Sparkletack - the San Francisco History Podcast

Bullitt

It’s the archetypal car chase, often cited as the most thrilling in movie history. And though legions of movie analysts will tell you that the car is the star, we all know perfectly well that San Francisco’s voluptuous topography is what turned this notorious scene into legend.

What we also know perfectly well is how the filmmakers played cut-and-paste with the city’s map — apparently borrowing a trick or two from Star Trek, as the two vehicles teleport from one neighborhood to another via the editing console. From Potrero Hill, to Russian Hill, back to Potrero Hill, back to Russian hill and the Marina, zapping over to Visitaçion Valley, and finishing up on the Bayshore roaring towards Brisbane — hello, movie magic!

A God’s-eye view

But this video takes things about ten steps further. It’s a side-by-side display that — through the techno-wizardry of geocoding — shows the schase 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:

Click to view at full size

Not to give the filmmakers too much credit, but perhaps there’s a meta-narrative of San Francisco’s inherent instability at work here too: Intersecting layers of history, invention and reinvention, kinetic faultlines at edge of the world … it’s easy to see the echos of San Francisco’s many earthquakes in Bullitt’s physics-defying leaps.

Charlie Chaplin was probably the first to take movie liberties with San Francisco, a half-century before Bullitt editor Frank Keller pulled out the scissors — and now, almost a century later, the list is anything but short.

Afterthought: At one of the early Lollapalooza music festivals, this clip played on the Shoreline’s in-house monitors as a warmup for the headliner. What a mistake! The gut-shaking roar of that Mustang’s engine swamped the amphitheatre, and after nine hair-raising minutes of adrenaline-fueled, high-speed action, the audience was completely wrung out. Finished!

The headlining act (the Smashing Pumpkins) sounded weak, tinny, and insignificant in comparison — nothing but an afterthought.

props to the creator: Steve McQueen @ SEERO
thanks for the tip: RICK! @ Laughing Squid

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 slapstick, featuring a case of mistaken identity, a jitney (think “flivver“), a mustachioed scoundrel and — inevitably — madcap hilarity. This milestone 1915 production has been described as the first “Chaplinesque” Chaplin film, but is that what we’re here for?

Nope … we want to look past the action with San Francisco-tinted glasses and see our city in all its vivid … okay, in all its grainy black and white early-century glory. The first half of the film takes place indoors, but take a look at clip from the second reel, featuring the crucial final ten minutes:

0:0 minutes: We begin somewhere on location in Golden Gate Park; Charlie is about to rescue the Girl from the amorous clutches of the mustachioed Count.

4:53 minutes: The action slowly picks up — over a half century before Steve McQueen will set the standard — with a car chase: high speed Tin-Lizzy!

5:02 minutes: This may be the high point of the film, a rare sight indeed: Golden Gate Park’s fabulous Murphy Windmill, complete with turning vanes! This windmill, the second of the Park’s famous pair, was built in 1905, but the vanes fell off sometime in the ’40s. The magnificent tower is still there, though, slowly rotting away — still unrestored.

6:00 minutes: tearing north past Ocean Beach along the Great Highway, not yet paved (!).

7:46 minutes: In a cinematic maneuver San Franciscans will see countless times over the years to come (hello “Bullitt‘), time and geography are defied with a leap across town into the Mission District. Note the fence advertising “Joe Holle Bicycles” — this handy clue allows us to place the scene precisely at 2336 Folsom Street, right across the street from today’s John O’Connell High School of Technology.

8:30 minutes: A pair of paved roads lead up a hillside … anyone want to take a crack at identifying this spot? Sutro Heights? The Presidio?

9:16 minutes: A major intersection that could be in the Mission, the Richmond or the Sunset districts … anyone recognize the buildings in the background?

9:46 minutes: The car chase finally ends with a splash as Chaplin bumps the villains’ car off a pier and into the bay. Our copy of the film is a little blurry, but our best guess is that this is somewhere around Fort Mason.

But wait, there’s more!

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 proposed that she be allowed to stay on as a sort of Statue of Liberty of the Pacific, the powers that be were unsympathetic — Pacifica was destroyed and hauled away with the rest of the rubble.

Now, almost 70 years later, the goddess is returning to San Francisco — albeit a bit reduced in scale. An 8-foot replica, reproduced in fiberglass from Stackpole’s original 3-foot working model, will be installed next week at the Community College of San Francisco (CCSF):

WHEN: Thursday, April 17th, 12:30-1:30 p.m.

WHERE: City College of San Francisco
Ocean Campus, 50 Phelan Avenue
in the garden next to the Diego Rivera Theater.

