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About Invisible City Audio Tours

Invisible City Audio Tours is a fiscally sponsored community-arts nonprofit that introduces new ways of experiencing literature, art, and geography by producing alternative self-guided walking audio tours. Each tour leads participants through liminal neighborhoods and forgotten or unknown histories, creating heretofore unseen realities through original works of fiction, poetry, music, sound, and visual art.

About The Armada of Golden Dreams

A surreal, literary-based, 60-minute audio tour that uncovers dozens of the vessels still buried beneath San Francisco's Financial District.

James Marshalls discovery of gold at Coloma in 1848 set in motion a world-wide migration of fortune-seekers to the gold fields of California. In the first year of the gold rush, over 62,000 of those immigrants came by ship, landing in San Francisco and abandoning their vessels as fast as their legs could carry them.

By 1850, the bay held nearly 600 abandoned brigs, barks, ships, and whalers, left to rot by the starry-eyed Argonauts who had crowded aboard to reach their dreams. For most of the Gold Rush fleet, San Francisco was not only their last voyage, but their final mooring, as scores of those vessels still lie beneath the skyscrapers, restaurants, bars, and plazas of downtown San Francisco.

This spring, twelve Bay Area authors, one composer, three visual artists, and a team of designers will resurrect the history of this once mighty fleet.       

What We Need & What You Get

Invisible City Audio Tours is currently funded in part by a grant from Southern Exposure, which covers the cost of the visual art for this tour and our fall tour, Everywhere Man. However, there are many additional costs that we still need funding for.

Though $6,000 would cover the remaining costs for The Armada of Golden Dreams, we are hoping to raise even more. If we hit $7,500, well be able to buy much-needed equipment. If we raise $10,000 or more, we'll be well on our way to funding future tours.

By donating, you get the chance to support a growing arts nonprofit that uses new technology and collaborative art to create surreal geographies, and you'll get some amazing, limited-edition Armada booty (click to see images)! You will find the donation levels to your right. You'll also get your name permanently engraved on our Supporters page!

How it Works

1. Donate to receive your Armada map (and other amazing booty). 

2. Once you receive your map in the mail, download the audio. You can either download the tour through our iPhone app or off the Armada page on our website.

3. Take the tour anytime! The tour begins at the foot of Market Street in San Francisco.

The Building of The Armada (The Backstory)

Five years ago, Armada's tour director L.J. Moore (author, poet, journalist) stumbled upon a map created by Ron Filion (SFGenealogy.com) that featured suspected locations of over 50 Gold Rush era ships buried beneath the streets of modern-day San Francisco.

After interviewing Filion for The Bold Italic, L.J. was haunted by the idea that scores of brigs, barks, and ships still sailed silently through the mud below the city grid, and that somehow, there must be a way to resurrect the vessels which have carried the dreams of San Francisco on their decks for over 150 years. How could one illuminate this oft forgotten (and amazing) piece of San Francisco history?

LJ happened to mention the ships to us as we were finishing the production of our first tour, Heliography. It was a true Godsend! We could not have thought of a more appropriate project for us to take on. 

Within weeks after the launch of Heliography, we started building The Armada. LJ mapped the route and selected a group of her favorite local authors to write pieces for the ships, and before we knew it our staff composer Jesse Solomon Clark (Agents Del Futuro) had written and recorded a full-length album of music dedicated to the ships: "Underwater/Underground".

We then commissioned the ever-talented George Pfau, cartographers Lohnes+Wright, and designer Sarah Ciston to create the map. Simultaneously, art curator Clare Haggarty invited Joshua Churchill and Rebecca Ebeling to make art for the tour.

After all the audio was in, we brought sound designers Michael Maurillo and Jeremiah Moore in to create the audio.