Google Map of this tour.

“Lovers Lane is the oldest trail in the Presidio of San Francisco and the shortest way out.  Well before the founding of the Spanish military outpost in 1776, it may have been a deer trail and perhaps a trail used by the Ohlone to move from one hunting camp to another.  Since then, it has been traveled by scores of soldiers and civilians, in war and peacetime, through boom and bust, one foot after the other, each journey something like the one before it, but different too. A Lover’s Line offers visitors a series of different perspectives on Lovers Lane, each one cued by a telephone message and a time/map that transforms the pedestrian trail into something more like a series of chronologies in three dimensions. The cast of characters includes the missionary, the soldier, the military wife, the translator, the dreamer, the hawk and the dove, the wayward trees and the water, whose chronologies overlap and intermingle, at different tempos and according to different, unconscious and imperceptible logics of repetition and return, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unknowingly—so that each history becomes a potential counter-history, each historical fact a fictional detour in someone else’s story.” —JP

Shuttles will leave YBCA for a tour of Lovers Lane on September 6 at noon. Reservations can be made at 415.978.2787. Audio can be accessed after September 6 by calling 415.294.3627 or downloading files at ban5.org.