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Nov 05, 2023

SF’s must

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A view of Fort Point, the rugged brick fortress from the 1850s that sits directly below Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

A brick wall with windows overlooks the water at Fort Point, a structure that interplays with its natural surrounding in a meaningful manner.

A view of downtown San Francisco as seen from Fort Point, the rugged brick fortress from the 1850s that Chronicle critic John King says displays the past, present and future of the city.

A visitor walks through Fort Point, the rugged brick fortress from the1850s that sits directly below Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

A cannon rests at Fort Point, the rugged brick fortress from the 1850s that was built as a deterrent to attacks on San Francisco.

Stairs at Fort Point, the rugged brick fortress from the1850s that resembles East Coast forts from the same era.

Fort Point's mammoth masonry walls are, in some locations, several feet thick.

Fort Point was built with permanence in mind, a long-term structure to defend the city's present and future.

An image depicting the Golden Gate Bridge during construction. Fort Point is at the lower right

Ranger Angel Garcia surveys Fort Point, the rugged brick fortress from the 1850s that sits directly below Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

As the American Institute of Architects geared up for this week's national conference in San Francisco — a four-day bash opening Wednesday at the Moscone Center — I was asked to offer sightseeing tips, including our one must-see building.

My answer caught me by surprise: Fort Point.

Not City Hall, or the Ferry Building or some wood-clad wonder on Russian Hill. Quite the opposite. I offered up a defiant masonry bulwark where the ocean meets the bay, underneath the exponentially more scenic Golden Gate Bridge.

The reason? Whatever this former military outpost lacks in material splendor and architectural grace, no structure in the city matches it for stark rooted power — and for embodying the layered aspects of what makes San Francisco such a compelling place.

Ranger Angel Garcia walks through Fort Point, the rugged brick fortress that Chronicle critic John King says is the one building in San Francisco everyone should visit.

The location is the first clue, a flat stub ruthlessly exposed to waves and fog and rain and winds. It jabs into the Golden Gate with water cupping it on three sides, as remote as San Francisco itself back when construction began in 1853. But the remote city also was the lone metropolis on the western coast of an ambitious growing nation, so the fort was erected with permanence in mind.

It followed a template found at dozens of other forts along the Atlantic coast: mammoth masonry walls as much as 7 feet thick, with square openings for cannons facing water and, facing inland, slit windows sized for rifles. The shape from above is a craggy donut, with a central open parade ground framed by three levels of arched spaces. There's one entrance, an iron-studded door leading into a barrel-vaulted passage.

The lack of architectural originality is not a demerit, by the way. Victorian homes are found in multiple American cities. So are regal civic buildings from the early 1900s, or crisp mid-century towers. San Francisco is an American city, not some precious enclave unto itself.

Fort Point is memorable because of how it responds to the particularities of its unique site, a setting where a bluff was dynamited to make room for the fort constructed between 1853 and 1859 of locally produced brick and granite slabs quarried near Folsom, 100 miles to the northeast.

Oh, and proximity to the Golden Gate Bridge that straddles it. literally. A steep arc of trussed steel arcs above the relic to support the bridge's roadway, lashed to concrete towers on either side, yet there's an artistry that radiates a beauty beyond infrastructure.

Not the obvious pairing with a closed-in mass of masonry hunkered low to the ground. Which adds a spunk. The juxtaposition of the fort and the bridge showcases each others’ strong points all the more.

Serendipity? Far from it.

Fort Point's continued existence shows that San Francisco's instinct for self-preservation dates back, well, before nearly all of us were born. The efficient way to build the Golden Gate Bridge would have been to level the fort and construct the span's southern anchorage in its place. But Joseph Strauss, the chief engineer for the bridge project, changed his mind after visiting the obsolete fortress that the War Department had boarded up a few years before.

Ranger Angel Garcia (left) chats with a colleague at Fort Point. The structure dates to the Civil War era, when it constructed to serve as a defensive post.

Strauss was struck by what he described as "a fine example of the mason's art," and urged that "in the writer's view it should be preserved and restored."

When you’re running the project, you have pull. Fort Point remains.

This is not the end of the story.

Visit Fort Point today and you come upon history immersed in the here and now, marked by the imprints of 21st century Bay Area life. Some people are there to explore a landmark, at least Friday through Sunday when the iron door opens and you can go inside to savor such architectural moments as the juxtaposition of corkscrewed granite staircases and the unexpectedly delicate cast iron columns that line the southern edge of the parade ground and are painted a prim white.

Other visitors are bicyclists or joggers who follow Marine Drive until they reach the fort; they whack the wall or touch the chain link fence and then head back. Tourists show up for the steep view to the bridge above, likely not knowing that the construction they see is the installation of what some day will be a suicide barrier so that anyone who jumps off the span's walkway will land safely in a net.

The view of Fort Point, and how it interacts with the Golden Gate Bridge, is a rare display in a city with many memorable views.

Fit daredevils skim across the waves using wing foils, exulting in the extreme conditions.

Those dynamics can be viewed from another perspective, as extreme weather that will only be exacerbated by climate change.

The fort's setting is low by design, hugging sea level so that cannons could take effective aim on the enemy ships (none ever arrived, though one Confederate ship drew near the strait in 1865 before learning that the Civil War had ended a month or so before). Waves already are tumultuous; add another 2 or 3 feet to their dimensions and future storms could test Fort Point's endurance in a whole new way.

This is the beauty of Fort Point, and why I settled on it as San Francisco's bucket-list building despite rivals with more dazzling details. It is the past, present and future combined in a way that defies simple narratives — just like the uncompromising, ultimately seductive metropolis in which it resides.

Reach John King: [email protected]; Twitter: @johnkingsfchron