Wednesday, October 5, 2005

Re:  O & A Interview of Images of America

San Francisco Potrero Hill Book - Arcadia Books

 

Below is a special question and answer interview of Abigail Johnston and Peter Linenthal, authors of "San Francisco's Potrero Hill," the first book devoted exclusively to Potrero Hill.  It is published by Arcadia Books as part of its Images of America series.  Johnston is the Managing Editor of the Potrero View and Linenthal is the Director of the Potrero Hill Archives Project which has been in existence since 1986. The interview was conducted by Bruce B. Brugmann, Bay Guardian Editor and Publisher, as a special online feature for the paper's 39th anniversary special, published Oct. l9th, 2005 and as a prelude to Potrero Hill History night to be held Saturday, Oct. 22, at the Enola Maxwell School, 656 DeHaro Street @ 18^th Street, beginning at 7 p.m. with exhibit viewing beginning at 6 p.m.

 

 

Bay Guardian:  This is San Francisco's Potrero Hill Images of America by Peter Linenthal and Abigail Johnston from the Potrero Hill Archives Project.  Now from my point of view, the Potrero Hill Archives Project is the premier neighborhood research and historical project in the city and Peter that's you.

 

Peter Linenthal:  Thank you.

 

BG:  And Abigail works for what I consider the best neighborhood newspaper in town as the Managing Editor.

 

Abigail Johnston:  Thank you, thank you.

 

BG:  So we have the two key people here to explain and talk about Potrero Hill and their book and Potrero Hill History Night in San Francisco and the Archives Project.,  Sso why don't we start at the beginning where every good story starts.  Peter, how did you get started in the Archives Project?

 

PL:   Well, I moved to Potrero Hill in 1975 and by 1986  in 1986 I heard about the Potrero Hill Archives Archives Project which had been started by Julie Gilden originally as an oral history project to record oral histories with long time neighborhood residents.  She was particularly interested in the Molichan Molokan Russian community on the hill and as the archive Archives project Project developed, more and more historic photos from these interview subjects were discovered and that's what really got my excitement going.  I became involved in copying these old historic photos that families that grew up on the hill Hill had and so the collection of photos of the archive Archives project Project grew and grew and now a lot of those photos are storedcan be seen at the Potrero Branch Library at 1616 20^th Street.  Actually,As the Archives Project developed, and another change that we made was tapingwe started taping our interviews on video tape instead of the audio tape that we had been using and that made the interviews much more interesting to a broader audience.

 

BG: .  Now, you do these taped interviews?  I've been to a couple of History Nights, and the live interviews there are conducted by Phil De Andrade of Goat Hill Pizza The ones I've see are on history night           at Mr. Bill Hill's Pizza which are pretty good but he's playing to the audience.

 

PL:  Unfortunately, since we became involved in the book, I've been doing less of the person to one personnot done a one-on-one taped interviews.interview.

 

Abby Johnston:  When did you last do one?

 

PJ:  Oh, before we began the book, I think. It's been a few years now.

 

BG:  So Abby, when did you come into the viewView?  Have you been there from the beginning?

 

AJ:  No I haven't.  This The paper started in 1970 and Ruth Ruth Patson Passen who is the Ownerpublisher  and Editoreditor-in-Chief chief came to it about a year after that and I came to it inon board in 19841985.  At that time, we had an intense 3 or 4 daysan intense 3 or 4 day of production in the office, but we had a largewith a pretty big  staff of volunteers and they did things outside the office as well.  That started to change as people moved to Oregon . . . . or stuff, so I didn't keep going  or really start in.

 

 

BG:  On page 127, you have the staff all very 70's, subversive looking, and very Potrero looking. When was this picture taken?

 

AJ:  This picture was taken in 1979?.

 

BG:  Now this is pretty good size staff for a neighbor newspaper.  Do you have this many now?

