Category: historyPage 1 of 2

Video: San Francisco Before the Earthquake

A fascinating glimpse or early 20th-century San Francisco.

Video: San Francisco in the late 1930s

This somewhat cheesy video from the late 1930s catalogues the tourist attractions of the city. It’s a pretty thorough survey, and there are a lot of great clips…

Good-bye, Bay Bridge

  It feels like it’s taken forever, but the new Bay Bridge is finally entering its final months of construction, if reports can believed. To honor the old…

San Francisco Presidio in 1887

This image of the presidio in 1887 comes from the public library’s historical photographs collection. Of interest are the small trees (today a large grove or forest) that…

Video: War protest, 1967

This newsreel footage documents 1967 antiwar in San Francisco and elsewhere. .

Aerial photo of 1949 San Francisco

This photo was taken in 1949 by San Francisco Chronicle photographer Barney Peterson. It was discovered by the Sparkletack blogger Richard Miller’s aunt among his grandfather’s archives. The…

The city as it was

David Newman administs a Flickr pool called San FranGone: The City as It Was. Here you can find photos, postcards (such as the mid-a960s cable car above), and…

1938 San Francisco map

By 1938 the essential outlines of the city were filled in and established. Some names have changed — I didn’t know that Fort Point was called Fort Winfield…

Vertigo at Fort Point

Fort Point, at the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge, figures prominently in the Hitchcock film Vertigo. It is here where Kim Novak plunges off the fort…

Muybridge’s San Francisco panoramas

Eadweard Muybridge produced two panoramas of the city. This one, made in January 1877 (the same year he produced photographic evidence that a trotting horse may lift all…

Historical map of San Francisco Creeks

This great map from the 1890s shows creeks in blue and marshes in green, with modern landfill in magenta. A larger version is at the Oakland Museum of…

An alternative to the Fisher Museum?

An alternative proposal to the Fisher Art Museum in the Presidio has been put forward by a group of historians and conservationists. The group supports a smaller museum…

Oil spills, volunteers, and the San Francisco Bay Area

Today beaches near the Golden Gate are closed as a noxious oil spill is washing up against the shore. A large South Korean-based Hanjin container ship struck one…

1906 Earthquake photos

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…

Pan American Unity

In 1940, Friday Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who had been divorced for a year, met on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Rivera was in town to paint Pan…

The Belgum Sanitarium

Hikers in the Wildcat Canyon hills above the city of Richmond may be surprised to come upon a glade full of palms and other exotic trees amid the…

P. Joseph Potocki

What has become of P. Joseph Potocki, I wonder. He produced a most peculiar Frisco (Phrisco?) blog called San Francisco Phax & Phikshun. The last post on the…

Lady from Shanghai

I’ve always enjoyed Orson Wells’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948). It was shot in San Francisco and Sausalito (and L.A.). Here are a few images, taken from the…

Death of the Hippie

A couple of days ago I was talking about the so-called Summer of Love as a media concoction. To repeat, the flowers were already beginning to wilt by…

Summer of Love

San Francisco celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Drugs Love in Golden Gate Park this weekend, and it sounds like it was a big hit. The…

San Francisco cable car lines, 1893

Some people don’t realize that cable cars were at one time a working transit system in San Francisco and not just an amusement ride for tourists. In fact,…

Encyclopedia of San Francisco

The San Francisco Museum and Historical Society in putting together an encyclopedia of the city. Right now there isn’t much up, but if they follow through with this…

Video: Newsreel of 1906 San Francisco earthquake

Edison newsreels of earthquake.