The closing of the San Francisco Presidio - 21 May 1993

Do you remember we talked just lately about the painful business of closing military bases, the consequent unemployment, the impoverishment of the towns that thrived on them?

I ought to say right away that I'm well aware that this and related economies like abolishing old famous regiments have become a problem for more nations than this one and have afflicted the Russians in a form so acute that along with their many other economic ordeals, they're confronting hundreds of thousands of officers with no job and no home.

Here in America, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, there are so many army and navy bases on states bordering the east and west coast, not to mention the Gulf of Mexico that the infighting is fierce between towns that live off the military. Everyone saying, "Yes of course, we must trim the military budget by closing bases, but not ours."

Well the government, the administration has just decided to close what I should think of all the bases in the United States had the strongest sentimental claim to be left untouched as an historic place, the San Francisco Presidio. San Francisco you know is a broad peninsula shaped like a thumb, which juts upward into the waters of the Bay that flow in from the Pacific. The Presidio, a Spanish word for garrison, lies on the left tip, the coastal edge of the big thumb. It's a marvellously placed. Well, it's more of a military park than anything fenced off from the sprawling petticoats of the city, it encompasses about 1,500 acres, which is twice the size of New York Central Park, maybe some people will get a better picture if I say more than three times the area of London's Regent's Park. So the 1,000 little houses and apartments are nicely spaced, even visiting the place gives you the feeling of being the privileged guest of some beautiful estate edging the great sail-less Pacific. The Presidio guards that coast at the very entrance to the Golden Gate, the splendid red bridge is anchored at its southern end on a fortified side of the Presidio, which has its guns trained on any seaborne intruder since 1776.

So the Presidio has been a garrison for 217 years. First for Spain, then for Mexico and since 1846, when the Mexicans were loosing their last war with this nation, the western most military fort of the continental United States. It has a forest of 400,000 trees and in the adjoining meadow lands an 18-hole golf course, many rare some endangered plants and trees. a medical research centre, two hospitals, one built only five years after the gold rush when San Francisco was a treeless shanty town on nine windy sand hills. Accordingly, the hospital's brick foundations and pine and hemlock girders were shipped around the Horn. The cemetery is second only to Arlington as a national cemetery, it bares the remains of 15,000 veterans and their wives and one other woman, not a veteran's wife, not a soldier or nurse or any member of the military. She was a young actress and was honourably buried in the Presidio for her services during the Civil War as a Union Spy, Pauline Cushman Fryer. Somebody should do a life of her, maybe somebody has.

Well, over the protests of the resident 9th Army Corps and local historians and Mexican American war buffs and other sentimentalists, the presidential commission that had the final say in recommending the 80-odd closures to the president, it spoke and he, the heartless Clinton, oh military historian, he gave the nod. The moment the decision was made, the air was thick with abrasive shouts and pleas and proposals what to do with it. Promptly came an appeal from the University of California, which is bursting with about 100,000 students too many on is now nine campuses. Please, they would like the Presidio as an additional campus. There were poignant appeals from San Francisco residents turn it over all 5,000 acres to the homeless, the vision that offers of a placid community boggles the imagination.

Of course, Hollywood and New York considered as entertainment centres hinted that they would pay dearly for a movie museum or for something on the order of yet another Disneyland, somebody had the brilliant idea that the whole place should be turned into a mushroom research centre. Well, as I say, the decision has been made it will be turned over to the National Park Service.

Now the National Park Service was born the germ of the idea on the high plains of Montana when a few natives of that spacious western state sat around a wilderness campfire one evening in 1872 and thought what a fine thing it would be if a whole sweeping stretch of country on the upper Yellowstone River could be set aside for, as they put it in a letter to their congressman, perpetual public use. Two years later, Congress established Yellowstone National Park, it was the first and since then and thanks mainly to the drive of Roosevelt the First, Theodore of that ilk, the United States as many of you I hope know has now over 40 national parks and the greatest possible range, size and variety, some of them the size of Hyde Park, some of them the size of Wales. The western ones, Yosemite, Sequoia, Yellowstone, Bryce, Zion for scarlet canyons, geezers, geysers, the waterfalls, ancient red woods, prehistoric cliff dwellings, glaciers, alpine lakes, thousands of mountains over 10,000ft, innumerable beasties and on and on to mountain parks with hundreds of varieties of trees, flowers to national military parks, battlefield sites and so on.

I'm always surprised by the way that intending tourists who write to me for suggestions about what to do and see in the United States very rarely mention any of the great parks. Several of the western ones, Bryce and Zion for instance, if they existed in Europe would be Europe's number one tourist attraction, so I suppose in theory the San Francisco Presidio will be designated as a National Military Site, not I gather so. A spokesman for the Department of the Interior, which is America's Home Office, said this week, the Presidio will be a new kind of park, it is a kind of project that will reinvent the park service. Needless to say there's already a committee formed to advise the park service how to develop it. And the first question these days about any splendid plan, policy, agenda: how much will it cost and where will the money come from?

The army has been spending about $45 million a year in maintenance and of course maintenance in that place means a good deal more than maintaining the houses, hospitals, apartments, barracks, training grounds and the like. It means they've done a beautiful job maintaining the forest and the woods and copses and the meadowlands, which constitute practically a forest reserve, not to mention, so I won't, the fine golf course. An ideal spot, a city father said for a public park, but like most ideals when you want to realise them, they cost a pretty penny and the first bill is already in, to cleaning up dangerous wastes, estimate $62 million. What would they be?

Well, to begin with something most of us don't immediately think off when the phrase comes up, am I right, we think of toxic wastes, industrial sludge and so forth. These days no matter what building and wherever, a building is to be converted, the first order of business is to rip out all the asbestos. This undertaken throughout this entire nation has run up a staggering bill of many many billions of dollars for old schools, factories, offices, apartment houses. Ours was done last summer. After the accursed asbestos, next on the menu at the Presidio is the residue of oil in underground tanks.

The laws that allow the Presidio to become a National Park do not allow a park fee or road toll to be paid. What it does allow is the acceptance of wealthy or anyway high-paying tenants, possibly the University of California will get its wish not for the whole campus, but for a part of it to house some speciality – how about that mushroom research centre? Foreign governments have been suggested, if not exactly solicited, and as you might guess breathing down the necks of the Department of the Interior in Washington already a pant of developers and their lobbyists. The department says, for now anyway – and I imagine with the enthusiastic assurance of Vice President Gore, who as you know is an environmental missionary – no commercial or private development. However, the new park does already have its first tenant and I think a little background is called for.

In the 1780s, Russians moved on to the coast of California and King Charles in Madrid assumed they meant to colonise his vast territory, hence the Spanish established that chain of forts along 400 miles of the coast disguised as Christian Missions, which by the way they also were. For the next, through the better part of, half a century, the cry alarmed the Californians and was taken up in the 20th century by William Randolph Hearst, "the Russians are coming". Well way back there, they hadn't arrived to settle or colonise anything, they came to hunt the sea otter and when the sea otter gave out, the Russians left.

Now you'll see how the identity of the Presidio Park's first tenant provides the happiest possible irony. Last month, the keys to an officer's house were given to a man who is being allowed to set up there the headquarters of his personal peace foundation, his name is Mikhail Gorbachev.

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