What a neat place this is! If you have a chance to visit San Francisco, you need to make the chance to visit Fort Point. It’s a 19th century defensive emplacement complete with bricks, mortar and cannons too. If you’ve ever done business with an obscenely profitable dot com business, you know they only have two of those three things, and they aren’t nearly as much fun.
Fort Point is located (in)conveniently in the shadows of the Golden Gate Bridge, right at the mouth of the harbor. Not sure what the harbor is called, but a quick deductive guess would tell me it’s something like Golden Gate… I can’t be held accountable at my age for that answer; it’s just a guess.
Fort Point a really great place. It’s like a playland for kids, except for kids… wait, did I already say that? It’s many stories tall, more indestructible than plastic (as a couple hundred years of use will agree) and it’s even got real-life cannons. No playground I’ve ever hung out on had those.
It’s long since been decommissioned, but I don’t know why. Is this no longer an important harbor for attack? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to keep it active just to gun down a few pleasure boats every once in a while? Nothing against pleasure boats, per se, I’m sure they’re quite pleasant, pleasing and pleasurable, but what about my fun from the gun emplacement? What am I supposed to do, use my imagination?
Fort Point is more than just an old fort, it’s the only such brick emplacement this side of Virginia, it’s a place to wander around and explore rooms, cubbies, exhibits and the general operating placements of the once grand place. Rooms like this may look dingy, and only because they are, but it’s all in part of the exploration fun… much better for my handlers that I played in here, rather than in the furnished crew rooms where I climbed under the gate and ran around like a junior madman. What can I say, I wanted to learn things I couldn’t from my side of the rope.
We did it the only way we could, we used our imagination. With our harbors more in danger now than they were when this place was decommissioned, I say we lobby the National Security Administration and tell them what to do. We may be kids, but we can run the NSA as well as them I’m sure. Reinstate Fort Point (and all the other pre World War One emplacements) and get those guns pointing bayward. Nothing says “don’t mess with me” like a life-threatening, 4-inch barrel pointing at you.
In closing, I’d also like to suggest we man them, these, there cannons with monkeys. They’re fun, cheap and it would really make America’s standards of defense stand out as a truly terrifying force in the world. I mean think about it, monkeys at the trigger of a monster cannon, what could be better?
If this doesn’t say I’m pointing out Fort Point then I just can’t say what would do it for you.