FOR two centuries before discovery of the Golden Gate the navigators of Portugal, Spain, and England carefully avoided the sea approaches to the Port of San Francisco. The forbidding coastline and frequent fogs were not alone responsible for its prolonged obscurity: the outer islands indicated the danger of submerged rocks and shoals in the Gulf of the Farallones. Although soundings were taken by Sebastian Cermeno in 1595, not until 180 years later was any mariner bold enough to steer his ship through the Golden Gate. When the master of the San Carlos ventured through the strait in 1775, he sent a pilot boat ahead to chart the depth of the channel. Even within the Gate, Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala's little packet proceeded with extreme caution: only too obvious was the danger of being swept out to sea by the ebb tide, whose current had permitted passage only after the vessel's third attempt at entry.
Although modern aids to navigation long since have made San Francisco's harbor one of the safest in the world, incoming ships must begin exercising caution about six miles from shore. Outside the Gate is deposited the silt brought down from inland valleys and carried through the Bay by force of the current. Fanning from the entrance is an undersea delta whose rim, tilted upwards, forms a wide semicircle, the San Francisco Bar, lying only about 30 feet under the surface—on its north side, where it widens out in the “Potato Patch,” only 22 feet. During storms the waves break upon these rock-strewn shoals with disastrous force, and even in calm weather they are impassable to large vessels. Three channels cross the bar: the artificially-dredged Main Channel opposite the Golden Gate, kept open by the Army's 3,015-ton Mackenzie to a depth of approximately 50 feet, and the narrow North and South Channels, close to shore. The entrance to the Main Channel is guarded by San Francisco Lightship, a 129-foot schooner with a flashing light visible in clear weather for 13 miles. Equipped with a foghorn and a transmitter for radio beacon signals, it is serviced by the Yerba Buena station. In the area between the lightship and the bar, the pilot boats cruise, waiting for incoming vessels. When contact with a ship is made, a bar pilot puts out from the lightship in a ten-foot dory to which a rope ladder is thrown over the inbound ship's side. From the lightship in, the Main Channel is outlined with eight buoys, all equipped with flashing lights, three with bells, one with a whistle, and one with an electric trumpet.
In strict nautical terms, the Golden Gate is the three-mile strait between the San Francisco and Marin Peninsulas. At its western end, lights and foghorns on the headlands and buoys in the North and South Channels (some equipped with lights and fog signals), make the entrance to the Bay more conspicuous in any weather than it was when mariners like Sir Francis Drake passed by without guessing the existence of an inland body of water. Radio beacon signals are flashed from the light on Point Bonita; between the cliffs stands Mile Rock Lighthouse. The Golden Gate itself is illuminated by two additional lighthouses, at Point Diablo and at Lime Point. And three life-saving surf stations are maintained along the strait, each with a staff of 9 to 22 men on duty 24 hours a day.
The efficiency of men and machinery in the modern life-saving service of San Francisco Bay is indicated roughly by comparing the casualties of two shipwrecks 39 years apart. The Rio de Janeiro, which sank in the Golden Gate during a fog in 1901, carried 128 people down with her. But when the Pinto was shattered on the “Potato Patch” in 1939—under circumstances that made rescue particularly difficult—not a life was lost. Even a ferryboat, the Golden City, has gone down in the harbor without loss of a single life. At Land's End may still be seen the rusty scraps of four hulks which testify to hazards of the Golden Gate, but no one drowned in any of these disasters.
The islands of San Francisco Bay, besides contributing to its natural charm, have played a notable part in its history. Yerba Buena, Alcatraz, the Farallones, and part of Angel Island were included in the huge Mexican grant claimed by Joseph L. Limantour, a Frenchman who swore that he received it in return for $4,000 he had advanced Governor Manuel Micheltorena in 1843. Besides the several islands the notorious Limantour Claim included about half the present area of San Francisco. Described by United States Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black, who prosecuted the case, as “the most stupendous fraud, the greatest in atrocity and magnitude the world has ever seen,” the claim was finally denied in the 1850’s after expenditure of $200,000 for litigation and the arrest of Limantour. Gradually, since their recovery by the Federal government, Alcatraz, Angel, and Yerba Buena Islands have been incorporated in the harbor defenses maintained by the Ninth Corps Area, United States Army.