 

AJ:  No, . But it's still an extremely hands-on newspaper, dependent on volunteers. but bBack then all the copy was done on typewriters and I remember when I came there we still hadall our display type was set on a headliner machine.  And use to enjoy the I used to enjoy the task of setting headliner headliner smachine because that meansit meant I could get out of all the arguments of thata bunch of other stuff over there.  If you ever y worked a headliner machine, you  know you can't be distracted at all because all inside there can be ruined, because it it's was a letter letter-by by-letter thing because each paper gets letter by letter photographed.  You don't see the whole thing until it come out at the end and if somebody interrupts you, you can have 18 feet of newspaper.

 

 

BG:  I always thought one of the best set of archives in the city and in the neighborhood were the bond copies was the binds of the Potrero Hill View - t.  The stuff there, the photographs, text, news, people, etc.

 

AJ:  It's good and, w wee have've got a lot of stuff.  Several years ago we started to bind all of our the issues.,   Iit was a big hunt to track down the issues because we hadn't been doing that.  So it was not until, oh, I think the early 90's when Ruth and I went out and to track down every single issue.  We have a set in our offices and there is a set  available public viewing in the neighborhood library.  Also, sort of surprised by this , we just found out a couple of years ago that the public main library has been collecting them on their own.

 

BG:  This is a splendid book and everyone I have shown it to and seen it has said so.  I looked at Arcadia Books a little bit and they specialize in this kind of publishing.and they do this kinds of things.  In San Francisco, this is the 4^th or 5^th neighborhood?

 

AJ:   Oh, no I think they've got maybe close to 30 titles about San Francisco and it is not just about the neighborhoods, its the expedition its the burning of the bridges, there's tons.

 

BG:  So this is like 31 or 32 - this obviously has a special quality to it and it's obvious that you folks are knowledgeable, put a lot of time in this and picked a lot of the right stuff.  What was your theme behind this?  Did they tell you what to do?  How did they do it? 

 

PL:  Well, when they came to us, the first thing we told them was that we really want to take our time and we gave ourselves one year.  We knew it would really take a long time and I am glad we took as long as we did because it took longer than I thought and there was really a lot of work involved.

 

AJ:  Yes, we were working on it for a long time.  Also, both of us were juggling.  Neither one of us could work at it just non-stop.  Peter had other assignments. He's a book illustrator and photographer and I had the View every two weeks.

 

PL:  We began by immersing ourselves in the collection and just looking at everything we had and seeing what themes emerged.  There was a lot of back and forth in the process of working on the book whether we would following a strictly a chronological theme. . . .

 

BG:  Speaking as a journalist myself, I can see that this is an interesting writer/editor process because you were both operating as writers and editors.

 

PL:  And photo editors and collectors.

 

BG:  So it was a real collaboration.

 

AJ:  We've We'd known either each other before because Peter's been in and out of the View, bringing in pictures and stuff, but we didn't have any idea that somehow our individual talents would just mesh the way they did.  I mean, he has areas of expertise that were his and his alone and I had areas that were mine.  It was such a perfect blend.

 

BG:  Well, it's good you had two of you.

 

PL:  I knew I needed someone to help from the beginning.  I knew I didn't want to do it on my own!

 

BG:  As you look through here, this really hangs together well.

 

PL:  Some of that I think is due to Abby's ability to group photographs thematically and really make them tell a story.

 

BG:  How do you do that?

 

AJ:  I've been a book designer most of my life and books that I've like liked best working on were books of historical photographs.  I have did worked on  a number of books on San Francisco and so that's just a little bit of my background.  One of the things that I we did noticenoticed  about in some of the Arcadia books that we looked at when we got started on ours was that there were quite a bit of differences on the spreadsthe handling of double-page spreads. .  It is not that I wanted our spreads to tell a story. I didn't want them to be to have pictures that are all  a disparate mush. blended together and look like mush, but somehow there was disparity between them.   Some books we saw had a spread with Like a picture of some businessman, and then a school, and then a church and then a fire station and they would have some kind of scribbledthe captions didn't connect the pictures to each other in any way.  caption and then didn't flow them one to another.

