Presidio to Golden Gate: A Self-Guided Walking Tour of San Francisco Presidio to Golden Gate is a first-timer's flagship self-guided walking tour of San Francisco, covering seventeen stops through the Presidio and along the strait the post was built to guard. The route covers the Main Post, the Presidio Officers' Club, Crissy Field, and Fort Point beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. Along with the stops you get eight deep-dive chapters and six first-person accounts from people who lived and worked here, including an ironworker who took a job on the bridge. About This San Francisco Walking Tour The U.S. Army established the cypress, pine, and eucalyptus groves that now cover the Presidio's slopes. In 1883, Major William A. Jones proposed an ambitious planting program for a reservation that was then mostly open dunes and windswept scrub, and the groves have been growing on his plan ever since. This stop is part of a walk that explores how different governments have transformed this strategic location for their own purposes. Long before any of it, the Yelamu, a community of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula, lived around the Golden Gate; the Presidio's military history starts only in 1776. The Army arrived later and continued to develop the area, including the construction of a post hospital in 1863, long brick barracks in the 1890s, and the addition of earthwork and concrete batteries equipped with twelve-inch guns on disappearing carriages. The earthquake on April 18, 1906, turned the post into an emergency logistics base for a city in crisis. Two buildings a short distance apart were doing opposite work during World War II. In 1941 the Army converted Building 640 at Crissy Field into classrooms and barracks for a Japanese-language intelligence school, because it urgently needed people who could read, speak, and translate Japanese, and that expertise was scarce inside the service. Building 35, a former cavalry barracks, housed the Western Defense Command under Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, whose exclusion orders forced Japanese American families out of their homes and into incarceration. Nisei soldiers trained for American military intelligence on the same post where that removal was ordered. The Army departed from the Presidio in 1994, leaving more than a thousand acres of historic buildings, forest, beaches, and environmental contamination. This posed a public challenge that needed to be addressed. Amy Meyer had started earlier and smaller, looking for a local conservation issue; by 1971 that search had grown into a campaign that helped create one of the largest urban national recreation areas in the country. The Route: From the Presidio Main Post to the Golden Gate Bridge Presidio Officers' Club: Yelamu homeland, Spanish colonial beginnings, and the archaeology under the Main Post.Main Post & Pershing: the open parade ground where the post held formation, drill, and ceremony, and what the Army did here in 1906.Montgomery Barracks: Buildings 101 through 105, built between 1895 and 1897, some of the first brick Army barracks in the western United States.Western Defense Command: Building 35, where a cavalry barracks became the office that ordered mass removal.Old Post Hospital: Building 2, constructed in 1863 and 1864, when the Civil War made California's coast worth garrisoning.National Cemetery: the first national cemetery on the West Coast, designated in 1884, with Buffalo Soldiers among the burials.Crissy Field: an Ohlone wetland that became an Army airfield and is now restored shoreline.Fort Point Mine Depot: completed in 1910 to arm the minefields planted in the water outside the Gate.Fort Point: a masonry fort built between 1853 and 1861 and kept standing when the bridge went up.Golden Gate Bridge: the campaign that got it approved and the ironworkers who put it together. You'll Learn About… Why the Presidio has a forest at all, and what the ground looked like before 1883.How Building 640 trained Nisei soldiers for intelligence work while orders written on the same post were removing their families from their homes.What crews at the Fort Point Mine Depot did from 1910: assembling mines, loading them onto vessels, and laying controlled minefields outside the Golden Gate.Why the Army stopped trusting masonry. Rifled artillery in the Civil War could smash brick and stone forts, so engineers put the next generation of guns behind earth at Battery East.How Doyle Drive, built to feed the bridge when it opened in 1937, separated the Main Post from its own waterfront, and how the tunnels under Presidio Tunnel Tops reconnected the two.What Irene Zieske did when the Army turned her down over her eyesight. She kept writing and applying until they took her, and she nursed in an era before antibiotics changed hospital medicine.How Shigeya Kihara, a Californian with a master's degree in international relations, ended up teaching a language the Army could not find enough speakers of. Who It's For First-time visitors get a full introduction to the Presidio and the Golden Gate in one route: what each building was for, who lived in it, and what replaced it. Anyone with an interest in military engineering or Japanese American history will find long stretches aimed at them, and so will anyone curious about how a closed base becomes a national park. Families can take it in pieces, since the stops work in any order. Practical Details for This San Francisco Audio Tour Seventeen stops, plus eight deep-dive chapters and six first-person accounts you can play whenever you like. The Main Post, Fort Point, and the Golden Gate Bridge are key points along the route, and the stops can be visited in any order. Battery Chamberlin sits west of the main route at the north end of Baker Beach; its restored six-inch disappearing gun and carriage is worth a separate visit. Everything is self-guided and plays on your phone at your own pace. Take the Tour Download the app to explore Presidio to Golden Gate at your own pace, with every story playing where it happened.
