For awhile, I used to pour over blogs and photos of abandoned buildings. This fascination is probably due to my love of the macabre, ghost stories, social histories and just plain being spooked.
While Fort Point is well maintained as a tourist point of interest, with museum like rooms set up in various places depicting life at the Fort during its years of occupation, it has that feeling of an abandoned institutional building in sections. The Fort's bare bones architecture is amazing and the particular day we visited, the light was streaming through the open stonework in a most beguiling way. This has become my latest photographic passion, to try to catch the ephemeral quality of light. I am not very good at it yet, but I am happy with how these photos turned out. So happy in fact that it was hard to choose 15 out of the hundreds of shots I took.
Almost immediately after arriving at the Fort, my family disappeared. They enjoy going to the very top and looking out at the view, while I prefer to stay on the lower levels and nurse my overwhelming case of vertigo. This left me plenty of time to explore and take photos. Just between you and I, I think I had the most interesting trip of the four of us. The Fort is a truly magical place, if at times a little eerie.
There are circular stairwells leading to each floor, but for the faint of heart, there are straight iron stairs as well. One can get pretty dizzy going round and round on those stairwells.
On the second floor, one can walk through a series of rooms that have been well maintained, meaning they either look like museum type rooms with props arranged in them or like empty rooms in which one might be tempted to set up house.
Did I mention that there were rows upon rows of these rooms? They were all connected by this hallway.
But upon wandering further, one will find the more, shall we say, structural parts of the building.
And this is where the light really started becoming playful. There was something wonderful to behold around every corner and because the light was constantly changing, so too was the character of the very walls by which I was surrounded.
Look at the scalloped detailing on the floor in the picture above.
Between the living and painted colors on the walls and the dramatic lighting, I was highly satisfied with my photographic experience at the Fort.
If you are ever in San Francisco, I would definitely recommend visiting Fort Point. It is free, with a suggested donation, and open daily during working hours. We visited around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, so if you are interested in this kind of lighting, go in the late afternoon as the sun is growing long.
If you are interested in looking at photos of abandoned buildings, check out this and this and this.