The Rivera connection

Connoisseurs of San Francisco art secrets will already know that the CCSF campus is the repository for one of the great surviving treasures of that fair, the mural “Pan American Unity” — a piece actually painted by Diego Rivera on Treasure Island as Fair patrons gawked.

Rivera’s original connection with San Francisco came from Stackpole, who traveled to Mexico to meet him in the ’20s and helped the lefty Mexican genius get his first mural commissions in the City. The Pacifica statue will be located in the “Olmec Head Plaza” — appropriately facing Rivera’s Treasure Island masterpiece.

The swimmer and the statue

But here’s an odd angle; one of the figures immortalized by Rivera in that mural is responsible for bring Pacifica back — one Mr. Salvatore DeGuarda. Salvatore was working as a swimmer in Billy Rose’s Aquacade, happened to catch Diego’s eye, and now here he is — the one in the white swimming trunks.

After a long and colorful career, Mr. DeGuarda is now retired — but not very: after getting involved with Treasure Island’s fifty-year anniversary celebrations a couple of decades ago, he became obsessed with the re-creation of “Pacifica”:

“If it wasn’t for this statue, I would probably be dead by now. I have great memories, and I love sharing them with people. I want my legacy to be the re-creation of Pacifa on Treasure Island and the sharing of my stories.”

His donation of this relatively tiny version to CCSF is just a stop along the road — he’s already given a copy to the town of Pacifica (the statue’s namesake) — Salvatore won’t be satisfied until the full-scale 80-foot statue rises again above the Pacific.

For more about Salvatore DeGuarda’s non-profit group “Pacifica II Project”, visit www.pacificastatue.org.

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 was … and a sort of mystery as well: the metal label affixed to the side reads as follows:

WESTINGHOUSE
SAN FRANCISCO
STEAM COFFEE URN

My first thought: “Westinghouse had a factory in San Francisco?” But then I saw that the thing had been manufactured in Ohio.

So, it’s a “San Francisco Steam Coffee Urn” … that “Steam” instantly put me in mind of the local beer style; could there have been an analogous coffee style — “San Francisco steam coffee” — unique and well-known enough to warrant a national brand?

Hmm.

I can just picture it: Dashiell Hammett slouching at the counter in a cheap Eddy Street diner, scowling down at his reflection in a chipped mug full of black, acidic San Francisco steam? I can feel the chill of the fog, the warmth of that steaming mug of “San Francisco steam” … Oh yeah. That’s got to be it.

So how come I’ve never heard of it?

The owner of the shop wasn’t around, so its provenance is a mystery. It does occur to me that “SAN FRANCISCO” might just be a model name, and that “steam” simply refers to some generic brewing method, but how disappointing would that be? I’m sticking to my much more romatic interpretation, thank you very much. (And if anyone cares to burst my bubble, this blog sports a nifty “comments” function.)

If you’d like to nip up to the Pacific Northwest and take this relic home, it’s right here — and the price tag is $600.

It’s my favourite thing, finding physical evidence of times past in the landscape of contemporary San Francisco. That’s why I was delighted when Aaron, a Sparkletack reader, sent me to a page of photographs snapped by a railfan in 1907.

The website displaying the photos is the passion of Amtrak engineer (and native San Franciscan) Frank Caron, and its name — Rails Around the Bay — is pretty much self-explanatory. The site is loaded with photos and history, and Frank describes this particular page of century-old rail photographs like this:

“The following photos are from the camera of Robert H. McFarland who grew up in San Francisco. Robert lived right on 22nd Street near Harrison where the original Southern Pacific mainline once ran and as a young man photographed all this action for us to see today. These photos were provided to me by Arnold Menke and are part of his collection. I thank him for allowing me to share with you today a sampling of the many photos that Robert McFarland took.”

The photos of these iron monsters steaming through the Mission are fantastic, but what really caught my eye was the fact that each photo came with a handy location description. What could I do? I had to create an interactive map! Those of you who enjoyed the Mission Street Railroad graphic are going to love this, too … it’s another look at the one-time “San Francisco and San Jose Railroad“, California’s first inter-city rail link. From 1864-1906 a $2.50 fare would bring you from San Jose to the terminal at 3rd and Townsend Streets. Crocker, Stanford and our other favourite robber barons absorbed the line into the Southern Pacific Coast Route in 1870, and it ran until sometime in the 1940s.

