SF-88L was the launch battery of the 2nd Battalion, 56th Artillery. It was here that the Missile body and guidance system were assembled and tested. The warheads were attached in the warhead building prior to being wheeled over to the launch area and lowered into the underground storage bunker magazine known as the pit.
SF-88L has two magazines, each with the capacity to store 6 missiles. The magazines are 49' long and 60' wide. At the end of each magazine, located behind blast doors, was the control room. From the control room, the crew could launch the missiles as well as raise or lower them to and from the magazine.
This is technically just the launch battery. The radar Integrated Fire Control, or IFC (named SF-88C) was located just down the road. SF-88C is abandoned and I planned to visit it on this trip. However, to my surprise, the roads were gated and I only had with me street maps to the location. To make it on foot would have taken roughly several hours round trip. Since I only had about 24 hours in San Francisco, I had to make the painful decision to not visit it in order to make time for other locations that I had planned.
The night before, on August 11th, 2010, I flew into LAX and stayed at crazydrummerdude's place nearby. In the morning, I made the ~5 hour trip as fast as possible on route 5 (100mph the whole way, despite signs all along the road that said "Speed enforced by low flying aircraft", thus actually getting it closer to 4 hours) to try to make it to SF-88L before it closed. I was the last person in the gate as they were closing it and had about 10 minutes to spend inside.
This was the first stop on the most amazing urban exploration trip I've ever taken.
The first time I uploaded the images from this trip, I did so in a hurry (late at night before driving all the way back home to STL the next day, which was to be an 1,800 mile/26 hour drive. To top it off, I was covered in a terrible rash that I encountered while in San Francisco, but more about that later. Luckily, crazydrummerdude was driving..) with no editing whatsoever and it has bugged me ever since. So finally, after almost 3 years, I have completed editing the shots. Although I'm still not happy with them, they are the best that I could have possibly done, given the fact I didn't stop running around shooting everything in site in a mad dash that didn't slow down until I was back in the car heading home. There was no other way to possibly see everything than to set the camera on auto and hope for the best.
I wish I could go on more trips like this...
In the next couple days, I will add this to my website. It will be located at http://www.sublunar.info/sf88l.html and I'll throw some additional shots in there.
Source: http://www.nikemissile.org/site_sf88.shtml