Less prominent are the Bay's two other tiny islands, but they too have had their uses. Brooks Island, the larger of these, lies about half a mile off Point Potrero. Some 46 acres in area, rocky and very sparsely wooded, it is (1940) uninhabited. Once known as Sheep Island, it was exploited several years ago by a construction company operating a rock quarry there. Just off Pier 50, near the San Francisco water front, is Mission Rock, occupied only by a warehouse and a wharf, both partially destroyed by fire in 1936. According to water front legend a Portuguese fisherman once stocked the rock with sheep; he rowed out to it once a year to harvest his crop with a shotgun, pulling the slaughtered sheep aboard with a boathook.
Almost as remote as Guam or Samoa to most San Franciscans is that chain of islands known as The Farallones, which lie about 32 miles off Point Lobos. Despite their inclusion since 1872 in the City and County of San Francisco, their inaccessibility to the average citizen has invested them with the unfamiliarity of a foreign land. Even to sportsmen, for whose annual yacht races they are a hazardous goal, their history and conformation have little intimate significance.
The Farallones lie in two groups separated by seven and three-quarter miles of open sea. Seven isles constitute the southern group: Southeast Farallon Island, Sugar Loaf Isle, Aulone Isle, Seal Rock, Arch Rock, Finger Rock, and Sea Lion Islet. Of these, Southeast Farallon Island is the most important of the entire chain, and Sugar Loaf Isle (185 alt.) is the highest. Except for one island which rises to an altitude of 155 feet, the North Farallones are small and unimportant. Noonday Rock, marking the northern end of the chain, is a submerged peak so named for the clipper Noonday which struck it and sank in 1863. Midway between the two groups lies “lonely little Four Mile Rock.” The Gulf of the Farallones, the stretch of water between the chain and the California coast, was called La Bahia de los Pinos (the bay of the pines) by the Cabrillo expedition in 1542 and Bahia de Puerto de San Francisco (bay of the port of San Francisco) by Vizcaino in 1603.
The Southeast, or South, Farallon, about 32 miles west of the Golden Gate, is about one mile long, half a mile wide, three and one-half miles in circumference. A rocky ridge runs its entire length, broken by gorges and a swift-running sea stream called “The Jordan” which separates the portion known as West End. The highest peaks of this island are Tower Hill (on which the lighthouse is built), and Main Top. In some places the slope from the ridge to the water's edge is too steep for a foothold; in others, there are ledges where sparse vegetation makes patches of green. The soil on these flats is a mixture of guano and granite sand. The forbidding coastline of the South Farallon is edged by grotesque rocky cliffs and caves. The contours of the island are suggested by some of the names given various parts: Indian Chief Cliff; Lost World Cave; Great Murre Cave; Giant's Bath, a natural swimming pool on Breaker Hill; Great West Arch, a natural arch with the sea swirling under it; and Breakers Bay, also called Franconia Bay for the Franconia, a wooden vessel of 1,462 tons which went ashore on West End June 4, 1881. Fisherman's or Tower Bay is the present (1940) anchorage.
Despite a popular belief to the contrary, the Farallon Islands support vegetation. Besides a group of 20 Monterey cypresses growing in one sheltered spot and the small gardens cultivated by the lighthouse keepers, there are scattered growths of rock flowers, moss, and grass. The largest of several varieties of clinging weeds is the Farallon Weed, bearing a small yellow blossom, which grows in a mat formation, sometimes torn loose in sheets by the winds. It is used by the cormorants and other island birds in constructing their nests. Other weeds have been introduced through seeds contained in the hay shipped in for the solitary island mule.
