The gunners, the "guardians of the gate" as they were known, must have felt like they were in a dream. Manning batteries along the rumpled Marin Headlands on the north side of the Golden Gate Strait, they were on the lookout for Japanese warplanes and submarines threading though the mines they had laid, all amid breathtaking natural beauty – the rolling Pacific, the cascading white fog invading the San Francisco Bay. They were Homeland Security a half-century before September 11, sentinels of a threat that would never come.
In the evenings they would return to Fort Baker, the military post by a crescent-shaped cove at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, a collection of officers quarters and barracks arrayed around parade grounds overlooking Alcatraz and the city of San Francisco to the south. The strategic importance of the site was clear early on, designated in 1850 by President Millard Fillmore as a military reservation that mirrored the Presidio across the water. Both had commanding views of the only opening from the Pacific to San Francisco Bay, and both became urban villages, with everything from a hospital to a blacksmith to a bakery. After World War II, Fort Baker hosted administrative offices for reconnaissance and the Nike missile sites of the Cold War, but by the end of the 20th century the strategic necessity had come and gone, replaced by computers and satellites. Fort Baker, named for a Civil War hero, was abandoned, and the military turned the property over to the National Park Service, as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Residents of nearby Sausalito went for jogs and walked their dogs amid the empty buildings, but this was a special place that cried out for reinvention. The story of how this urban asset was re-purposed holds lessons for cities engaged in similar transformations.
In 1989, the Bay Area Discovery Center opened at the water’s edge, and the last property holdings were turned over in 2002. An early proposal for a 350-room hotel and conference center was greeted in somewhat typical Bay Area fashion with loud opposition and concerns about traffic. Then Equity Community Builders and Ajax Capital Group LLC partnered with Passport Resorts, operators of the luxury Big Sur resort the Post Ranch Inn, to engineer a kinder and gentler intervention – Cavallo Point Lodge, a 142-room hotel in rehabilitated Colonial Revival structures and a collection of new buildings on existing foundations, a $100 million project that combined historic preservation and green building.