I had just finished a commission in the San Francisco Bay area and, finding myself at a loose end before returning home, decided to take a drive. The ocean has always held a real fascination for me and the Bay area is a real joy to explore. But on this occasion my journey was rather suddenly cut short. Driving over the San Francisco, Oakland Bay Bridge I caught sight of a slip road with a small sign that read “Treasure Island”. Not only do I love the sea but the idea of a place straight out of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, with its tales of pirates and buried treasure, was hard to resist. I swung the car round at the end of the bridge and headed back.My hopes of finding jewels or a character like Long John Silver were quickly dashed. Seemingly the only other person around was a burly security guard patrolling a large perimeter fence. After some spiel about property development I managed to convince him to let me through. I still had no idea what this Treasure Island was or why no-one was here but that just added to the intrigue.There was no buried treasure , nothing of the sort. Instead, a disused bowling alley…a deserted theatre…an empty swimming pool. These strange hulks, completely lifeless in the blazing sun and emerging from cracked concrete paving were certainly not what I had expected. Everything in this place was laid bare for all to see decaying totems to the American ‘Way of Life’.It turns out that this particular Treasure Island had been built for the 1939-40 Golden Gate International Exposition, celebrating two huge engineering feats - the bridges across the Bay, one of which I had crossed earlier - as well as America’s burgeoning consumerism. Named after the famous novel, it is a man-made island, built from the shoals of Yerba Buena island across which the San Francisco - Oakland Bay bridge runs.The guard returned after an hour or so, probably having seen me with my camera and nervous that he’d left me alone all that time. As I was politely asked to leave I managed to find out that the place had been, until fairly recently, used as a base by the US Navy. Perhaps this was the reason I might have overstayed my welcome. After the International Exposition the island was earmarked to be an airport but the Navy had swapped the island with a site on the mainland. Treasure Island became a naval base during WWII and subsequently a communications training centre, in operation until 1996 when it was handed back into public control. People do actually live on the island, many of them students who commute to a nearby college on the mainland.This place though, a holding pen for relics of America’s golden age of consumerism, remained devoid of people. The basketball arena and ersatz airport still stood. The original visitors to the Expo - thrill seekers and treasure hunters - had all long gone. But with no-one around to return it to its former glory, or to tear it down, the island had simply been abandoned and left to its own fate. Marooned like Ben Gunn in Louis Stevenson’s original…