Around the islands gather great hordes of Steller sea lions, the largest congregations being on Saddle Rock and Sugar Loaf. The California Harbor seal and Pribilof fur seal are seen occasionally. There are also numbers of hares, descendants of a few given by an English sea captain to a former lighthouse keeper. These animals increased so fast that they surpassed the supply of food (weeds) and at one time died of starvation in great numbers. During the last century, when tender service to the islands was less regular than now, the rabbits furnished the only supply of fresh meat for the keepers during periods of protracted storms.
The bird population of The Farallones includes California murres, Western gulls, cormorants, pigeons, guillemots, tufted puffins, Cassin's auklets, ashy petrels, and rock wrens. During the early 1850’s, when fresh eggs were almost worth their weight in gold to San Franciscans, the pear-shaped eggs of the murres were gathered here and sold in San Francisco markets. The thick, tough shells of the eggs enabled their collectors to handle them with shovels and eliminated the necessity of packing, but gathering them was a dangerous occupation. So precipitous are the cliffs of these islands that the collectors, besides being liable to arrest as poachers, frequently fell off into the sea. The trade in murres’ eggs continued until the late 1880’s, when the supply had so decreased that the profits of collecting them no longer outweighed the risks involved.
According to some historians, the first white man to see the Farallon Islands was Bartolemeo Ferrola, who took command of Cabrillo's expedition after Cabrillo's death, although other authorities question the authenticity of the old Spanish chronicles which credit the discovery to him. However, Sir Francis Drake not only saw but landed on one of the Farallones on July 24, 1579—24 hours after leaving “Nova Albion” (Drake's Bay), where the expedition had been repairing their Golden Hinde since June 17. Drake named the islands the “Islands of St. James” and described them as having “plentiful and great stores of seals and birds.” Sebastian Cermeno and his companions apparently visited the Farallones in 1595 when they were proceeding down the coast from Drake's Bay in their launch, the San Buena Ventura, after their San Augustin had been wrecked.
According to Mildred Brooke Hoover, the islands had already been designated as The Farallones: “The name Los Farallones is derived from the Spanish nautical word meaning ‘cliff or small, pointed island,’ and was fixed on this particular group during the years when the Spanish galleons plied between the Philippines and Mexico.” The implication that the islands were well known to mariners of the time is substantiated by the chronicle of Sebastian Vizcaino, who described them in 1603 as a mark for finding Punta de los Reyes and the harbor of Drake's Bay. The first to name individual islands of the group, he called the Southeast Farallon La Isla Hendido [sic] (the cleft isle) and the Northwest Farallon, Las Llagas (the wounds) to commemorate the stigmata of St. Francis.
First white inhabitants of The Farallones were fur-gatherers from the Russian colony at Bodega Bay. At a cost of much sickness and death due to improper food and water, they took 200,000 fur seals in three seasons. Although the supply of fur seals was seriously depleted at the end of that time, the Russians continued to keep hunters on the islands. In 1819 a new colony was planted there, including a number of Aleuts. They lived in huts made of stone, planks, canvas, and the sea lions’ skins (some of the stone walls still stand). Lacking wood for fires, they used the fat of sea lions and seals. Only once did a Russian brig call at the island for their products. After several months most of the men, too weak to kill the seals, were barely subsisting on raw birds’ eggs. By 1825 not one fur seal was left on the island and only one Russian family and 23 Kodiaks (northwest Indians) were living there.
Since 1855 the islands have been under the supervision of the United States Lighthouse Service and closed to the public. In 1909 bird lovers, aided by Admiral George Dewey, succeeded in having the islands declared a bird sanctuary. At the present time (1940) the Southeast Farallon is inhabited by four lighthouse keepers, six Navy men in charge of the Radio Beam Compass Station, and their families. Still standing, though remodeled, is “Stone House,” the structure put up during the 1850’s when the first lighthouse was built. The original light has been replaced by a modern one, raised 358 feet above mean tidewater and visible for 26 miles. To reach the light, the keepers climb a zigzag path along steep bluffs. It is said that during winter gales they have to crawl on hands and knees along the unsheltered stretches of this path.
