author archive
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Sunset neighborhood — televised history tour
The ubiquitous and erudite Woody LaBounty of the Western Neighborhood Project takes Brian Hackney of CBS Channel 5 on a televised history tour of his beloved Sunset stomping grounds.
Just in case you’ve been missing out, the Western Neighborhood Project (outsidelands.org) is a wonderful organization, a non-profit passionately dedicated to uncovering and preserving the [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Blog, Just plain cool by richard - sparkletack
Monday, August 18th, 2008
Vintage snapshots of San Francisco pt. 2: Google-mapped
A couple days after I passed on this alert to the amazing Charles Cushman photo collection, another reader immediately saw possibilities for this carefully filed and annotated archive of our city in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.
He’s created a Google map, digitally mapping over 200 of the enormous collection’s slides to their places of origin.
This looks like it must have been a TON of work, but as Dan wrote, “Richard — this wasn’t so much effort as it looks. Google maps has a geocoder which takes street intersections and turns them into GPS coordinates. I wrote a script to download the Cushman archive pages, look up the street addresses in the geocoder, and add them to the map.”
Right — it’s easy if you know how! And I suspect that slightly more energy went into this project than Dan is letting on.
Though just a bit over 10% of the 1791 images in the San Francisco portion of the archive were readily identifiable, it’s more than enough to pull you back into a visceral, three-dimensional experience of our city in the era of Kodachrome.
5 Comments » - Posted in Blog, From the community, Just plain cool by richard - sparkletack
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
Faded time capsule — vintage snapshots of San Francisco
A reader alerted me to an amazing post that just popped up over at Laughing Squid.
See the two photos below? The first comes from an online collection of vintage color snapshots of San Francisco, courtesy of an online gallery at Indiana University — it’s the intersection of South Van Ness and Army, snapped by who-knows-who back in 1953.
The second one was snapped by Todd Lappin just yesterday — and at first glance, not much has changed in the last fifty years but the trees on the Bernal Hill and the price of gas!
check out the rest of the post …
6 Comments » - Posted in Blog, Just plain cool by richard - sparkletack
Friday, August 8th, 2008
Kitchen Sisters on NPR: “Birth of Rice-A-Roni”
1940s San Francisco. A young Canadian immigrant and her Italian pasta family husband move into the spare room of an old Armenian woman.
The result of this temporary arrangement? The boxed rice and pasta side dish which — for good or ill — would come to be as strongly associated with San Francisco as the Golden Gate Bridge:
“Rice-A-Roni - the San Francisco Treat”
No Comments » - Posted in Blog, Just plain cool by richard - sparkletack
Friday, August 1st, 2008
Grandpa’s archives: San Francisco Chronicle aerial photo ca. 1949
My mother called a few days ago, opening the conversation with a breathless “I think I’ve found something that might interest you!”
She was right.
Her sister had recently gone through some papers belonging to my late grandfather Elmer Plett, a sober, hard-working dairy farmer who spent the majority of his adult life in the central valley town of Turlock.
Among piles of receipts and newspaper clippings my aunt discovered a mysterious item bearing the handwritten label “San Francisco picture, 1949″. Sure enough, nestled between protective cardboard sheets was a large, glossy, black and white aerial photograph of San Francisco.
The shot is spectacular, taken on an unusually clear winter day. The angle is unusual too, looking almost precisely north towards Mount Shasta — and according to the story of how the photo came to be taken (see below), that view of the distant volcano is what prompted the photographer to take to the air.
What we’re interested in, though, is the city in the foreground — captured in all its hat-wearing, freeway-building, pre-jet-age post-war glory. Take a look:
click image to view at full size
check out the rest of the post here, including photo details
3 Comments » - Posted in Blog, Just plain cool by richard - sparkletack
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
SFWeekly: “Nonconformity Still Reigns”
Apparently yours truly is the go-to source on non-conformity in historical San Francisco. That’s the way the SFWeekly is leaning, in any case. An hour of phone-schmoozing with intrepid reporter Lauren Smiley resulted in the following introduction to story about modern-day San Francisco kooks and characters:
In the beginning of our city’s love affair with odd ducks, there was Emperor Norton. A businessman in Gold Rush San Francisco who lost his pants on an investment in Peruvian rice, he re-emerged as a grand character of his own invention: “Emperor of These United States” and “Protector of Mexico.” He waltzed about town in a secondhand military uniform while newspapers printed his official edicts without caveat and establishments honored his fake currency.
