Treasure Island itself was bizarre, an inexplicable man-made mass of contradictions. The navy built it in 1936, sinking 287,000 tons of rock and 50,000 cubic yards of topsoil into San Francisco Bay, just off of a natural island called Yerba Buena and between San Francisco and the East Bay. The island, a military base through World War II, wasn’t called Treasure Island then. The name came afterward, when it was decommissioned and the powers that be, hoping to convert it to commercial use, named it after a book about murderous pirates.
