“Everyone has a story about Treasure Island,” says John Hogan, director of the Treasure Island Museum.
Visitors to his museum love to open up about their connections to this 393-acre island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, a landmass that didn’t even exist 100 years ago. Nonetheless, this flat, man-made island has played a unique, outsized role in illuminating the region’s vision of itself as a vanguard for American progress.
A drone view of Treasure Island seen from Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, April 30, 2024. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
Two years after it was built in 1937, Treasure Island hosted 17 million people for a World’s Fair to promote international unity, then served as the point for wartime embarkation and debarkation for 4.5 million sailors, Marines and servicewomen headed to the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. More servicemen and women passed through Treasure Island in the years that followed — up until 1997 — as the Navy continued to use the island for command, electronics and nuclear weapons training and for regional command operations.
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I recall my father, a Naval Reserve captain and veteran of the Pacific Theater, bringing our family to special-occasion dinners at the Officer’s Club in the 1970s. It seemed so elegant, like a scene from a World War II movie, with my father donning his uniform and inviting my mother to dance.
People who currently live and work on the island talk about building a new sense of community, with a demographically diverse population that includes formerly unhoused people, creative entrepreneurs and denizens of new low- and high-rise buildings along the waterfront.
“We got the water, we got walking paths. This is so beautiful. It’s a miracle on Treasure Island,” Melanie Williams Jones, who raised her two children on the island, said in a recent oral history anthology.
Court of the Seven Seas at the 1939-40 Golden Gate International Exposition (Gift of Janis Bosenko/Courtesy of the Treasure Island Museum)
For thousands of years, Treasure Island existed only as a submerged outcropping of rocks in San Francisco Bay. Ohlone tribes likely fished here while visiting or living on adjacent Yerba Buena Island, which was later used for goat farming, until the U.S. Army seized it in 1866 for coastal defense purposes
San Francisco leaders came up with the idea of building a new island in the 1930s, inspired by the construction marvel that was the Bay Bridge. They wanted to host a world’s fair to promote San Francisco as a center for progress, then transform the island into a major new airport. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed off on the proposal after being persuaded that building an island and airport would put thousands to work during the Depression. Of course, the military also recognized its potential as a future Navy base.
It took the US Army Corp of Engineers just 22 months to finish the island, connecting it to Yerba Buena Island via a causeway. The federal government also funded the construction of elegant new airport buildings, including the stately Art Moderne-style Administration Building and control tower, which served as a terminal for the Pan American Airways Clipper flying boats that landed in the Bay.
The airport idea never progressed further, not after the Navy moved onto the island in 1940 to prepare for the possibility of war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Navy stayed for another 55 years, until the island’s transfer to the city of San Francisco for future redevelopment.
Now, both Treasure and Yerba Buena islands are undergoing another transformation for the 21st century. By 2041, up to 8,000 new homes, along with restaurants, retail centers, public transportation hubs, parks and open spaces are expected to be built on the two islands under a master plan overseen by San Francisco’s Treasure Island Development Authority. The idea is to rekindle the island’s original mission to provide a vision for the future.
As this transformation unfolds, here are two other stories about the island’s unique role in American history.
Anne Schnoebelen of the Treasure Island Museum visits a collection of statues from the 1939-40 Golden Gate International Exposition stored in a hangar on the island, Friday, Feb. 28, 2025, in San Francisco, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Amazing hidden art
Getting a rare peek at the 12 Pacific Unity sculptures stored in an old warehouse on Treasure Island may not entirely compare to the experience of the Chinese archaeologist discovering the ancient tomb holding 8,000 terra-cotta warriors. There’s an echo, though.
Stepping behind a fence to see these seemingly forgotten, nearly 90-year-old sculptures still inspires a heart-pounding sense of awe and discovery. The works are stunning and historically significant in their own right.
For the 1939-40 Golden Gate International Exposition, eight Bay Area artists — four women and four men — were commissioned to create monumental works that presented America’s hope for global unity, even with World War II looming.
The Court of Pacifica during the Golden Gate International Exposition 1939-40 (Gift of Kelly Williams/Courtesy of the Treasure Island Museum)
The sculptures are among the original 20 featured in one of the Expo’s most spectacular locations: the Court of Pacifica, named for an 80-foot-tall figure of a mythological goddess. Each of the sculptures represented people of the Pacific Rim.
They are in storage now with the expectation that they will again be publicly displayed on the island at housing and retail centers, said Bob Beck, director of the Treasure Island Development Authority.
The group includes one of three dancing Chinese musicians crafted by Fresno-born Helen Philips, who was later known for her avant-garde and surrealist bronzes, and two massive figures of Incan soldiers riding llamas by Sargent Johnson, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, even though he lived much of his life in San Francisco’s North Beach.