Resembling a huge battleship lying just within the Golden Gate, grim Alcatraz Island is known as “The Rock” to the Nation's underworld, whose most desperate criminals are confined within its practically inescapable walls. With a capacity of 800, normally two-thirds filled, this prison for incorrigibles has had such notorious inmates as Al Capone, kidnapper “Machine Gun” Kelly, and mail robbers Albert Bates, Gene Colson, and Charles “Limpy” Cleaver. Amid the riptides of the Golden Gate, a mile and a quarter from the San Francisco mainland, the island consists of barely 12 acres of solid rock rising in sheer gray cliffs from the water's edge. Above its stone walls jut the watchtowers of guards armed with machine guns; and below them the waterline is equipped with barbed-wire entanglements. The wall separating prisoners from the water is 20 feet high; the massive prison gates are electrically operated. In the main building the steel cell-blocks are three tiers high, arranged back to back in four double banks. In the mess hall, above the heads of the prisoners as they eat, hang drums of tear gas that can be released by the pushing of a button.
When visitors call (they are allowed only once a month), they face the inmates across tables through sheets of bullet-proof glass reaching to the ceiling. Conversation is carried on by means of microphone and loudspeaker, over which whispers cannot be transmitted. Since all incoming mail is censored and recopied, inmates never see the original of any letter sent to them; they are allowed to send only one letter a week each to a blood relative. Industries employing prisoners on the island include a laundry, mat factory, clothing factory, model shop, and dry cleaning plant, in one or another of which more than half the prisoners are employed. The inmates are allowed to receive elementary musical instruction and to enroll for correspondence courses sponsored by the University of California.
Less widely publicized by the movies and the press than the island's more forbidding aspects is its little civilian community comprising facilities for 51 families. These quarters, some of which were built half a century ago, are inhabited chiefly by families of prison guards. Some 60 children of these families commute daily between Alcatraz and San Francisco during school terms, being carried by Army boats plying between Angel Island and the Fort Mason Transport Docks.
The history of Alcatraz Island begins with its discovery in 1775 by Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala of the San Carlos, who named it Isla de los Alcatraces (Isle of the Pelicans) because of the great number of these birds he found nesting there. In 1846, Pio Pico, last Mexican Governor of California, sold the island to Julian Workman. In March, 1849 Alcatraz was resold to John Charles Frémont, who acted as representative of the United States Government. Before the $5,000 was paid for the property, however, Frémont disposed of the island to the banking firm of Palmer, Cook and Company which subsequently brought suit to recover possession of it. Because Frémont had acted as a Government agent, the suit was denied and the island was retained as Federal property.
When the United States began to fortify the harbor in 1854, a lighthouse and lantern were installed on Alcatraz. Temporary buildings were erected, a wharf was built, and construction of batteries was begun. The building erected at that time as the engineer's office is still standing. Between 1854 and 1882 the Government appropriated $1,697,500 for fortifications on the island. Powder magazines were blasted from the rock and a citadel built on the crest. In 1859 the first Army detachment, Company “H,” Stewart's Third Artillery, arrived on Alcatraz, commanded by Captain Joseph Stewart.
The island was designated a disciplinary barracks for prisoners having long sentences to serve in 1868. From the early 1870’s on, troublesome Indians were sent to this post from time to time. A company of Indian scouts accused of mutiny at Cibicu Creek, Arizona Territory, were incarcerated here, as were five Indian chiefs who mutinied at San Carlos, Arizona Territory, in June, 1887, among them Kae-te-na, friend of Geronimo. Of the many prisoners who arrived from the Philippines (one transport alone brought 126) in 1900, most had deserted the United States forces and joined the Filipino insurgents. Civilians who committed crimes against the Army in China also were brought here. During the 1906 disaster, 176 prisoners removed from San Francisco jails were transferred to Alcatraz.