If Los Angeles lionizes its celebrities, San Francisco has always embraced, or at least tolerated, its homegrown eccentrics. “I can’t imagine any other city in the world where [Emperor Norton] could have become what he became with the acceptance of the city,” says Richard Miller, an armchair historian who creates podcasts on San Francisco legends for his Web site, Sparkletack. “Some say all the loose nuts rolled west … people who hadn’t made it elsewhere, or just different from the average bears.”
Take a look at the rest of the SFWeekly’s article, and not just because of that little quote — Lauren hits the high spots from the Brown Twins (who refused to be interviews by the Weekly without cash on the barrelhead) to Frank Chu (who could not be contained). The premise of the story is that there’s still hope for San Francisco … and I hope she’s right.
No Comments » - Posted in Blog, Media by richard - sparkletack
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
Bullitt: the greatest car chase ever (from space!)
This video takes Bullitt about ten steps further. It’s a side-by-side display that — through the techno-wizardry of geocoding — shows the chase scene’s logic-defying route from space. Now you can track Steve’s ‘68 Mustang GT turn by screeching turn through every neighborhood in the city — just like a James Bond super-villain:
5 Comments » - Posted in Blog, Just plain cool by richard - sparkletack
Friday, June 20th, 2008
book review: Oakley Hall’s “Ambrose Bierce Mystery Novels”
An inordinate number of my youthful hours were spent in the company of the mystery novel; Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy L. Sayers … I couldn’t get enough. Somewhere along the line, though, the fixation faded …
But it’s back.
I’ve discovered a series of detective novels that — in a “you got chocolate on my peanut butter!” kind of way — seem to have been written with me in mind:
The setting is 1890’s San Francisco, the lively heart of the Gilded Age. And the detective? None other than our own famously cynical wit-about-town, that brilliant literary misanthrope Mr. Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce.
See what I mean?
Just a minute: Ambrose who?
2 Comments » - Posted in Blog, Historical book reviews by richard - sparkletack
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
And I quote: “Buried Treasure in San Francisco?”
I love this blog, if for no other reason than the jawdropping diversity of the email that slips over the digital transom.
This note from a few weeks ago just about takes the biscuit. In breathless terms it tells the story of a decades-long treasure hunt, a project just brimming with danger, doggedness and derring-do! [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in From the community by richard - sparkletack
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
book review — “Historic Photos of San Francisco”
I read a lot of books on San Francisco and California history. And though these posts are labeled “book reviews”, the only books you’ll ever see here are those that I’ve really enjoyed. In short, if you see it here, it’s a great book — I’ve no urge to write about the stinkers! And [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Historical book reviews by richard - sparkletack
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
SFist: “A Jitney Elopement” — Charlie Chaplin’s San Francisco film
File this — again — under “there’s ALWAYS a San Francisco connection”.
A reader recently alerted me to the fact that Charlie Chaplin, America’s favourite clown (and perhaps the most influential performer in motion picture history), shot one of his bazillion-odd silent movies on location in and around Golden Gate Park.
“A Jitney Elopement” is classic [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in From the community, Just plain cool, SFist, Video by richard - sparkletack
Friday, April 11th, 2008
Pacifica is back!
When last we encountered this goddess-behemoth, she was being blown up by the Navy at the end of the ‘39 Pan-Pacific Exposition. The mythical goddess Pacifica — symbol of the Fair — had loomed over Treasure Island for the duration, a sternly imposing concrete figure of some 80 feet tall.
Though sculptor Ralph Stackpole had [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in From the community, Just plain cool by richard - sparkletack
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
sparkletack facebook group
Web 2.0 here we come … there’s a brand new Sparkletack group on Facebook.
You can post photos and video, add links, start a discussion, or just join the group and show your enthusiasm for Sparkletack and San Francisco history. And if you’re not already part of Facebook, it’s painfully easy to join.
C’mon, drop by [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Media by richard - sparkletack
Sunday, April 6th, 2008
tour review — san francisco ghost walk
I love San Francisco, I love history, and I love walking. Luckily for me, there are a billion walking tours out there. Every so often I participate in one of these, try to pick up a thing or two, and take some notes for you. Ratings systems provide a useful shorthand, but your mileage [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in From the community, Walking tour reviews by richard - sparkletack
Friday, March 21st, 2008
san francisco steam coffee?
I ran across an old and beautiful (not to mention HUGE) coffee urn in front of a Portland antique store today. Just like a magpie, shiny objects catch my eye — so I stopped to check it out.
It’s become a running joke that there’s always a San Francisco angle, and sure enough there [...]