If you look closely at this map (choose “satellite” view), you can see the evidence of this long abandoned line all over the place, a still-vivid antique scar: the Juri Commons park between Guerrero and San Jose Avenue is a great place to start; the diagonal slice extends farther north- and east-wards across Shotwell between 24th and 23rd, then cuts through three rectilinear blocks before emerging at 21st and Harrison. It becomes Treat Street, then slices through several blocks between 16th and Bryant, and continues northwards, rolling out of range of ol’ Robert McFarland’s camera.

Google map after the break

This is spectacular.

Twenty-four hours of San Francisco are compressed into less than three minutes of time-lapse video, gorgeously captured from the hills above Sausalito. The city and bay spend most of the day almost buried by a dramatically roiling mass of fog, which finally whisks itself out to sea to reveal the sparkling lights of the nighttime skyline.

Beautiful!

It’s a little odd to see the fog pouring out of the bay — as every shivering tourist on the Golden Gate Bridge can attest, it normally flows in from the Pacific, running west to east. For more on where our fog comes from, along with a few romantic musings on the subject, check out my “Fog City” podcast from a couple of years back.

A live feed from the cameras of Hi Def-San Francisco is also available. Here are some of the geeky-cool details of this ongoing project:

Hi-Def San Francisco is project of CloudView Photography. The camera is a 3 megapixel StartDot Technologies Netcam XL mounted in a weather proof enclosure high in the hills of Sausalito. Images are captured every 60 seconds cropped from the full resolution to 1920×1080 and uploaded in 480, 720 and 1080 resolution to the web server. Periodically the software (running on a FreeBSD server) creates a time lapse that collapses the prior 24 hours into 144 seconds of video.

thanks for the tip: Laughing Squid

Researching San Francisco history means spending way too much time sitting in the dark. In the library, I mean, staring at microfilm of old newspapers. Hours of scanning those scratched and blurry archives makes me a little punchy, so I blinked and rubbed my eyes at this gruesome headline from the February 13, 1902 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.

I wondered momentarily if it was a prescient comment on the state of contemporary San Francisco baseball, then lapsed into a reverie about the fate of urchin ‘Bricky’ Sylva.

It was just so weirdly entertaining that I had to share it — first at SFist.com, and now at here at Sparkletack:

LEG BONES FOR BASEBALL BATS
Boys of Russian Hill Put Their Discovery to Queer Use

When John Doe and Richard Roe laid themselves down to dreamless sleep they little suspected that the urchins of Russian Hill would be using their leg bones as ball bats and their hollow skulls as balls, but that is precisely what occurred last night. Residents of the vicinity of Leavenworth and Broadway going home to dinner were treated to a choice assortment of cold shivers at the sight of the national game being played with the grisly loot from a tomb. Half a dozen boys were making long drives of the ball to center filed with resounding thwacks from the long bones, the femur and fibula radius and ulna humerus. Between times two yellow skulls would be tossed to the batters, and the fun characteristic of the reverence of the North American youth, waxed warm until a policeman swooped down upon the players.

(more…)

 

San Francisco is following me around.

You know what I mean — it probably happens to you too: wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, something pops up to bring your attention back to the City Formerly Known as Yerba Buena.

Which brings me to my point: I’m in the midst of a short trip to coastal Oregon, visiting the uncle of my Lady Friend. He and his wife live in a fabulous little cabin in the mountains outside of Creswell, tucked into the foothills of the Coast Range — hundreds of miles from San Francisco.

As I woke up this morning I was greeted by the pattering of rain and the aroma of a freshly brewed pot of Yerba Buena tea. Yerba Buena! If that name doesn’t ring a Bay Area bell, you just haven’t been paying attention!

The results of the Sparkletack “favourite episode poll” are in!

Okay, they’ve been in for a month already — but it isn’t as if the dominance of Emperor Norton is something that’s going to go stale … or even come as a real surprise. One hundred and twenty-seven years after his passing, the “Emperor of San Francisco and Protector of Mexico” continues his undisputed reign over the imaginations of San Franciscans.

In celebration of Abraham Norton’s Sparkletack victory, I offer a photo of the Emperor attempting to add mastery of nineteenth-century technology to his arsenal of political skills.

Incidentally, this moody portrait was taken by the legendary photographer Eadweard Muybridge. To modern eyes, it suggests an obvious question: why the heck hasn’t Emperor Norton been adopted as the Patron Saint of Critical Mass?

Make no mistake, though, the Sparkletack poll was a very close contest. Rounding out the top five finishers, and trailing the Emperor by just a handful of percentage points, we have:

• Lefty O’Doul, the Man in the Green Suit
• the Columbarium and the Caretaker
• the Great Diamond Hoax
• Luisa Tetrazzini and Christmas Eve (favourite of my Lady Friend!)

