As a grown up, he walked daily along the beach,
exploring, photographing and philosophizing about the concrete bunkers that could
still be found every few miles. He
concluded that these bunkers were “symbols of the fragility of the Nazi
state. This cryptic architecture became
the marker for the evolution of Hitlerian space.” The notion that bunkers are a sign of
fragility is an interesting one, but I wonder if there’s any civilization that
hasn’t built bunkers of one kind or another.
It so happens that San Francisco has its own line of bunkers, along with
other attendant fortfications, as in fact as does the whole of the American
coast: a sort of “Pacific Wall” built to deter enemies coming in across the water,
be they real or imaginary, Mexican, Japanese, or Russian. It’s tempting to see this as simple American
paranoia, but in fact in fact the first San Francisco bunkers were built by the
Spanish.
The San Francisco bunkers are on the west coast of the peninsula, all
along the side of the Presidio, once an impenetrable military base, now a
public park. I decided I’d walk the
length of the Presidio, from the southwest corner, take the path that goes past
various bunkers, battlements and batteries – Battery Chamberlin, Battery
Crosby, Battery Godfrey, Battery Boutelle, et al -and end up somewhere under
the Golden Gate Bridge. That’s not a
huge distance, not more than a couple of miles, though with plenty of up and
downs and detours, including the Battery to Bluffs Trail, if you choose to take
them.
I’d been told that this area is known in some quarters as “bad boy
beach,” a hot bed of gay sex, but I couldn’t see any evidence of this. Maybe it was too cold. I did see a couple of professional dog
walkers at the southern end, and increasing numbers of more or less serious
walkers, and even runners, as I got further north, but in general the stretch
was thinly populated.
Of course the ocean is the attraction for a lot of people, and there’s
a pretty fabulous view of the bridge for most of the way, and yet the bunkers
still felt like the real attraction, and I didn’t see any anybody resisting the
urge to walk among them, going up and up and down the steps, climbing the
parapets, walking on the roofs, on what would have been the impenetrable face
they toward the enemy.
I’m still trying to work out exactly what’s so great about these
bunkers, and perhaps all bunkers; I think it’s because that they’re so
uncompromising, they’re absolutely functional, built exactly the way they need to
be built, without decoration or aesthetic consideration, they don’t look like
any other kind of building, they’re completely themselves and yet when you want
among them it’s as moving as walking in the ruins of ancient Greece.
There
are still several thousand World War Two pillboxes scattered around Britain,
there were originally 28,000 of them apparently. When I used to live East Anglia, in Suffolk, I’d always come across a pillbox or two when I was walking, nothing as
grand as those in the Presidio, and not nearly as photogenic as Virilio's, but they were appealing for many of the same
reasons. The coast itself had bunkers
bunkers too – I used to poke around in one close to the Sizewell power station
- looking out across the North Sea, ready for a German invasion just as the
Germans behind the Atlantic Wall were ready for an Allied invasion. Last time I was in England I walked by, and even into this, very fine example in Hartford End, Felsted; above and below.
