildings in 1906 refugees from the city’s impoverished Italian, Chinese and Irish neighborhoods took shelter as fire consumed the city. More than 3000 people died in what remains the deadliest natural disaster in the United States. Further west, white wooden houses with wide porches and sun-rooms which form part of the old barracks for officers and cavalrymen who would be deployed in 1891 to protect the forests and grasslands of the newly formed Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks from illegal logging and ranchers. The racially integrated regiment of soldiers which largely comprised African American cavalry, known as Buffalo Soldiers, would become the first US Park Ranger. Looking East, that muscular stucco building with the broad stone arches is where the US military centered their operations during WWII. In this building, Generals strategized the deployment of troops in the Pacific Theater. It was in building 35—where this road intersects with Lincoln Avenue —that General DeWit authorized General Exclusion Order 1 through 5 on 1 April, 1942. These orders would lead to the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans. Just across the street in the building with the high tower, Japanese Americans were interrogated, processed and treated as criminals, even as many second generation Japanese (nisei) were conscripted into military service. Among the Americans who were processed for internment at the Presidio was Fred Korematsu. Not only was Korematsu interned, but he was sentenced with treason for having failed to report himself by the date mandated in the Exclusion Orders. As early as the fall of 1942, the ACLU and Korematsu would fight to overturn that conviction on grounds that the General Exclusion Orders were an inherently racist and unconstitutional directive. In 1990, Korematsu's claim to innocence was finally restored by a Supreme Court Ruling that reversed his conviction. Lobbying efforts by Korematsu also led Congress to pass the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided compensation to wrongfully incarcerated Americans. Today all of these buildings serve different purposes. Some are apartments, others are restaurants, museums, hotels and even a high school. These buildings also comprise headquarters for local film studios and regional offices for the National Park Service and its affiliated nonprofits.
Tunnel Tops
Before 2022, the Presidio was cut in two by highway 101 which runs from the Golden Gate Bridge into the City downtown. In 2016 the National Park Service began work on two concrete archways that would cover the highway. Earth was then moved to cover these tunnels and manicured lawns, gardens and other recreation areas were added. Not only do the tunnel tops become a corridor for people between the Parade Grounds and the Bay, the Tunnel Tops are also a corridor for native wildlife such as sweat bees, or the endangered Green Hairstreak butterfly. Looking toward the Bay, immediately ahead is the Crissy Marsh, a recently restored wetland. West of the marsh is Crissy Field, a grass strip that was created in the early 2000s after industrial and military waste was painstakingly removed. Crissy Field, like much of the low lying neighborhoods in San Francisco is bay infill, extends a quarter mile into what was once tidal wetland. East, you can see Salesforce and The TransAmerica Pyramid in the Financial District. Between the Financial District and where you stand is the Palace of Fine Arts. Constructed in 1915 for the PanPacific World's Fair, the event symbolized a rebirth of San Francisco following slow recovery after the 1906 earthquake and fire. It was during construction of these fairgrounds that most of San Francisco’s remaining Northern marshlands were destroyed. Like the Officer’s Club the Palace of Fine Arts offers us another vantage into how San Franciscans perceived themselves. Artists and residents living in the Bay Area in the early 1900s sought to model California as a spiritual successor to the ideals of Greek and Roman cultures. That simile between the Bay Area and the Mediterranean permeates into the present in our agriculture, adapted ecology, and in how California is described and compared. Nearest the Parade Grounds, many of the plants are from South Africa, including the bright King Protea. These plants were selected as low maintenance, drought tolerant species which could provide some level of habitat benefit. Though not native, these plants are also non-invasive, meaning they are not likely to spread into native habitat and displace existing ecosystems. As we move away from the Parade grounds toward the bay the vegetation starts to change. Slowly, the non-native ornamentals are replaced by the native species of the coastal chaparral and dune systems. California sage, yarrow and ceanothus populated the trailside. Crossing Mason Street we leave behind the artifice of the tunnel tops for the sandy beaches of Crissy Marsh. Walking toward the sandy swales we entered yet another massive restoration effort. What you see is a continuation of the restoration efforts at MacArthur Meadow and all along the watershed of El Polin Spring as the Park sought to create a contiguous ecosystem from the bay to the source of the watershed.
Crissy Marsh
Peer into the water of the marsh from this slender boardwalk. Here, brackish water forms from the mixing of the bay and the Tennessee Hollow Creek. American avocets, godwits, and sandpipers lurk between the coyote brush and the reeds, in search of crustaceans and small fish. If you look out onto the flat banks on either side of the slough, you will see pickleweed and spartina. Living in the bay waters these plants have learned to cope with the salt that the tide brings in. As the season progresses the succulent leaves of the pickleweed fill with salt. The leaves that emerge in early Spring, begin their life a bright green. By autumn, the leaves will turn candy-apple red and fall away, purging the plant of the salts it has sequestered. Throughout the year, you may also notice great tangled heaps, wool and auburn. This is California dodder, a delicate parasitic plant that has tiny white flowers. With tender frog-fingers, dodder clings to the blades of the salt grass and other marsh plants that grow here, holding fast against the tide.