From 1895 to 1907 several Coast Artillery detachments were stationed here. In the latter year, when Alcatraz was designated the Pacific Branch of the United States Military Prison, the third and fourth companies, United States Military Prison Guard, were organized as its permanent garrison. It became a Federal prison for civilian incorrigibles in 1934.
Escapes from the island are nowadays seldom attempted and rarely successful. The most ingenious of these get-aways was engineered in 1903 by four prisoners, all trusties for good behavior, of whom one was a professional forger and another a printer by trade. Between them they succeeded in drawing up and printing a document recommending leniency in their cases, to which they forged the name of the commanding officer. Through a friend in the post office department they succeeded in having the document slipped into the outgoing mail. It made its way through all departments to the Department Commander, who then ordered the four released. They were given a military escort to the mainland. No sooner had they landed in San Francisco than they forged four checks to the sum of $125 on the quartermaster department, whereupon they repaired to a grog shop for liquid refreshments. Three of the men, fearing drunkenness, fled; but the fourth was picked up by police on a San Francisco street and promptly returned to the island. More successful were Roy Gardner, the “gentleman bandit,” who escaped alone from the island in the early 1920’s, and two prisoners who made a sensational get-away in 1938 and never were found. In 1926 a plot for a mass exit was halted when the warden, learning of the plans, pointed to the Bay and told the rebels to “go ahead and swim.” The invitation was unanimously declined.
Alcatraz’ grim reputation has caused San Francisco civic bodies recently to demand its abandonment; but though former United States Attorney General Frank Murphy in 1939 advised removal of its felons, “The Rock” continues to make San Francisco Bay the locale of the most fearsome of American prisons.
Largest island in the Bay, mile-square Angel Island, roughly triangular in shape, rears its central peak (771 alt.) across Raccoon Strait from Point Tiburon. Once the site of a detention camp for hostile Indians captured during the Arizona campaign, it has served since 1892 as San Francisco's Quarantine and Immigration Station (adm. by pass only to relatives of station employees; boats leave Pier 5, 8:40 and 10:30 a.m. and 1 and 3:30 p.m.). The grassy green of the island's slopes is broken by darker patches of trees and brush. In some places out-croppings of rock lend a fantastic color to the predominating gentleness of the landscape. The shoreline, nearly six miles in circumference, rough and steep in places, curves inward here and there to narrow strips of white sand. Above it a military road circles the island at elevations varying from eighty to three feet. A Federal game refuge, the island is stocked with deer, quail, and pheasant.
When the San Carlos dropped anchor in Raccoon Strait, Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala named the adjacent island Nuestra Señora de los Angeles (Our Lady of the Angels). After a century and a half of consequent neglect, Angel Island was granted in 1839 to Antonio Mario Osio by Governor Juan B. Alvarado, who took this means to prevent its occupation by the Russians and other foreigners. Osio raised horses and cattle there, although he never lived on the island himself. However, his claim generally was recognized until California became American territory, whereupon Osio went to Mexico. When he returned in 1855 with a claim to the island, he found it had already been set aside in 1850 for military purposes by executive order of the United States Government. The island was occupied by Federal troops in 1863. By 1865 a battery of three guns had been established on the west slope of the island, commanding the approach through the Golden Gate, which was later increased to 18 pieces; and in 1867 a general depot for receiving and discharging recruits from the Atlantic Coast was established on the east shoreline.
Before the end of the 1850’s, Angel Island had won local fame as the site of a celebrated duel, which grew out of a stormy conflict involving the slavery issue. One Charles A. Stovall had brought with him to San Francisco from Mississippi a Negro slave boy known simply as Archy. When Stovall decided to return home, Archy refused to go and escaped from a Sacramento river boat. His master had him arrested but the Sacramento police refused to hand him over, whereupon Stovall carried the matter to the State Supreme Court. Justice Peter H. Burnett ordered the Negro returned to him. Archy's case then was taken to United States Commissioner George Penn Johnson, who ruled on April 14, 1858 that he no longer was a slave. One of Johnson's closest friends, State Senator William I. Ferguson, a Southerner, challenged Johnson's decision. Feeling ran so high between the two that arrangements were made for a duel. On a tiny piece of level ground on the eastern side of Angel Island the principals met at five o'clock on the afternoon of August 21, 1858. Dueling pistols having been chosen, it was agreed the combatants would start firing at ten paces, this distance to be reduced to ten feet if the first fire ineffective. When neither contestant was hit on the first exchange, or on the second and third, Johnson demanded an apology or a fourth encounter. The latter course was chosen. Ferguson was hit in the right thigh and Johnson in the left wrist. Ferguson was taken to San Francisco, where he died on September 14 while his leg was being amputated.