There was no flow.

 

BG:  Let's give an example. What illustrates that point ? What made it flow?

 

PJ:  Our solution to that problem . . .

 

AJ:  We would go back and forth between being thematic and being chronological.  Our editors first told us bluntly, cheerfully that virtually all of their office authors preferred to do it thematically.  So then we would start started off thinking it would be easier to do it thematically.  But then we We would struggled with this.  Remember that list of potential chapter titles?  But one of the rules was that you could have between 3-10 chapters and weWe wound up with a list of 7 themes.  And then I started working with some of our pictures, in trying to get them within these theme chapters.  Well, we have Bethlehem Steel here and Bethlehem Steel there.  See, Bethlehem [Union Iron Works] was such an important part to a particular part of Potrero Hill and to separate Bethlehem S that to separate it teel from the school that served the children, the church that served the working people, it just didn't feel right. TI.M. Scott o take an ordinary school and put it in a separate chapter apart from Bethlehem Steel because he was  was the manager of Bethlehem Steel Union Iron Works and the benefactor of the school and the whole neighborhood.  So to separate him into a different chapter from the school just didn't seem right.

UIW from its surrounding neighborhood just didn't seem the way to go.

 

PL:  A good example of the packing skill of balancing chronology with theme is on Page 58-59, where there are four pictures that relate to the Lim family.  We discovered they were a very early Chinese family living in Dogpatch.

 

BG:  12435 Minnesota.

 

PL:  I think having all of these together one spread gives an impact that they wouldn't have had if they were broken up by year.  It begins with Willie Wong's steps up the road to Grandma's house and that's from the 30's.

 

AJ:  But, also here's another thing.  Here's this combination of we did some chronological, what they would structure as chronological, but sometimes within the 3 chapters we ended up with even though we We went back and forth.  I would call Peter up and with have a brainstorm and say We're not doing it chronologically, we're doing it thematically.  He took it all quite well.  So what it the book really winds up is being is three chapters that are essentially chronological with a beginning, a middle and a now, but within them there are themes.

 

BG:  The book has With so many interesting things fromfor someone just coming onto the hill. late,  We just came into this Guardian location 3 1/2 years ago,.  Ffor example, on Page 52, the pictures of the tents and then the little shacks.  , housing refugees from the 1906 earthquake and fire. People associate that with Golden Gate Park and the Presidio and so forth, and none of us had any idea of thissuch a community was here on the hill.  It looks like there are hundreds of people here.

 

AJ:  And we have photographs of the tents extending all the way down 3^rd street and Mission Bay

 

BG:  And is this were 3^rd Street is?  Were these along the sides?  Was there a 3^rd Street at that time?

 

AJ:  It was called Kentucky then. Yes, they were there?

 

BG:  How long were they there?

 

AJ:  The tents weren't there all that long but the shacks were there a while.

 

BG:  The shacks replaced the tents, because that was how you illustrated it?

 

AJ:  The tents came first for sure and then the government built the shacks.

 

BG:  What felt more comfortable of the two room shacks?

 

PL:  I remember someone telling us that what was frustrating was the spaces were actually really small and I remember there was a story of a little girl who when she got her first job she worked in a brush factory that was in one of these shacks that had been dragged to some other location on the hillHill.  After they were returned at the relocation center, they were sold off and people would turn them into houses.

 

 

AJ:  And there are still several of themAJ:  And there are still a number of those earthquake shacks..  Ralph Helson Wilson who knows of several of the shacks that have been combined and that are still down there, still down on the flats .  there.  And then Oothers people were moved up to other parts of the hill Hill and there are a couple up on Carolina Street.

 

BG:  Is this the real start of Potrero Hill becoming a populous.  These people were not people who lived up here.

