Occasionally we leave the Mission. Occasionally we leave the Mission to crawl into a hole in the ground, climb down two sets of ancient metal ladders, and play pretend putting range in an abandoned artillery bunker with a golf ball that someone has doused with lighter fluid and set on fire.
Legitimately abandoned spaces are rare in San Francisco. This space appears to have been occupied by many subcultures, many of them exhorting the virtues of dance music, AC/DC and loving each other. A brief investigation of the historical record shows that everyone from Chronicle reporters to television crews have been down there. A friend recalls making an entire film down there in the ’80s.
“This space is hard to keep a secret,” says one partygoer. “Think. If you find it, what do you do with it? It’s just this big empty space, underground. It wants to have parties thrown in it.”
“The entrance that we found first took forever to get into,” says another man. “So we dug a second entrance. Because we realized that unless we had an entrance close to the ladder, we would never be able to get girls down here.”
“What’s your story?” yells a third man in a headlamp, addressing the crowd of about 30 people from on top of a table covered in beer bottles and a red-and-white checked tablecloth. “If the cops come, you say, ‘I heard the noise, and so I came down here and found this going on.’ You have no idea who organized this.”
The next day it feels like it was all a dream. All that’s left is a pile of muddy clothing and a persistent, hollow cough. Which makes us think what we probably should have thought of already — that maybe setting golf balls on fire underground isn’t such a good idea.