Near Angel Island a prison brig had been anchored in 1852 with 35 convicts aboard, 17 of whom escaped at different times, overpowering or bribing the keepers. The island itself served as a prison camp during the 1870’s for hostile Arizona Indians. A part of its eastern shore was set aside in 1900 as a detention and quarantine camp for soldiers returning from the Philippines. In 1900 the post was named Fort McDowell (adm. by pass only to relatives of persons at fort; boats leave Pier 4, Army Transport Dock, Fort Mason, at 7:20, 8:30, 10 a.m.; 12 noon; 4, 6 p.m.). From December 1, 1901 to June 30, 1902 a total of 10,747 soldiers passed through the Angel Island station on their return from Manila.
By an act of Congress in 1888 the building of a permanent quarantine station on the island was authorized and an appropriation of $103,-000 set aside for the purpose. Constructed on the shores of a sheltered indentation north of Fort McDowell, known as Hospital Cove, the quarantine station was opened May 1, 1892. In 1909 the Angel Island Immigration Station was established. Quarantine and immigration officers board ships from foreign ports for inspection. Individuals who do not pass inspection are taken to the Angel Island Station for further examination. An Oriental Division is in charge of matters relating to vessels from China and Japan (a majority of cases handled at Angel Island are Chinese and Japanese). A hospital at the station operates under jurisdiction of the Public Health Service Department. Besides the Quarantine and Immigration Station, the Government operates a lighthouse, established on the southwest portion of the island, under license to the Treasury Department, in 1886. Its two keepers operate the light, a fog bell, and (by remote control) two fog sirens at other points on the island.
Stepping stone for the bridge builders in spanning the Bay, cone-shaped Yerba Buena Island (open for official business only by pass from Headquarters 12th Naval District, Federal Office Bldg., San Francisco), rising between the eastern and western shores, is the anchorage for both the suspension and the cantilever spans of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Through a rock formation of the island passes a bore tunnel connecting the two (see Emporium of a New World: Engineering Enterprise). East of the tunnel, the first of the bridge's East Bay spans passes over the buildings of the island's naval reservation on a narrow tongue of land projecting into the bay, terminated by a barren low hill. Winding paved side roads lead to all parts of the island's landscaped and heavily wooded slopes, dotted by the neat dwellings of navy and lighthouse personnel.
Known to early navigators and whalers as Wood Island, Yerba Buena Island was indicated on old Spanish charts as Isla del Carmen. The English navigator, Frederick W. Beechey, gave it the present name in 1826, but it was known locally as Goat Island in the early 1830’s when Gorham H. Nye pastured his goats on its slopes. Until after the 1850’s, when the Land Commission denied the Limantour claim to the island and gave title to the Government, other early settlers raised goats there. Despite the subsequent disappearance of all goats from the island the colloquial name persisted, although various official documents referred to it as “Yerba Buena.” (An 1858 map of California had called it “Ghote” [sic] Island.”) In 1895 the United States Geographic Board officially adopted the local name.
Not until December 19, 1866 did the Government first take possession. First used as an infantry station, the island served in the early 70’s as an artillery post, until fire destroyed the buildings, leaving as the only remaining Government service the lighthouse station established in 1875.