Crissy Field South Beach
As you cross the bridge over the Tennessee Hollow Creek look again into the clear waters. On most days you can spot small sandy colored tidewater Goby and stickleback, or even the slippery length of a grunion. Small holes appear in the sand—the only indicators of the bivalves that haunt just below the surface.You are standing at the site of a Yelamu Ohlone village called Petlenuc. It was the Yelamu who welcomed De Anza to this land in 1776. Thirty-eight years later, in 1814, the last surviving adult to witness De Anza’s arrival and the founding of the Presidio would die. Pulled back from the mouth of the Golden Gate, Petlenuc, like the Presidio that replaced it, was protected from the fog and harsh winds. Along this shoreline the people enjoyed a wealth of what the Ocean and Bay offer. By winter, thousands of migrating birds would black out the sky as they passed overhead. The Yelamu would hunt the birds, and would gather fresh eggs from the curlew and willets that roosted in the tidal marshlands. They would also hunt the sea lion and seals who would birth their pups along these beaches. In Spring and Fall, Chinook and Coho salmon made their way through the bottleneck of the bay’s straits on their journey to the rivers of the Sierra where they would spawn. The people in this village would catch these and other fish in the nets they made and from the tule boats they would build. Because of the work to conserve these waters and restore these shores, today, much wildlife known to the Yelamu is returning.If the fog is not streaming through the Golden Gate into the warm interior you may see Alcatraz with its tall gray lighthouse just a mile to the east. Like the Presidio, the island has undergone many transformations. The former federal prison was first a light station constructed by the Mexican government to guide ships through the choppy waters of the bay. Under the United States, a formidable military fort was constructed, and the site was used as a repository for gold sluiced from the sand bars of the Sierra Nevada. Gold that moved through Alcatraz was added to the coffers of the Northern cause during the Civil War.The US military set dynamite along the shore of the island. What had been a gentle coastline became the rocky cliffs we see today. It was during this time that Alcatraz also came into use as a prison. First the fort’s darker lower quarters were used to imprison Confederate sympathizers who had attacked barracks in the Presidio. Later, those same cells would hold Hopi men in the 1870’s who refused to send their children to American boarding schools. Those housed in the military prison were deprived of natural light and were kept in solitary confinement for periods that would last as long as 20 days. While these men endured barbaric conditions, today, in our American prisons systems there is no limit on how long an incarcerated person may be kept in solitary.In 1933 the island was acquired by the US Justice Department and would be a federal penitentiary until 1963. In 1969, six years after the island was retired from its government uses, the island was occupied for 19 months and 9 days by members of the Sioux Nation and other Indigenous Americans. The occupiers asserted a claim to the island by the terms of 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. In that treaty, the US promised a return of all decommissioned land that had been seized from native peoples to the native people who had been forced to cede that land. In response to the Occupation, the Nixon administration drafted new provisions for Native American Self-Determination which included the Indian Civil Rights Act, that would pass later that year.In 1972 the Island became a National Park committed to preserving the memory of a turbulent history that reflects times of great brutality as well as the uplift of solidarity movements to reform US prison systems and advance the rights of tribes and indigenous peoples. The island has also become an important refuge for seabirds. Every year many gulls, heron, egrets, pigeon guillemots and shags nest on roofs, detention yards, and rubble of the former prison. And the Brown and white Pelican, after whom the island is named, have made a dramatic comeback and may often be seen from the island, bobbing in the surf. The battlements' high walls and blasted shoreline which originally served to safeguard the island now serves to protect a myriad of avian life.Looking across the water are the Marin Headlands and Angel Island, both protected as National and State Park lands. In conjunction with this shoreline, the Headlands function as an important waypoint on the annual pilgrimage of raptors, waterfowl and other migratory birds. As with the Presidio, both the Headlands and Angel Island were former military sites.The Headlands housed defense structures such as the many bunkers and batteries that can also be found here in the Presidio, and which were hastily constructed to watch over these shores after the attack on Pearl harbor. Later, the Headlands added to its arsenal two Nike missile sites which housed nuclear warheads and anti-aircraft missiles during the paranoia of the Cold War. Even while these sites carried the blueprint for so much destruction they have also been a source of much renewal as the scars of military exercises and installations have receded to make way for the native ecology to recover.Turning to the West, the Golden Gate frames the Pacific Ocean just beyond. Here, on this beach, at the edge of the water, our trail ends. In the path we traced across the Presidio we explored a place that still exists as a rough draft and the park and the public decide how to best memorialize and honor complicated pasts in ways that serve the present and the future. Whether working to return a creek to its prehistoric meander, to reassemble what was left behind from many iterations of people who have inhabited this place, or apply the lessons of a deep natural and cultural resources, the Presidio is a crucible for our understanding of the challenges, aspirations and biases of restoration in the twenty-first century.
