Quick answer
Baker Beach is a stretch of sand on the western edge of the Presidio in San Francisco, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It hosted the first Burning Man from 1986 until 1990, when park police stopped the burn and the event moved to Nevada. Battery Chamberlin, a coastal gun emplacement built in 1904, sits above the north end.
Full transcript
The View Everybody Already Knows
You have seen this beach before you got here. A long run of coarse sand at the western edge of the Presidio, and at the north end the Golden Gate Bridge stands almost side-on above the rocks, close enough to see the paint. It is the angle on the postcards, and it is genuinely better in person because you get the scale: the towers against open ocean rather than against a skyline. Walk north along the sand until the cypress on the bluff stops blocking it. That is the spot. Do it in the late afternoon if you can, when the light comes in from the water instead of over the city.
Eight Feet of Scrap Wood
Then there is what happened here in 1986. At the north end of this beach, a small group put together a rough wooden figure and set it alight on the sand. Perhaps twenty people were watching. That was the first Burning Man. It came back the next summer, and the summer after, and each time the figure was bigger and the crowd was larger, until it was no longer a thing a beach could hold. In 1990 the park police made the call: you can raise it, you cannot burn it. So they raised it, took it down, and drove it to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where it has been ever since. Stand at the north end and try to fit fifty thousand people onto this sand. You cannot, which is the point.
The Gun Above the Sand
Above the same end of the beach sits Battery Chamberlin, built in 1904, when the job of this coastline was to stop ships entering the bay. Its six-inch gun sat on a disappearing carriage — fire, and the recoil drops the barrel back behind the concrete so the crew can reload out of sight. The original guns left in 1917 to be shipped to the First World War, replacements arrived in 1920, and those came out in 1948. The barrel sitting there today is neither of those: the Park Service brought in a replacement six-inch gun on a disappearing carriage in nineteen seventy-seven, so that there would be something left to look at. Climb the short path from the north car park, look at the arc that barrel covers, and then find the bridge in it — the bridge arrived thirty-three years after the gun that was pointed across its footings.