On April 12, 1898, President William McKinley signed an executive order setting aside a part of the island for a naval training station. At a cost of $74,400 barracks were erected to house 500 apprentices. The additional water supply necessary for the training station was piped under the bay from Contra Costa County. The island slopes were cleared and landscaped and a road built to its highest point. A fully rigged training ship, the Boston, was attached to the station for use in a six-months cruise of sea duty, following a like training period on shore. Stocks of quail and pheasant turned loose on the island thrived until in 1916 an executive order signed by President Woodrow Wilson set aside 141 of the island's approximately 300 acres as a National game preserve. The naval training station was officially closed in August, 1923. The remaining buildings and old training ship continued to be used as a receiving station for transfer of naval units to and from the Asiatic fleet and various naval bases.
The campaign to change the name of the island, begun in 1916 by historian Nellie van der Grift Sanchez, succeeded in 1931 when the United States Geographic Board made the name “Yerba Buena” official. A newspaper account of the ceremonies held on the island in June, 1931 states: “The day's legend was that there was one remaining goat on the island, and he was to be thrown overboard to free Yerba Buena, like St. Patrick did Ireland. Jack Love, radio operator on the island, dressed up as a goat and was twice fed to the crocodiles, figuratively speaking.”
Below the eastern entrance to the Bay Bridge tunnel, a road winds down around the island past a marine sentry post to the Naval Receiving Station on the southeastern shore. Commissary buildings, warehouses and a carpenter shop, a building marked “General Court Martial and Brig,” and the old barracks with its colonial portico stand below a span of the bridge. At a nearby dock, beyond a tennis court, the gray-painted receiving ship rides at anchor. Its interior has been altered and its superstructure changed to conform with modern naval construction, so that only the hull and the decks of the original ship remain.
Below the high bluff on the southwest shore are the six buildings of the Yerba Buena Lighthouse Depot, where a force of about 25 men service and supply all lighthouses, lightships, buoys, and fog signal stations on the California coast. A white-painted lighthouse tender, used to maintain contact with the various lighthouses and with San Francisco Lightship, is stationed at the depot's dock alongside the red-painted lightship, Relief. Equipped with complete radio beam facilities, the Relief carries a crew of nine while in port and seventeen while on station. It is used to relieve the regular lightships stationed off San Francisco Bar and Blunts Reef during annual vacation and check-up periods.
Above the island's southwestern point, visible from the San Francisco span of the Bay bridge, is the octagonal grey and white frame tower of Yerba Buena Light, erected in 1875. One of the smallest in the service, it is supplied by a 1,500-watt globe magnified to 12,000 candlepower by its prism shade, which operates at calculated intervals from sunrise to sunset. An astronomical clock regulates the light automatically to conform with changes in the daylight hours. The gray and white frame building with gabled red roof above the tower, occupied by the lighthouse keeper and his assistant, houses a radio-beacon monitor control station. Here radio beams from lighthouses and lightships are checked twice daily with naval observatory time for frequency and strength. (California lighthouse stations are grouped in south, central and northern districts. In clear weather, the southern district broadcasts its beam only during the first and fourth ten seconds of each hour; the central district, during the second and fifth ten seconds; the northern district, during the third and sixth. The monitor station checks all districts to guard against lag or overlap between broadcasts.)
“It ought to be in the West, and have a tang of the Orient about it…at the last frontier of civilization's forward march, yet looking out upon the most ancient lands and the most exotic peoples.” So was hailed—by Lewis Rex Miller in the Christian Science Monitor—the concept and construction of the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939-40) on Treasure Island. Approached by a filled-in causeway from Yerba Buena Island, Treasure Island (see Emporium of a New World: Engineering Enterprise) appears like a “stately pleasure dome” conjured up by the magic of modern science from Kublai Khan's Xanadu. By night this unearthly effect is enhanced by panchromatic floodlighting which transforms the exposition's towers and pavilions into a floating city of emerald and vermilion palaces.
