The U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library includes 301 historic photos of the great April 18, 1906, San Francisco earthquake and its immediate aftermath. Shown is a view of the fiery city from Golden Gate Park.

The city is getting worked up over one of its periodic and so far futile efforts to clean up Golden Gate Park, and Champion complains that Nevius is “entirely uninterested in coming to terms with the homeless in Golden Gate Park for his piece.”

There’s no question San Francisco’s homeless problem needs more serious attention than it has been getting. Will Champion’s heated rhetoric help? Wasn’t this supposed to be mayor Newsom’s signature issue?

UPDATE: Randy Shaw, in Beyond Chron, weighs in, 9/4/07:

While the traditional media’s role in promoting the Iraq War has become conventional wisdom, military invasions are not the only place where the press sells the public a false story. Consider homelessness. For two decades, the media has offered the public a “framing” of homelessness that focuses on problem individual behavior, rather than on the massive federal funding cuts that saw widespread visible homelessness remerge in 1982 after being nonexistent for over forty years. The San Francisco Chronicle still identifies the homeless problem as primarily caused by problem individuals such as campers in Golden Gate Park, and blames advocates, rather than the media and politicians, for the persistence of homelessness. C.W. Nevius’s August 28 Chronicle column perfectly captured how the media still “enables” the federal government’s abandonment of the unhoused, and shows why the Bush Administration – like its Reagan, Bush and Clinton predecessors – feels no pressure to act.

Remember this ending to SF Chron art critic Kenneth Baker’s Hiroshi Sugimoto-at-the-de Young review?

Probably the de Young has never seen an exhibition of gravity and elegance to compare with “Hiroshi Sugimoto” and a look around the institution suggests that the next one like it will be a long time coming.

Now we know what Baker was expecting: FAMSF released its 2007-2009 exhibition schedule yesterday. It reveals that FAMSF is well on its way to becoming the worst-programmed major museum in America. Heck, considering its programming and ethics problems, by the end of 2009 FAMSF might not be a major museum.

For more, and the DYM’s schedule of forthcoming shows, see the original Modern Art Notes post.

“Officials are trying to determine if the youngster is related to the pair of animals that was shot last week”

UPDATE: The Chronicle is suggesting that the coyotes became more aggressive as a result of people feeding them.

Coyotes disappeared from the city after the 1906 earthquake. They appear to have returned sometime in the past decade via the south peninsula. Recently a coyote was tracked with an electronic device, revealing that it traveled to Daly City and back in a single day (a trip that is agonizingly slow for commuters).

Over the weekend coyotes attacked a Rhodesian ridgeback, a large dog bred to hunt lions, in the park. To go after such a formidable opponent suggests the coyotes were protecting a den.

I have heard that city officials have killed the coyotes that attacked the dog, though I have yet to see an official report to that effect.

UPDATE: Yep, the shootings have been confirmed.

LINK: San Francisco Chronicle: “Coyotes attack dogs in Golden Gate Park,” by Jim Herron Zamora.

The San Francisco Public Library’s historical photograph collection is a great resource for old photos of San Francisco, such as this one of snow in Golden Gate Park in 1932. You can search the database online, and if you want print-quality photos you can order them very cheaply. I got several of the photos for Bridge to Understanding, my book on the Asian Art Museum, from this collection.