SAN FRANCISCO — Westerners brought many things when they came to the Bay Area, technology, new religion and massive greed. Among these was paranoia – a fear of others slipping in and disrupting the nice life they were making.
The focus of this paranoia was a mile-wide strip of water below what’s now the Golden Gate Bridge. If you look at a map of the San Francisco Bay, it’s like a vast front door left open to anybody who wants to cruise in and poke around. Early on, the concern was a British invasion. Then it was the Confederate States Navy – it existed and not just in the South – and then Japanese and German forces during World War II.
Several measures were proposed to guard this entrance. A never-realized idea from the 1860s was to string a cable all the way across the water to clothesline ships, professional-wrestler style. There actually was a physical barrier during the 1940s – a retractable metal-mesh net – to snag intruding U-boats. None was ever found in the Bay, so supposedly it worked, no doubt to the annoyance of larger marine mammals.