Thanks to everyone who made his or her virtual voice heard! And never fear, the next Sparkletack episode, which I hope will become your new favourite, is on the way.

What is it exactly? It’s built like a notebook, with a couple of sheets of green and magenta construction paper sandwiched between its plastic wings … but it can’t really be opened for writing, and on the opposite wing — the Oakland side — there’s a patent number and the tiny word “bookmark”. Bookmark it is!

The side pictured shows a line drawing of Treasure Island complete with the Port of the Trade Winds in the foreground, a three-masted wooden ship and China Clipper seaplane bobbing in the harbor. The other side shows both Golden Gate and Bay bridges from an eastern aerial perspective, the Oakland Hills visible in the background.

An avalanche of memorabilia was created to memorialize the 1939 World’s Fair at Treasure Island, but though far from being unique, or even especially valuable, it’s still thrilling to hold this little plastic-winged butterfly and somehow feel the 75+ years that have passed since the day it dropped off the assembly line. I’m not really a collector of anything but stories, but this thing really is a tiny treasure.

Juliana from outloudradio.org (a Sparkletack listener and fellow radiophile) just thought I’d enjoy this memento of the City of Light, and mailed it in. Thanks, I do indeed.

An email showed up last week which I found impossible to overlook, beginning as it did with the words “Hail, Sparkletack!” Clearly a writer of taste and intelligence!

But wait — could a person of “taste and intelligence” be responsible for words like these?:

Here’s the tale of three typically offbeat San Franciscans who do just that. Bay Time Detective Mikki Bingo moonlights at Lusty Lady and volunteer cooks at Glide. Mikki’s sole employee is Pete Bingo, her inventively incompetent grandfather. Their client, Sharky Bate, is a gazillion year old hip-hop bottom fish who flip-flops from petrified to putrefied. Stumbling through epic timequakes, our titanic trio pits wits with nefarious foes in their unending quest for truth, “justice” and a truly affordable apartment.

Dearest San Francisco History Center,

I have longed to write to you for so long, but it has taken me months to work up the nerve.

If only you could appreciate how wonderful you are. Here’s what you reveal about yourself on the official website, so typically demure and self-effacing:

The Daniel E. Koshland San Francisco History Center contains a research collection of books, newspapers and magazines, photographs, maps, posters, archives and manuscript collections, and ephemera, documenting all aspects of San Francisco life and history. The Center is also the official archives for the City and County of San Francisco.

Coyly, you neglect to tell the world what real treasures await inside the walls of your sixth floor Civic Center aerie. Whether the approaching suitor is a scholar or just a Curious George citizen, you, dear History Center, already know the answers to their questions.

Mark Pritchard over at San Francisco Metroblog has alerted us to a fabulous new Flickr find; a 1938 street map of San Francisco in vivid pinks, blues, and greens.

And why fabulous? In 1938 there are no freeways yet in sight. Lefty O’Doul’s Seals Stadium is still in place — as are the Sutro Baths. Lafayette Park is not yet whole. Calvary and Laurel Hill cemeteries still occupy Lone Mountain. Treasure Island is still the future site of the World’s Fair, and Mission Rock is still an island.

Feast your eyes, my friends, because that’s just the beginning — and a high-resolution version is available too. On behalf of the whole city, thanks to the intrepid map scanner Octoferret.

An amazing 63 episodes of Sparkletack have floated out into the digital ether so far — 64 if you count the infamous “Trolls” episode. That’s well over two years of storytelling, and though I’ve read some fantastic individual comments, I don’t have a good sense of which stories you like the best.

The style of Sparkletack has changed significantly over the years, with the depth of the research and (I hope!) the quality of the storytelling gradually improving. I could just guess which ones have really made an impression on you, but why speculate when I can just ask?

For me it’s a “which is your favourite child” kind of question — impossible to say! I have no doubt that you have an opinion, though… and I can’t wait to find out. Cast your vote below…

I’m addicted to the “moving images” section of the Internet Archive — particularly the Prelinger Archives, recently absorbed into the Library of Congress. This massive collection of “ephemeral films”, a term which covers just about anything not made for commercial entertainment (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) is a fantastic source for unexpected historical treasures.

I’ve found all manner of fascinating clips here, from documentaries about 50s-era juvenile delinquents to home movies of the ‘39 World’s Fair — about 2000 are online. A nice documentary introduction to the film archive actually narrated by Rick Prelinger (a San Franciscan!) can be found here — well worth a look.

Since I can’t seem to stay away from this stuff, I will share it, starting with…