The Presidio : from Army post to national park /

As the northernmost point on the San Francisco Peninsula, the Presidio was the natural vantage point from which a military garrison could attempt to control marine traffic through the Golden Gate into or out of San Francisco Bay. Because the Bay was also one of a small number of water-level routes through the Coastal Ranges into the western interior lands and provided direct access to the Sierra Nevada gold fields after 1848, this became an important point of strategic control. Consisting of only 1,500 acres and surrounded on three sides by urban residential neighborhoods or approaches to the Golden Gate bridge, the site combines a complex layering of military structures, roads, park-like recreation areas, and natural landscapes that prompted its designation as a national historic landmark in 1963. The federal legislation that created the Golden Gate National Recreational Area in 1972 included the Presidio and constituted another step in a long sequence of events that would eventually blend a strategic military site's historic structures and natural or planted woodland with the community's appreciation of the site's unique qualities. A federal decision in 1988 to close the military base brought a concerted community effort to preserve the space. Benton places in context the political process that accompanied the designation of national park, through a generalized environmental history in the tradition of sequent occupance. Maps, sketches, photographs, appendixes. All levels. K. B. Raitz; University of Kentucky