The Fort Point Vandal...

The Fort Point Vandal

In 1853, three years after Californian attained statehood, the United States Army began the construction of Fort Point, a large three story red brick fort that today sits directly under and blends in well with the Golden Gate Bridge.

Lee and I passed by it many times in our forays around the Presidio.  One of our favorite places were the huge concrete coastal gun emplacements that faced the Pacific Ocean and at one time were the bases for huge guns that would have fired against enemy ships had they tried to approach the Golden Gate.  Today they were empty, but the tiered platforms were fun to play around and spurred our imaginations of what they once held.
We had walked around Fort Point many times but it was closed up and we always wondered what was inside.

On this particular day we found an open window.

We climbed through and fund ourselves in a rather small room.  It opened the open court yard the building surrounded.  There was a walkway with a steel railing that went around all three floors.

Lee and I began exploring room by room.  They were all empty on the first floor.

On the second and third floors we did find some boxes staked against the walls.  Also on the third floor we found stacked sacks of dry, powdered camouflage paint.  Brown, yellow, green and red.

It took us over an hour to explore the fort room by room and we became a bit bored.  So we climbed back out the window and sat at the edge of the parking lot next to the bay and watched the waves crash against the rocks.  A couple of small ships came in under the bridge and some sailboats were sailing to and fro between the bridge and Alcatraz Island.

When we got up to leave I got an idea.  Where it cam from I don’t know.  But mischief has a way of popping into a young boy’s mind from time to time and this one was going to be fun.

We climbed back into the fort through that open window and climber the stairs to the third floor and the room where all the camouflage paint was.
They were quite heavy for a young boy to lift, but I struggled and dragged first sack to the edge of the walkway between the deck and the bottom railing of the rail and pushed it over the side.

Down it went and hit the courtyard with a loud pop and burst open spraying brown powder over the concrete.  It was beautiful.

I dragged the next sack over to the launching point and pushed it over the side.  Whoomp!  And another spray of brown powder.
This was fun!

All in all I must have pushed a dozen sacks over the side.  Some red.  Some brown.  Some green.  Some yellow.

Lee and went down the stairs to examine my handiwork.  A nice multicolored mountain of paint powder spreading out at the base like the slope of a mountain and the paper sacks that had burst open by the impact of them hitting the cement.

Lee and I climbed back out of that window and walked home.  I was filthy.  My clothes were filthy.  Paint residue and dirt and dust from dragging those sacks was on my clothes and my face.  Mom was furious.  How could I get s dirty?  She made me take a bath and change my clothes.  Small price to pay for such an adventure.

Epilogue

Many years later, perhaps 40 plus years later, I was serving as a weather forecaster in the Colorado Air National Guard.  One of the units we served was the 6th US Army Headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco.  I would make TDY trips there from time to time.

When the Loma-Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco in 1989 my commanding officer and I were sent to the Presidio to do weather support for the 6th Army Emergency Operations Center that was controlling all the emergency support operations around the Bay Area.

One afternoon my commanding officer and I went to lunch at the Hardees that was on the base and after lunch decided to visit Fort Point, now a National Historic Site.

It’s not at all like it was when Lee and I first visited the place.  It’s a very nice museum with the rooms full of old photographs and artifacts of the days it was a real fort.

But over on the northeast corner of the courtyard is a faded, nondescript stain.  I don’t know if  it was 40 years old or not but I like to think so.  I like to think that a piece of my boyhood handiwork is enshrined in a National Historic Site.