Fort Mason: From Military Base to Startup Campus

The headland on the northeast tip of San Francisco's Marina District has been continuously occupied for purposes its original inhabitants could not have anticipated: first as an Ohlone coastal landing, then a Spanish artillery battery, then a private estate seized by Lincoln's government, then a gun emplacement, then the second-largest US Army port in World War II, then a derelict, then one of the country's biggest arts campuses, and now, in part, a 42,000-square-foot startup lab run by Founders, Inc.¹⁹ Each transition destroyed or repurposed what came before, but the buildings survived -- warehouses built to ship soldiers to the Pacific now house 3D printers and soldering irons.²¹⁵

Before the Army: Ohlone land and a Spanish battery

The Ramaytush Ohlone people lived in small independent communities across the San Francisco Bay Area for thousands of years before European contact; the sandy shoreline on Fort Mason's north face is the last remaining section of original coastline in San Francisco east of the Golden Gate Bridge.¹¹² The Ramaytush Ohlone managed the Bay's wetland ecosystems through cultural burning, harvesting shellfish and waterfowl, and maintaining natural salt ponds for trade.¹²

The Spanish named the point Punta Medanos and Punta de San Jose and in 1797 the Presidio of San Francisco built the Bateria de Yerba Buena there -- an artillery emplacement intended to protect the Yerba Buena anchorage from foreign ships.¹⁴ The battery was briefly occupied and abandoned by 1806; no fortifications survived.¹

After California's cession to the United States in 1848, the federal government reserved the site on December 31, 1851 as the Point San Jose Military Reservation by executive order of President Millard Fillmore.¹⁴ But the Army did not actually garrison it. For most of the 1850s the unoccupied headland drew San Francisco civilians -- five houses were built on the bluff by real estate developers Leonidas Haskell and George Eggleton -- and locals renamed the area Black Point after the dark-leaved California bay laurel trees covering the cliff.¹⁴

The abolitionist salon at Black Point

In 1859 John C. Fremont -- Bear Flag Republic commander, first US senator from California, first Republican presidential nominee in 1856 -- bought a 13.5-acre parcel at Black Point's tip for approximately $42,000 and spent another $40,000 improving it.¹⁸ His wife Jessie Benton Fremont, daughter of Missouri's anti-slavery senator Thomas Hart Benton, turned the house called "Porter's Lodge" into a political and literary salon.⁶⁴

The salon's regulars included Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King, whose anti-slavery sermons helped keep California in the Union; writer Bret Harte, whose stories shaped the national imagination of the American West; Edward D. Baker, the senator and friend of Abraham Lincoln who had successfully represented runaway slaves in court; and Herman Melville, who stopped in during his West Coast travels.⁶⁴ Jessie invited Starr King to use a quiet study behind the house to write his sermons.⁶

The abolitionist community at Black Point had already been marked by violence. In 1859, pro-slavery California Supreme Court Chief Justice David S. Terry challenged anti-slavery senator David C. Broderick to a duel after a public clash over the expansion of slavery; Terry mortally wounded Broderick, whose friends rushed him to Leonidas Haskell's house at Black Point, where he died three days later.⁴ Broderick's reported last words -- "They killed me because I am opposed to the extension of slavery and a corrupt administration" -- made him a national martyr.⁴

Seized by Lincoln, armed for the Civil War

On October 13, 1863, while the Fremonts were in St. Louis (John having been appointed major general of the Union's Western Department before resigning after clashes with the White House), the federal government seized the Black Point property by executive order of Lincoln.⁴¹ The Army demolished Porter's Lodge and built two batteries on the headland's northern tip: the West Battery mounted six 10-inch Rodman cannons, and the East Battery held six 42-pounder rifles.⁴¹ A post headquarters, hospital, and barracks were built around a rectangular parade ground.⁴

The Fremonts were never paid.¹ Over the following decades at least 24 congressional committees voted to compensate John Fremont; in February 1898 President William McKinley signed a bill directing the Court of Claims to fix the award.¹ The Fremonts' descendants were still suing the government over the parcel in 1968 -- more than a century after the seizure.¹⁸

In 1882 the post was renamed Fort Mason after Richard Barnes Mason (1797-1850), the fifth US military governor of California, whose official report to President Polk confirming the August 1848 gold discovery at Sutter's Mill is credited with igniting the California Gold Rush.⁷²² Mason was a direct descendant of George Mason IV, the framer of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights whose language shaped the US Bill of Rights.⁷

Gateway to the Pacific

Between 1912 and 1915, the Army built three piers, a complex of warehouses, and the Fort Mason Tunnel under Upper Fort Mason to connect the new port to the State Belt Railroad along the Embarcadero.¹ The piers became the Pacific home port for the Army Transport Service, supplying US posts in Hawaii, the Philippines, and the Pacific islands.¹ From 1904 to 1907 Fort Mason had served as headquarters of the US Army Pacific Division under Major General Arthur MacArthur Jr., father of Douglas MacArthur.¹

On May 6, 1932, the complex was formally designated the San Francisco Port of Embarkation (SFPOE) -- modeled on the New York Port of Embarkation that had supplied US forces in World War I.² Fort Mason became both the SFPOE's headquarters and a component of a logistics network that, by 1941, had expanded to 13 installations across the Bay Area, including the 624.5-acre Oakland Army Base, Camp Stoneman at Pittsburg, and leased piers in Alameda, Richmond, and Stockton.²

