San Francisco Presidio Military History (Zoom Class)

The Presidio of San Francisco (originally, El Presidio Real de San Francisco or The Royal Fortress of Saint Francis) is a park and former U.S. Army post on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, and is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

It had been a fortified location since September 17, 1776, when New Spain established the presidio to gain a foothold in Alta California and the San Francisco Bay. It passed to Mexico in 1820, which in turn passed it to the United States in 1848. As part of a military reduction program under the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process from 1988, Congress voted to end the Presidio’s status as an active military installation of the U.S. Army. On October 1, 1994, it was transferred to the National Park Service, ending 219 years of military use and beginning its next phase of mixed commercial and public use.

The Letterman Army Hospital, established around 1898 and redesignated as the Letterman Army Medical Center (LAMC) in 1969, was a US Army facility at the Presidio of San Francisco in San Francisco, California, US. It was decommissioned in 1994. Some of the original 1898 buildings still exist and now house the Thoreau Center for Sustainability. The Letterman Army Medical Center built in the 1960s era was demolished to make way for Lucus & Letterman Digital Arts Center.

The Palace of Fine Arts is a monumental structure located in the Marina District of San Francisco, California, originally built for the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition to exhibit works of art. Completely rebuilt from 1964 to 1974, it is the only structure from the exposition that survives on site.

Conceived to evoke a decaying ruin of ancient Rome, the Palace of Fine Arts became one of San Francisco’s most recognizable landmarks. The most prominent building of the complex, a 162-foot-high (49-meter) open rotunda, is enclosed by a lagoon on one side and adjoins a large, curved exhibition center on the other side, separated from the lagoon by colonnades. As of 2019, the exhibition center (one of San Francisco’s largest single-story buildings) was in use as a venue for events such as weddings or trade fairs.

Early 2009 marked the completion of a renovation of the lagoons and walkways and a seismic retrofit.

The Consulate General of Russia in San Francisco was Russia’s diplomatic office in the 2790 Green Street building in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, California. It was operated by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The building of the former consulate remains government property of Russia.

During the Russian Empire the consulate had jurisdiction over the Honolulu, Portland, and Seattle consulates. During the Soviet Union, the consulate and the New York consulate were the only active Soviet consulates in the United States.

Between 1941 and the mid-1960s, some medical experiments were conducted on a large scale on civilians who had not consented to participate. Often, these experiments took place in urban areas in order to test dispersion methods. Questions were raised about detrimental health effects after experiments in San Francisco, California, were followed by a spike in hospital visits. The San Francisco test involved a U.S. Navy ship that in 1951 sprayed Serratia marcescens from the bay; it traveled more than 30 miles. In 1977, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that there was no association between the testing and the occurrence of pneumonia or influenza.

Operation Sea-Spray was a 1950 U.S. Navy secret biological warfare experiment in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria were sprayed over the San Francisco Bay Area in California, in order to determine how vulnerable a city like San Francisco may be to a bioweapon attack. There has been speculation that the experiment may have contributed to one death and at least 10 illnesses.

Starting on September 20, 1950, and continuing until September 27, the U.S. Navy released the two types of bacteria from a ship off the shore of San Francisco. Based on results from monitoring equipment at 43 locations around the city, the Army determined that San Francisco had received enough of a dose for nearly all of the city’s 800,000 residents to inhale at least 5,000 of the particles. This is within the range of infectivity for anthrax.

Foundation:

Michael A. Aquino
Born in 1946, Michael A. Aquino was a military intelligence officer specializing in psychological warfare. In 1969 he joined Anton LaVey‘s Church of Satan and rose rapidly through the group’s ranks. In 1970, while he was serving with the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, Aquino was stationed in Bến Cát in South Vietnam when he wrote a tract titled “Diabolicon” in which he reflected upon his growing divergence from the Church of Satan’s doctrines. In this tract, teachings about the creation of the world, God, and humanity are presented, as is the dualistic idea that Satan complements God. The character of Lucifer is presented as bringing insight to human society, a depiction of Lucifer that was inherited from John Milton‘s seventeenth-century epic poem Paradise Lost. By 1971, Aquino was ranked as a Magister Caverns of the IV° within the Church’s hierarchy, was editor of its publication The Cloven Hoof, and sat on its governing Council of Nine. In 1973, he rose to the previously unattained rank of Magister Templi of IV°. According to Satanism scholars Per Faxneld and Jesper Petersen, Aquino had effectively become LaVey’s “right-hand man”.

Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, Inc. was a free health care service in Northern California which remained in service from June 7, 1967, until July 2019. It was founded in response to the Summer of Love and was the first of more than 600 free clinics made over the next decade.

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