San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area contains an outdoor museum of fortifications that waited for wars that never happened and enemies that never came. Historian John A. Martini, a retired National Park Service ranger, covers the Presidio’s colonial-era fortifications built by the Spanish and Mexican governments; the towering Civil War fortress of Fort Point; the dozens of concrete coast artillery bunkers built from the 1890s to the 1940s; and the Bay Area’s final defensive system: a chain of Nike missile sites armed with nuclear weapons during the Cold War. All obsolete, the fortifications’ legacy is the stunning parklands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

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