24

Earth's history on a 24 hour scale.

Source: G-100 Introductory Geology at University of Wisconsin via this isn't happiness.

3rd & Mission, San Francisco

Looking south on 3rd Street from Mission Street in San Francisco, 1961 (top) and 2011 (bottom)

These two photos are taken from near the same spot 50 years apart -- looking south down 3rd Street from Mission Street in San Francisco. A close look at the blonde brick building on the left allows you to make the connection.

I get a kick from these 'then and now' comparisons. When your pictures and stories about a neighborhood's past fill your head, walking down a street is like walking down ten streets at the same time and any one of them can present itself at anytime.

Thanks to OldSF.org for developing a fantastic tool to explore a large portion of the San Francisco Public Library's photo archive. The story of how their project came to be is an example of the volunteer spirit that makes the internet awesome.

So what the story behind 3rd Street's transformation? How was this neighborhood south of San Francisco's financial district, one filled with rooming houses, pawnshops, bars, cafes, and parking lots redeveloped into an area of museums, fine hotels, large-scale retail, a convention center, a public garden, and a few pockets of affordable housing?

The SF Redevelopment Agency's summary of the 87-acre project seems rather flimsy. An historically rich account can be found in Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (see Map 12 and accompanying text, pp. 85-90).

Photographs from Ira Nowinski's No Vacancy and Ben Pease's map are folded together with Solnit's beautiful prose, including perspectives from Jack London, who was born near 3rd & Brannan in 1876, and Jack Kerouac, who lived near 3rd and Howard and worked at the trainyard at 4th and Towsend for spell during the 1950s.

To the left: a slice of Pease's map detailing the neighborhood's buildings and uses in 1960. Clicking the audio/media tab of the UC Press page leads to an audio interview with Solnit and UC Press Art Director Lia Tjandra about Infinite City.

The History of the English Language

On a related note...

Gladwell & Gopnik on Texting: The Death Knell of Culture? from 92nd Street Y on FORA.tv

It's Harvey time

The brink of Pride weekend is a good time to share The Times of Harvey Milk (1982), a documentary about San Francisco’s first openly gay man elected to public office.

After several attempts, Milk was elected to the city's Board of Supervisors in 1977. He and SF mayor, George Mascone, were assassinated a little more than a year later.





This Oscar-winning documentary preceded the Gus Van Sant drama, Milk, by 26 years. For those not familiar with California politics of the late 1970s (like me), these two films can act as a primer on Proposition 6, the 1978 initiative that intended to ban gays, lesbians, and their supporters from working in California's public schools. Watching Life and Milk, I couldn't help but compare the defeat of Proposition 6 in 1978 to the passage Proposition 8 in 2008. (Prop. 8 narrowed the definition of marriage to different-sex couples.)

The public debate on Prop 6 included long-form, televised debates; the Prop 8 race lacked such discussions and was dominated by political TV ads. Further, there wasn't a readily identifiable spokesperson, such as Milk, representing the cause of same-sex couples during the Prop 8 campaign. How much these factors influenced the respective outcomes, it's hard to say, but the differences stood out to me.



From Gallop, June 18, 2008

Gallup polling chronicles important changes in public attitudes about homosexuality and gay rights over the past quarter century. Americans have shifted from frowning on homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle and being divided over whether it should be legal, to now supporting gay rights on both fronts. At the same time, the country remains highly ambivalent about the morality of homosexual relations, and as a result, support for legalizing gay marriage lags far behind the less culturally sensitive matter of gays having equal job rights.

Kathy Kozachenko's election to the Ann Arbor city council made her the first openly gay or lesbian candidate to run successfully for political office in the United States (January 1974).

The Internet, 50s-style

Here's a brief history of the internet--from fear-driven project of the scientific, military, and commercial communities to a platform for just about everything. It's a bit dry and acronym-laden, but the spiffy graphics and Hitchhiker's-Guide-to-the-Galaxy-like narration improve its watchability.

We often focus on government's short-comings (poor construction of levies or a failure to adequately oversee banks), so it's only fair to remember how some governmental geeks accomplished something cool and world-changing, whether they meant to or not.

The people's library

The Library of Congress has added 3,000 images to Flickr, a Yahoo-owned photo-sharing web site. The images include color pics from the 1930s and 1940s and news photos from the early 1900s. All seem to be from the U.S. None have no known copyright restrictions. Flickr has created a special section within their site, The Commons, to house such collections.

The assembly of a B-17 tail fuselage. October 1942.

The LoC offers over a million pictures in its own online archive, so why join the rabble on Flickr?

As Flickr's blog reminds us, "many hands make light work." The LoC blog admits that tagging each of these images (adding descriptive key words to pictures making the photos searchable) would be a daunting task. The Flickr community will do this tagging for free, contributing hundred of person-hours to the archive in short order, and I suspect the LoC will be pleased with the results.

Syndicating the images on Flickr also allows the LoC to better fulfill its mission "to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people." According to Alexa, Flickr draws 50-times more visitors than LoC's site.

Librarians are smarties. While some may wince at displaying publicly-held photos on a for-profit platform, I applaud the move and hope other governmental archives and non-profits take note.

Update: The LoC has released a report on this project (12/11/08).

The Chutes

Between 1895 and 1902 a San Francisco amusement park called The Chutes occupied the area bordered by Haight, Cole and Clayton Streets, a spot just a few blocks from Golden Gate Park -- an escape from SF's crowded northeast quadrant and accessible by a handful of independently run cable car lines.

c. 1895. Top of The Chutes, looking northeast onto Haight Street.

The surrounding middle-class neighborhood was just taking shape. The attraction was billed as a family-friendly locale and the sale of alcohol was prohibited.

The ride was 70 feet high and 300 feet long. The flat-bottom boats would hit the artificial lake going over 50 miles-an-hour.

The site eventually included an elevated railroad, a merry-go-round, an alligator house, a live theater and an exhibition hall. Within seven years, The Chutes outgrew its Haight Street location and moved to the Richmond (1902-1909) and then the Fillmore (1909-1911).

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Friends of 1800 provides an architecturally focused history of the neighborhood. For more on The Chutes' amusements, visit Historysmith.