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Inside San Francisco's Presidio: A 1,500-acre former US Army base turned National Park now home to 'Star Wars' creators and VC firms
Inside San Francisco's Presidio: A 1,500-acre former US Army base turned National Park now home to 'Star Wars' creators and VC firms
Katie CanalesNov 1, 2019, 21:57 IST
Katie Canales/Business Insider
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The Presidio of San Francisco is a 1,500-acre national park at the north end of the peninsula.
It's unusual compared to the rest of the city - you won't find brightly-colored Victorian homes, trendy coffee shops, or much of an indication of an urban environment.
Instead, the Presidio is blissfully quiet, smells like eucalyptus, and is filled with century-old red-roofed Mission-style homes that once housed soldiers stationed on what used to be a US Army base. They're available for rent, too.
The post is now populated by some residents and companies, like Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Lucasfilm.
But remnants of the site's military past are still present, like an abandoned fort and a pet cemetery that was used by the army base's officers.
It eventually became under the control of the US military and was turned into a coveted Army post — soldiers were considered lucky to be stationed at the Presidio, according to SF Gate.
But then the Base Realignment and Closure Act in 1989 spelled the closing of the Army post, and the Presidio was transferred to the National Park Service in 1994.
The Presidio National Park is unlike other national parks in the US — it's the only one that Congress requires to be financially self-sufficient without taxpayer assistance.
So the Presidio Trust, the federal agency in charge of running the park, went about restoring the red-bricked historic structures that would later make tenants out of residents, startups, tech offices, and organizations of 21st century San Francisco.
On any given day, you'll find cyclists, walkers, and joggers regularly making use of the miles of trails throughout the site, as well as a small number of coyotes that roam the acreage. Coyote awareness signs are posted throughout the park.
According to SF Gate, snagging one of them can be like finding a rental anywhere in San Francisco, but there are longer waitlists for certain areas of the Presidio.
One of the more expensive homes in the Presidio comes with seven bedrooms and is rented out with a bidding process, with the initial bid starting at $18,500 a month according to SF Gate.
Lucas chose a San Francisco location for the headquarters to allow closer collaboration between special effects teams and computer game developers, according to SF Gate.
A couple of doors down is home to one of Silicon Valley's head honchos in the venture capital arena. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund is credited, among other feats, with backing companies like SpaceX and Airbnb in their early stages.
Both Lucasfilm and the Founders Fund back up to a sprawling park with grassy hills and a duck-filled pond.
Three of San Francisco's signature landmarks are seen from this vantage point. A quick turn of the head to the left, and there's the Golden Gate Bridge.
You can see the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts looming large just a few yards away.
And beyond the Palace of Fine Arts is Alcatraz, what was once a maximum-security island prison.
They lived in the barracks that line the lawn. Now they're filled with offices, like the Presidio Trust.
And the Walt Disney Family Museum fills one, too. It's been here since 2009 showcasing exhibits that catalog the life and accomplishments of the beloved producer.
Big offices may have moved in, but the Presidio still has an iron grip on how the historic acreage is used.
On the western side of the Presidio is Fort Scott, which is basically an army base within an army base.
It's sat mostly abandoned for years until recently when the Presidio Trust launched a development process recruiting organizations to submit proposals that could revitalize the land.
The vision for the fort was for it to be a "campus for change," with its operations serving a higher purpose through social and environmental problem-solving.
Now-embattled WeWork and the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI were among the organizations that submitted a joint proposal to build on the fort.
But the Trust rejected the proposal, citing that it was dismissive of the overall humanitarian vision for the land. The fort will continue to sit untouched until the Trust gradually develops it itself.
This is where military personnel and their families laid their furry friends to rest. There are over 400 tombstones with names like Laddie and Schmelly inscribed on them.
There's no official founding date for the pet cemetery, but newspaper reports on the site date back to the early 1950s, according to the Presidio website.
