Fort Point. Look up. The Golden Gate Bridge is directly over your head. And this brick fortress underneath it is the reason the bridge looks the way it does. But we'll get to that.
First — the fort. The Army built this between eighteen fifty-three and eighteen sixty-one. They started with a ninety-foot cliff and blasted it down to fifteen feet. Apparently that cliff was in the way of their plans to stack eight million bricks into a fortress with a hundred and forty-one cannon positions. The idea was to guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay the same way Fort Sumter guarded Charleston Harbor — a ring of heavy artillery that could sink anything trying to sail through.
The cannonballs were designed to skip across the water like stones. That was the actual military tactic. You'd fire a heavy iron ball at a low angle so it would ricochet off the surface of the bay and slam into the hull of an approaching ship at the waterline. And if skipping cannonballs weren't enough, they also had a f
urnace inside the fort for heating iron shot until it glowed red. Soldiers would carry these red-hot balls in iron baskets and load them into cannons so they'd set wooden ships on fire on impact.
None of this was ever used. Not once. No enemy ship ever tried to enter the bay. Fort Point is the most heavily armed building in San Francisco, and it has a perfect record of shooting at absolutely noth