The architectural commission to whom goes much of the credit for the exposition's dominant features included such outstanding Western architects as Lewis P. Hobart, Ernest Weihe, Timothy Pflueger, William G. Merchant, and Arthur Brown, Jr. Until his death in 1937, George W. Kelham, supervising architect of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), was chairman of the commission. Under its direction the goal which Kelham described as an attempt “to strike a golden medium between pageantry and structural beauty” was realized to a degree of perfection witnessed by the millions of spectators who have marvelled at the spectacular charm of the exposition's array of courts and pavilions. Working in close harmony with its designers of buildings, landscape architects such as Mark Daniels, Thomas D. Church, Butler S. Sturtevant, and the Misses Worn, under the supervision of John McLaren, chief landscape architect of the 1915 exposition and of Golden Gate Park, created floral designs and arranged for the planting of evergreens indigenous to the Pacific Coast. Besides rhododendrons and azaleas, native annuals, and perennials from all over the Far West, landscaping brought to this riot of color the exotic hues of flowers and plants imported from far countries of the Pacific area.
Midway down the Avenue of Palms rise two massive Mayan-Incan pyramids (Weihe) supporting huge stylized elephant figures—the exposition's main gateway to its great circular Court of Honor. Here the slim octagonal Tower of the Sun (Brown), pierced by airy embrazures and surmounted by a spire, rises 400 feet to dominate with a Renaissance gesture the conglomerate eclecticism of the surrounding architecture. Northward from the belvederes and statuary about its base stretches the immense oblong Court of the Seven Seas (Kelham). From the facades of the pavilions which enclose it protrude the rearing prows of galleys with carved figureheads, suggestive of travel and adventure. This via triumphalis set with standards and lanterns opens into the Court of Pacifica (Pflueger), across whose fountain and sculptures gazes Ralph Stackpole's amazonian statue, Pacifica, symbolic of peaceful co-operation between the Americas and their Pacific neighbors, stationed against a gleaming backdrop of tubes and metal stars designed to produce melodious sounds under certain climatic conditions. Eastward from the Tower of the Sun lies the long Court of Reflections with its serene sculptures and still pools, separated by a lofty arch (Hobart) from the adjoining Court of Flowers. Olof C. Malmquist's The Rainbow rises from the fountain dominating this enclosure, whose eastern entrance is guarded by twin Towers of the East (Merchant). The Court of the Moon and Stars (Kelham) adjoining the Court of Honor on the south presents a decorative vista of fountain, urns, and bas-reliefs. Beyond, in the direction of Yerba Buena Island, lies the sunken Enchanted Garden, where landscaping plays unconfined about a huge fountain. Overlooking this verdant area, William Wurster's Yerba Buena Clubhouse achieves that gay and functional quality associated with this architect's rejection of ornament and fondness for modern materials.
Throughout the exposition's ensemble of almost a hundred buildings, as various in design as the purposes they serve, are many whose architecture is notable either for beautiful modernity or for features suggestive of cultures ranging from Alaska to Argentina, from Missouri to French Indo China.
The exposition has proved a gigantic workshop for all but a few of the more renowned Bay region sculptors and mural painters. From Sargent Johnson's grotesque Inca Indians astride llamas beside the fountain in the Court of Pacifica and Adeline Kent's evanescent Air and Water above the arched west walls of the Court of Honor to Robert Howard's gamboling Whales in the fountain of the San Francisco Building and Herman Volz's gigantic mural The Conquest of the West on the facade of the Federal Building—the statuary and murals run the gamut of the Bay region's artistic achievements. The academic tradition predominates in Olof C. Malmquist's Fauna, in Ettore Cadorin's Moon and the Dawn, in Haig Patigian's Creation. Purely decorative are Jacques Schnier's gold-finished panel, Dance of Life; Raymond Puccinelli's restrained Flora; Ruth Cravath's fountain group, North America.
When the exposition buildings are demolished and Treasure Island is transformed into an air terminal, the semi-circular Administration Building will remain, and the two huge pavilions housing fine arts and aviation exhibits will become hangars for clipper planes linking San Francisco and the Nation with Latin America, the Orient, and Australasia.