Frisco Vista

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 photo is copyright the Chronicle, but I hope they won’t mind my posting this small version; the image links to the Sparkletack post.

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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 maps ranging from the nineteenth century to fairly recently. Newsom says:
Please post your image in this group if:
You can’t go there anymore (i.e. Playland-at-the-Beach)
If the person, place [...]

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 Scott. The location of Funston Park was called Lobos Square. USF was the San Francisco College of Women. There were “bear cages” in the park, as well [...]

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 into the water and is saved by Jimmy Stewart.
The story is told — I don’t know if it is true or not, although it sounds plausible — [...]

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 four hooves off the ground), was shot from the Mark Hopkins Mansion at California and Mason. Muybridge used 13 different cameras to make the image. At America [...]

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 California site.

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 devoted to the local history. Will the proposal get a fair hearing? Doubtful. The Chronicle reports:
Opponents of Fisher’s museum plan complain that the competition sounds more wide [...]

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 of the supports of the Bay Bridge and released oil into the bay from a damaged tank. According to Caltrans engineers the bridge got the better of [...]

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.

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 American Unity, a large mural commissioned by the Golden Gate International Exposition.

In the mural, Rivera had depicted himself with his back to his ex-wife. In the image [...]

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 chaparral and oak woodlands.

These are the vestiges of a sanitarium that overlooked the bay, with views of San Francisco to the south southwest

and Richmond to the west.

This [...]

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 blog is dated October 2, 2006. I doubt that he is Joseph P. Potocki. Where has the fellow gone?
Here’s is his summary of the sixteenth century in [...]

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 excellent site Film in America. At that site there are more images and commentary. I’ve taken the liberty of adjusting the tone of the images for clarity [...]

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 that celebrated summer. To indicate how short-lived the movement really was, recall that by October residents of the Haight were commemorating “The Death of the Hippie” in [...]

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 weather certainly cooperated.
Something to know about the Summer of Love is that it was largely a media creation. By the summer of 1967 the peace, love, and [...]

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, when I first came to the city I used a cable car for one leg of my commute. The cars cost the same as buses then.
Click on [...]

 
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 ambitious project it should end up being a helpful resource.
It’s too bad there’s no feed so that one could be alerted of new entries. Right now the [...]

Edison newsreels of earthquake.

Here’s a chap who lived through the sixties in the Haight and claims to remember it.

A few excerpts from the press conference, including questions like “How wasted is really wasted?”

Via San Fran Voice.

This 1907 street map from the San Francisco History website has great detail. Clicking on the sections of the map at that site enlarges them.

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 [...]