The majestic figure of a seated Polynesian woman is by Brents Carlson, who, like these other artists, trained at the now-shuttered San Francisco Art Institute. And an almost kinetic figure of an Indigenous boy wrestling an alligator, which shows signs of decades of wear, was made by Cecelia Graham, another San Francisco native.
The artists were among the thousands who found work on Treasure Island during the Depression, helping to prepare the island to host the exposition.
A few months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Navy took formal possession of the island and knocked down or repurposed exposition buildings. It kept the Court of Pacifica and allowed the statues to stay, though the goddess Pacifica came down in 1942. By the early 1990s, six of the sculptures had been restored and were displayed in front of the Administration Building, which also houses the Treasure Island Museum. But the grand former Court of Pacifica eventually became a parking lot.
The Port Chicago Mutiny Trial
The island was also the setting for a pivotal moment of civil rights history, a court martial for mutiny in the wake of the 1944 Port Chicago disaster that carried the threat of years of prison or even the death penalty.
Even though they were the defendants, Jack Crittendon and 49 other Black sailors, many in their teens and early 20s, had to occupy seats in the back of the room on Yerba Buena Island, which was part of the U.S. Navy’s World War II-era Treasure Island Training and Distribution Center at the time. Their offense: refusing to return to work loading munitions at the Port Chicago Naval facility on Suisun Bay two months after an explosion killed 320 sailors and civilians, most of them Black.
The 1944 trial of the “Port Chicago 50” became a pivotal moment in the history of 20th century civil rights and military history. (Unknown photographer/Courtesy of the Treasure Island Museum).
In October, an exhibit commemorating the “largest mass military trial in U.S. history” was unveiled in Panorama Park at the top of Yerba Buena Island. The trial is now recognized as one of the defining moments in 20th century civil rights and military history.
The explosion and trial were “devastating to him,” Jack Crittendon’s son, Hiram Crittendon said. The trial ended with Jack’s conviction, and he was initially sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Born in rural poverty in Alabama, drafted into the Navy after Pearl Harbor and serving his first assignment, Jack Crittendon was scheduled to go on guard duty the night of July 17, 1944. He told author Robert L. Allen, there was “a great big flash,” then he was thrown out of a building. “People running and hollering, (men in the barracks) blown to pieces,” he said. The next morning, he was ordered to help with the search and rescue, finding “a shoe with a foot in it” and “a head floating in water.”
Three weeks later, he was among 258 Black sailors who refused to do the hazardous work, unless they received proper training.
The work stoppage was classified as mutiny, and 50 sailors put on trial that September. In an unusual move, the Navy opened the trial to local and national media, prompting NAACP attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to attend and eventually commission a blistering, nationally distributed 18-page pamphlet on the Navy’s “bias, bigotry and bungling” that found its way to activist first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Public outcry over the trial became a catalyst for change in the military, with President Harry S. Truman signing an executive order in 1948 to desegregate the armed forces. Jack Crittendon died in 2017 at age 92, seven years before advocacy by groups like the Port Chicago Alliance convinced the Navy to finally issue a full exoneration of the sailors.
Now, the sailors’ heroism is being remembered with a set of panels in Panorama Park, some 300 feet above where the trial took place.
Treasure Island: If you go
Pretty much any waterside perch on Treasure and Yerba Buena islands offers spectacular views of San Francisco Bay, the San Francisco and Oakland skylines and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Construction crews install Point of Infinity, a 69-foot-tall stainless steel sculpture by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco, Calif., May 23, 2023. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Yerba Buena’s Panorama Park delivers a 360-degree view of the Bay, the exhibit dedicated to the Port Chicago 50 and the Point of Infinity, a 69-foot-tall stainless steel spire by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto.
The Treasure Island Museum occupies just one room in the historic Administration Building, but it offers well-curated displays and a wealth of information about the island’s cultural and military past and its future. The museum also hosts special events and is a good place to start a self-guided walking or driving tour. Among other things, the museum’s downloadable guide recommends stops at “the YMCA mural,” which depicts the island’s history, and at the famed Doggie Diner heads, as well as a swing over to Yerba Buena Island to see the Nimitz House, the home of Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet during WWII.
With the San Francisco skyline in the distance, a pair of cyclists relax in the courtyard at the Mersea Restaurant on Treasure Island, Friday, Feb. 28, 2025, in San Francisco, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Dining on Treasure Island? Two excellent, innovative restaurants emphasize outside dining. Mersea Restaurant, which serves casual comfort fare and boasts incredible views, is built out of container ships arranged around a garden of succulents; www.mersea.restaurant. Aracely Cafe offers a cozy, intimate experience whether you are sitting indoors or in the outdoor lounge areas around a fireplace. Aracely is known for its daily brunch service. It’s open for dinner Wednesday-Saturday as well; aracelysf.com.