 

AJ:  A lot of them were from the South of Market area.  So many Many of the people there were the Slovarians Slovanians, who didwho  moved to the hill Hill after the 1906 earthquake were from the south of Market area.

 

BG:  Did they then go back to where they originally lived or did they go back tostay on the hillHill?

 

PL:  A lot of them stayed.

 

BG:  Did they rent or buy?

 

PL:  Well, a lot of the hill at that point was unbuilt up on.  There was lot of fill.

 

BG:  Was it owned by somebody?  Back where I am from in Iowa, we have the Hompestead Law.  My great grandfather got a piece of land _____________and then that's it.

 

PL:  I think it was owned by that point.  It really got bought up and built upon. 

 

BG:  To see all these people if they had a little piece of land there they could really populate the hill.

 

PL:  The picture on the cover is from 1908 just a couple of years after the earthquake and I think you can see construction happening, at least in several places and then here's the point where a lot of the hill really gets built up and much more filled in.

 

BG:  Alright now, the most enduring name of Potrero Hill is Goat Hill.  What's the history of the goats?  Are there any goats in the back of those houses and are there any goats today?  Bill AntradiPhil De Andrade  claims there are goats back there.

 

AJ:  I don't know if there are any goats today.  Bill Phil himself might have been the last person on the Hill with goats.  He had aHis goat, Hilda, goat and you lived where the pizza parlor now has its back dining room.

 

BG:  Is that where they got the name?  Did the goat come before the name?

 

PL:  I think pizza came before they got Hilda. 

 

AJ: Then they got Hilda and then Hilda had a couple of kids.  By the way, my husband took that photograph. 

 

PJ:  It's kind of cool.  In the backyard there they would give Hilda the leftovers.

 

BG:  Do both of you go back to the days when there was a goat there?  You can personally verify that there was a goat there?

 

AJ:  Oh, yes.  As I said, my husband took this photograph.  W, and my husband when we just lived maybe just a block away.

 

PL:  I tried to take Hilda to a class I was giving.  I was working at a preschool and I tried to get her in VolkswagonVolkswagen Rabbit and it was really tough, so they had to bring her in a Volkswagan VolkswagonVolkswagen bus later that day.

 

AJ:  It was really funny to pass by the hillAJ: It was really funny to come up 18th and see this goat head pop over the fence.  It was very sad actually when Hilda and her kids had to move on -- there was a parade down the street with signs: saying Save the Goats.

 

PL:  I didn't know though until we worked on the book that a Russian man said that when the houses were torn down to due to the public housing projects, that a lot of those houses belonged to the Molichan MolakanMolokan community and there were a lot of goats that belonged to that Molichan MolakanMolokan community where Potrero Terrace is now.

 

BG:  I was delighted to see _Connecticut_________ Yankee here.  It looks to me like is pretty much the same building.

 

AJ: 

 

PJ:  It pretty much is. It was built by the Salvotti family out of wood that had been  a ________ Red Cross shelter for refugees of the 1906 earthquake and fire.  ______________ refugees from the 1906 fire earthquake.

 

BG:  One of the difficult things in San Francisco is you see a building, you see it for years, then someone tears it down and you go by it the next day and you wonder what was there and what did it look like it's a horrible feeling.  I had that feeling just the other day.  How many of buildings that you have in here are still standing?  About half?

 

PL:  I would say probably more about 75% .%.would say.  There are a lot that are still there.

 

BG:  Now the Neighborhood House goes back to 1925.   and that is a house by the sea over viewing ____________. How did that come to be?  Is it associated with Hearst Castle one of those big things?

 

AJ:  Julia Morgan, the architect.She wasn't actually on the hill.  Not sure how they got in touch with her, but it was the Presbyterians  synagogue or something like that and they wanted her got in touch with her; this was some time before she hooked up with William Randolph Hearst and became famous for deisi