Tucked beneath the Golden Gate Bridge is the slightly less famous musty brick fortress of Fort Point, an 1861 edifice built to guard the bustling gold region from foreign invaders and marauders. Visitors to the area mainly train their cameras on the bridge and not the fort-turned-National Park.
"I like to say sometimes that Fort Point resides in the literal and metaphorical shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge," said National Park Ranger Alejandro Cruz.
But visual artist Ben Wood prefers the brick fortress, wrapped around the cavernous parade ground and almost entwined within the bridge's trusses.
Wood created The Bastion of Memory project to share the stories of the fort's past. The project uses archived audio recordings of oral histories and images projected onto a brick wall.
"Through photographs and stories, which typically are sitting on a shelf which no one sees," Wood said, "I'm able to make available to the public and tell some of these really precious stories, important stories from San Francisco."
Wood's flickering projections of artfully treated photos light up a wall in a hallway galley where large guns were once trained on the bay. The audio of voices of some of the fort's former residents bounce off the walls, mingling with the overheard traffic and the churning current of the bay.
"My hope was to sort of bring the building to life," Wood said, "bring some of those memories to life."
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The projections share the accounts of three people. Meriam Nagel lived with her family in a house next to the fort from 1906 to 1920 and recalled helping her lighthouse-keeping grandfather polish the brass.
Captain Cornelius Sullivan tended the Life Saving Station at Fort Point, responding to the ships that struck rocks in the thick tule fog of the Golden Gate Strait. He was on duty in 1901 when the SS City of Rio de Janeiro hit a submerged reef and sank, killing 135 people.
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Slim Lambert, a bridge worker who, along with nine others, plunged through a safety net into the bay, told a third story. Lambert landed in the watery current feet first and attempted to save others.
"That's what I'm excited about, which is getting people through projection and sound to maybe hear some of the ghosts," said Wood. "Some of the people who lived and worked in those places."
Wood has used his projections of historical photos to bring living memories back to places like the historic Haas-Lilienthal House, Coit Tower, and the Cliff House.
"Being able to share the stories of people who lived and worked in the fort when it was an active military fort," said Cruz, "kind of like makes it a little more personable for people."
Wood's projections, which will run through the end of the year, are among several new installations bringing new life to the old fort, which hosts regular Civil War reenactments during the month. Wood hopes the effort will inspire more locals to seek out the sprawling 163-year-old brick building—and maybe point their cameras down instead of up.
