One of the more interesting tid bits about or neighborhood is that the building across the street from our house played a role Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The movie was filmed in San Francisco and many local sites were used as backdrops to Hitchcock's story.
In the movie, after visiting Madeline's grave, Jimmy Stewart's character, Scottie, suffers a nightmare causing him to have a nervous breakdown requiring treatment at a sanatorium. He is taken to the St. Joseph's Hospital on Buena Vista East facing Buena Vista Park. The below images show a screen shot from Vertigo (top) and the same view from just a few years ago (bottom).
The hospital is now the Park Hill Condominium and the back end of the building on Park Hill faces our house.
While we are working diligently on the house and planing - we could not possibly overlook the landscaping and art - could we?
We found these really neat blue steel buoys at 14 Feet in Healdsburg and thought they would make a great addition to the front yard, which will be terraced with a series of concrete retaining walls.
As it turns out these buoys have some really interesting history - they were used during World War II to net the San Francisco Bay against Japanese Submarines.
San Francisco was a major port and naval base that was vital to the war in the Pacific. It was well protected by mines, guns, and numerous coastal batteries mounting 40mm anti-aircraft guns all the way up to 16 inch naval guns at Fort Cronkite and Fort Funston. In addition to these defenses, on September 15, 1941, the War Department authorized a submarine net to be positioned across the Golden Gate to prevent access to the bay by Japanese submarines. These buoys, along with about another 100 buoys, held the net in place during the War. The net was made and serviced at the Tiburon Naval Net Depot and at Alcatraz prison. Navy ships would open and close the net for friendly vessels. The below picture shows the buoys with the net just before the net was installed in the bay.
After the war the nets were recovered and returned to Tiburon for storage in case of future need. Eventually, they were salvaged, the nets went to scrap dealers, the massive concrete anchors became bulkheads for shoreline protection at the depot and what is now Paradise Park, and many of the huge buoys became beehives around California. The gantries were removed, leaving only the tracks on which they ran and a concrete trestle down the center of the base.
As can be seen by the below map, the submarine net spanned from Fort Mason on the San Francisco side to Sausalito on the Marin side.
