San Francisco History Podcast - Sparkletack » Just plain cool

OldSF.org – Map of the San Francisco Public Library’s Historical Photo Collection

richard - sparkletack — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:27:26 +0000

Just received an email from an old contact — and though I’ve not been actively updating Sparkletack, this project is just too fantastic not to mention. I’ve pillaged the San Francisco History Center’s online photo archive myself many, many times … and often dreamed of a resource exactly like this one. OldSF.org in Dan’s own [...]

SepiaTown — a virtual San Francisco

richard - sparkletack — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:43:23 +0000

This is awesome. SepiaTown is a brand new website integrating mapping technology with crowd-sourced historical photos to create a virtually strollable San Francisco. They’ve collected over 150 images of San Francisco thus far, mostly clustered around California, Montgomery, and Market Streets â€¦ but it’s easy to see how the entire city could be reconstructed. Reconstructed [...]

Gangs of San Francisco

richard - sparkletack — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:30:29 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post about these amazing T-shirts forever. Because they’re — I kid you not — unbearably cool. It’s an idea so good that I’ve been kicking myself constantly (though ever so gently) for not having thought of it first! What we have here is a series of San Francisco historical T-shirts, each [...]

A map that’s just my type

richard - sparkletack — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:48:19 +0000

Ork Posters has created something guaranteed to delight typophiles (that’s me) and San Francisco neighborhood geeks (check) alike. It’s a typographic neighborhood map of Our Fair City. See? Oh sure, they do it for a bunch of their other favourite cities too. But this is so cool that I forgive them for that. Screen-printed. Multiple [...]

Inspiration! “Secret Histories of San Francisco”

richard - sparkletack — Mon, 25 May 2009 23:16:28 +0000

"Thank you for making such an awesome show. It's really helped me out with this art project I've been working on.
I'm in an art show at the San Francisco Arts Commission and the theme is "Trace Elements", or uh, Hidden Histories of San Francisco, so I'm making an illustrated map of San Francisco with bits of its hidden history. I probably wouldn't be where I'm at with this thing if it wasn't for your podcast."

How cool is that?! read on ...

Emperor Norton Day: “Le Roi est Mort”

richard - sparkletack — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:32:01 +0000

It’s Emperor Norton Day One hundred and twenty-nine years ago today, the Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico crumpled in front of Old St. Mary’s Church on the edge of Chinatown, and died on the way to the hospital. Thirty thousand citizens attended his funeral, and the San Francisco Chronicle commemorated the [...]

Sunset neighborhood — televised history tour

richard - sparkletack — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:11:44 +0000

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 legacies [...]

Vintage snapshots of San Francisco pt. 2: Google-mapped

richard - sparkletack — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:25:38 +0000

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.

Faded time capsule — vintage snapshots of San Francisco

richard - sparkletack — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:22:16 +0000

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 ...

Kitchen Sisters on NPR: “Birth of Rice-A-Roni”

richard - sparkletack — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:30:06 +0000

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"

check out rest of the post

Grandpa’s archives: San Francisco Chronicle aerial photo ca. 1949

richard - sparkletack — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:35:39 +0000

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

Bullitt: the greatest car chase ever (from space!)

richard - sparkletack — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:56:37 +0000

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:

Click to view at full size

check out the whole post here

SFist: “A Jitney Elopement” — Charlie Chaplin’s San Francisco film

richard - sparkletack — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:30:35 +0000

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 [...]

Pacifica is back!

richard - sparkletack — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:29:54 +0000

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 [...]

san francisco steam coffee?

richard - sparkletack — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:16:16 +0000

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 [...]

1907 harrison street mainline — photographic google map

richard - sparkletack — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:11:51 +0000

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) [...]

The fog rolls in — 24 hours in 144 seconds

richard - sparkletack — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:01:06 +0000

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 [...]

SFist — “Leg Bones for Baseball Bats”

richard - sparkletack — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:55:14 +0000

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 [...]

“the good herb” — yerba buena

richard - sparkletack — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 19:27:24 +0000

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 [...]

the winnah and undisputed champeen

richard - sparkletack — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:33:13 +0000

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 [...]

’39 world’s fair butterfly

richard - sparkletack — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 22:50:09 +0000

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 [...]

screwball time-traveling noir: the bay time detective

richard - sparkletack — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:48:07 +0000

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 [...]

love letter — san francisco history center

richard - sparkletack — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:00:47 +0000

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. Hereâ€™s what you reveal about yourself on the official website, so typically demure and self-effacing: The Daniel E. Koshland San [...]

1938 san francisco street map

richard - sparkletack — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:00:24 +0000

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. [...]

poll: choose your favourite sparkletack episode!

richard - sparkletack — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 19:29:22 +0000

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 [...]

“mr. summers’ 1941 vacation” — prelinger archive

richard - sparkletack — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:08:05 +0000

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 [...]

vintage san francisco maps — on the cheap!

richard - sparkletack — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 22:40:04 +0000

File this under cheap and geeky thrills: full-size photocopies of old San Francisco maps for pocket change! I got a hot tip about this from a friend of mine several years ago, but with my usual alacrity, didn’t follow it up until this week! Kevin works in the public housing industry, and often has occasion [...]

buried history

richard - sparkletack — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:32:29 +0000

The buzz over recently exposed timbers of the “King Philip”, a clipper ship which foundered at Ocean Beach in 1878, got me thinking about San Francisco’s legacy of maritime corpses — especially those which ended up becoming part of the foundation of the city. I’m talking about the ships buried underneath downtown San Francisco. One [...]

a sparkletack tour of san francisco

richard - sparkletack — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:00:50 +0000

My long-time supporter Michael Roberts sent an email several months ago that absolutely made my day: After listening to your podcasts for the last six months, I couldn’t wait any longer and took a trip to the city so that I could experience some of your “brand” of history. He’s in good company. This isn’t [...]

mission street railroad graphic

richard - sparkletack — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 21:03:05 +0000

I have more than a passing interest in transportation and urban infrastructure issues — not because I have any expertise in the subject, mind you — I just find it fascinating to ponder the way technology and movement have shaped our surroundings. Craig Butz, a listener of mine, feels the same way. While examining his [...]