CA-RECORDS-L Archives

From: carolyn <>
Subject: [CA-RECORDS-L] POST 1906 SF PHOTOS discovered and returned to Pulbic Domain
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 14:42:30 -0800

This is a great story!- Carolyn
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/01/26/BA236170.DTL

After the great earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco staged such
an impressive comeback that visiting President William
Howard Taft coined the famous moniker, "The City That Knows How."

The city's Department of Public Works, which played a huge role in
that renaissance, took meticulous photographs of the
massive rebuilding project, but about 2,000 of those photos vanished

from public view -- and were nearly lost forever.

Until now.

Saved from the incinerator by a former newspaper librarian, the
photographs -- made with a large box camera that used
glass-plate negatives -- were almost auctioned off, but instead the
city attorney has succeeded in getting them donated to the
public library.

"Future generations of San Franciscans will be able to enjoy a
collection of photographs that quite literally document the
building of San Francisco," said City Attorney Dennis Herrera.

It all started last March, when a local history buff alerted
Herrera's office that 19 albums of photographs of historical
photographs, dated between 1911 and 1919, were about to be sold by
Butterfields auction house.

The collection includes one-of-a-kind images of the construction of
City Hall, Civic Center Auditorium, the Esplanade at
Ocean Beach and the Hetch Hetchy water project, as well as major
roads, bridges, tunnels and sewers built as the city
expanded west and south.

Herrera got a subpoena and seized the photographs, and then
contacted the seller, Mark Rasmussen of Rohnert Park, who
agreed to donate them to the San Francisco Public Library's History
Center. The center hopes to post all of the pictures on
the Internet, and has put some on display while they catalog the
rest.

Rasmussen said his now-dead father, Stuart R. Rasmussen, a newspaper

librarian employed by William Randolph Hearst at
various publications for nearly 60 years, saved the photographs from

being burned during a library downsizing following a
merger of two Hearst publications.

"Within those pictures is the soul of this city rebuilding itself,"
said Rasmussen, who praised his father for keeping them in his
Sebastopol home when nobody else wanted them.

It is unclear how the volumes of photographs came to be in a Hearst
publication library, but in researching their origin, city
officials learned they were part of a largely forgotten collection
of sequential photographs depicting Department of Public
Works activities through the 1940s.

To everyone's delight, 73 more albums of photographs -- nearly
10,000 pictures -- were rediscovered in similar black paper
binders in a city warehouse on Treasure Island.

Olga Arias, executive assistant to the director of Public Works,
said she was spellbound as she pored over the images she
found stored in a file cabinet.

"I have worked at the Department of Public Works for 27 years, and I

had never seen those photographs," she said. "These
need to be available for public viewing."

At first glance, many of the pictures appear to be dry and
technical, showing pipes in the ground, crumbling streets in need of
repair and buildings at different stages of construction.

But the pictures -- some bearing the shadow of the photographer
hunched behind a long-legged box camera -- inadvertently
documented now-vanished elements of the city: ornate centers of
commerce, deluxe hotels, movie palaces,

Chinese laundries, homes both grand and modest, schools, firehouses.

"This photograph shows a Greek neighborhood that we knew was South
of Market, but of which we had no images," said
city archivist Susan Goldstein, pointing to various businesses on
Third Street near Harrison with signs in Greek.

In the background of many photographs are empty fields and hillsides

that today are covered with streets and buildings. A
sparsely populated Telegraph Hill looks down on a quarry, downtown
streets are unpaved and the waterfront is in full
industrial swing.

Workers use real steam rollers and steam shovels, as well as
steam-powered cranes, pile drivers and horse-drawn,
steam-powered street cleaning machines.

Especially in the earlier pictures, horses are everywhere, pulling
carriages and hauling loads, such as rock, out of the Twin
Peaks Tunnel.

One series of photographs from 1914 shows a horse-drawn "peanut
wagon" that was brought to a city office after it was hit
by a streetcar. The floridly painted wagon boasts of peanuts, "ice
cream cornucopias," popcorn, frankfurters and chewing
gum, all for a nickel. Hot tamales are 15 cents, or two for a
quarter.

The photographs also contain snapshots of daily life -- children
playing, a young man carrying flowers, people in period hats
going about their business.

There are saloons, political campaign signs, advertisements for
favorite products of the day.

A 1915 wall poster for the Pantages theater promises a "Monster 8
Act Bill, " titled "Concentration," which features such
performers as George C. Roverte, the "World's Mental Marvel," with
Madame Zenda.

There are civic events involving the political figures of the day
making speeches, building dedications, parades, aviator Charles
Lindbergh's 1915 visit and a French official's body lying in state
at City Hall.

A spectacular nighttime series shows the Panama Pacific Exposition
of 1915, fireworks exploding in the sky and the elaborate
buildings, such as the "Tower of Jewels," bathed in lights.

The cumulative impression is of a city on the move, cutting through
obstacles with industry and resourcefulness.

When it was decided in 1913, for example, that the three-story brick

Commercial High School near Van Ness Avenue at
Grove and Larkin Streets was in the wrong place, the city raised the

entire structure and moved it 16 feet.

"There's spirit and strength and muscle of those pictures," said
Rasmussen. "I feel lucky that my father, bless his heart, saw
enough into the future to say, 'This is important.' "

Picturing the past

Eight albums of the Department of Public Works' recently discovered
historical photos are in display cases at the San
Francisco History Center, on the sixth floor of the San Francisco
Main Library, 100 Larkin St. The center is open
Tuesday-Thursday and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Fridays
from noon to 6 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m.
Call (415) 557-4567 or visit www.sfpl.org for more information.

E-mail Patrick Hoge at .

This thread:

• [CA-RECORDS-L] POST 1906 SF PHOTOS discovered and returned to Pulbic Domain by carolyn <>