1.6 million soldiers through the gate

At peak the SFPOE operated 20 piers with 43 deepwater berths, 2,867,000 square feet of warehouse space, 1,984,000 square feet of transit sheds, and 7,640,000 square feet of open storage.² Roughly two-thirds of all US troops sent to the Pacific Theater in World War II shipped through it.²⁵ Over the 45 months of the war the port moved 1,647,174 passengers and 23,589,472 measured tons of cargo to the Pacific.¹⁵ The single highest month was August 1945, when 93,986 outbound passengers were loaded.¹ Between September 1945 and October 1946, nearly 800,000 returning troops passed back through the gate.⁵

The port's volume distorted San Francisco's rail network. On January 12, 1942 -- five weeks after Pearl Harbor -- 3,208 loaded freight cars arrived at the port in a single day, far exceeding shipping-out capacity and forcing the SFPOE to temporarily embargo inbound traffic; five months later the port was moving 2,500 cars a day cleanly.² The Emeryville Motor Depot, a dedicated vehicle-processing facility, shipped 99,731 tanks, trucks, and tractors between December 1941 and August 1945.² Camp Stoneman alone processed over 1.5 million troops across WWII and the Korean War.²

One minor lieutenant in the SFPOE's early wartime planning unit, "The Backroom Boys," was future president Ronald Reagan, a cavalry reservist assigned to Fort Mason in April 1942 and classified for limited service only because of his poor eyesight; he was reassigned to the Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit within weeks.¹

The SFPOE reprised its role during the Korean War (1950-1953) and was renamed the US Army Transportation Terminal Command Pacific in October 1955.² In 1962 the Army declared Fort Mason surplus, ending 111 years of continuous military presence.¹³ The headquarters moved to the Oakland Army Terminal in 1965.¹

A decade of disrepair

After the Army left, the lower campus deteriorated. The warehouses and piers that had processed more than a million troops sat empty.³ Public attention on unused federal land in the Bay Area -- galvanized partly by the 1969 Native American occupation of Alcatraz -- made Fort Mason's fate a live political question.³

In 1972, Representative Philip Burton's HR 9498 established the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), a roughly 80,000-acre urban national park that absorbed the Fort Mason lands, much of the Presidio, the Marin Headlands, and the Pacific coast beyond.³¹ The National Park Service, unwilling to operate the lower campus directly, solicited a partner to be a "pioneer in the imaginative use of urban national parklands" and preserve "the diverse culture of the Bay Area."³

The cultural campus

A nonprofit called the Fort Mason Foundation answered the call. It refurbished the dilapidated campus and opened it to the public on January 1, 1977; the first cohort of nonprofit residents moved in shortly after.³¹¹ The foundation was renamed Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) in 2015.³ On February 4, 1985, the former Port of Embarkation was designated a National Historic Landmark District, covering 49 buildings of historic significance.¹²³

Two of the first-generation FMCAC residents reshaped American culture from inside the warehouses. On June 27, 1978, Magic Theatre -- already a leading West Coast home for new work -- premiered Sam Shepard's Buried Child, directed by Robert Woodruff; the play won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and has had more than 400 productions worldwide.¹⁷¹⁸ Shepard wrote eleven more plays at Magic Theatre over the next decade as playwright-in-residence.¹⁸

In July 1979 the San Francisco Zen Center opened Greens Restaurant in a pier shed on the waterfront, with Deborah Madison as founding chef.¹⁵¹⁶ The New York Times later wrote that Greens "established vegetarian food as a cuisine in America."¹⁵¹⁶

Fort Mason also became a stage for moments of broader cultural reckoning. In 1980, the People's Republic of China held its first trade show ever sent abroad in the Festival Pavilion -- tens of thousands of San Franciscans queued outside.³ On June 25-26, 1998, Bill Gates headlined the Windows 98 launch at the same Festival Pavilion, comparing the PC industry to the 1920s auto business and predicting PCs in 60% of American homes by 2001.¹³¹⁴

The campus today hosts roughly 25 tenant organizations, including The Interval (the Long Now Foundation's salon and bar), BATS Improv, Blue Bear School of Music, Arion Press, and Flax Art + Design, San Francisco's oldest art supply store.¹⁰³ Since 1977, more than 1.5 million visitors have passed through the campus annually.¹¹

Building B: from buildspace to Founders, Inc.

Founders, Inc. has been a Fort Mason resident since 2022, renting space in Building B (2 Marina Blvd, Suite 200).⁹ From July 2023 until August 2024, it shared the building with buildspace, Farza Majeed's builder community that ran its Nights & Weekends program from the same suite and put roughly 150,000 participants through its cohorts.¹⁹²⁰

When Majeed closed buildspace on August 24, 2024 -- despite having more than two years of runway and a $100M valuation -- Founders, Inc. expanded into the vacated footprint.²⁰¹⁹ The campus now spans 42,000 square feet of Building B: a hardware lab with CNC machines, 3D printers, soldering irons, and Raspberry Pis; a media studio; open workspace for roughly 80 founders; a gym; and a gaming room.²¹⁹

The building that once stored cargo bound for the Pacific Theater now stores the prototypes of companies working on robots, brain-computer interfaces, and consumer hardware.²¹ It is one of the few for-profit venture operations on a campus that remains majority-nonprofit -- a warehouse district that has cycled through armies, artists, chefs, playwrights, and founders over 150 years, and has never stopped being remade.¹⁰⁹