Consider how much of San Francisco and its surroundings have been touched over the past 150 years by the presence of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers which began operations in the Bay Area a century and a half ago this year. From paving the way for the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge to the massive recovery from an earthquake that nearly destroyed the city, San Francisco might have evolved very differently had the Corps not played a key engineering role in the city’s development and preservation.