A new series of photographic essays offers a wide-angle history of San Francisco

BY MIRIAM WOLF

SAN FRANCISCO HAS more than its share of local-history buffs. Maybe because the city's past is so colorful, what with the shaky earthquakes and the shady ladies. Maybe it's because only about one out of every four people you meet in San Francisco was born in the Bay Area, and all those Johnnies-come-lately think that immersing themselves in San Francisco's past will help them pass as natives. Maybe it's just that San Francisco, unlike some other California cities we could name, actually has a history that stretches back farther than the latest box-office numbers.

You can delight almost any San Francisco buff on your holiday gift list with one of a series of books of vintage San Francisciana recently published by Arcadia. Arcadia's Images of America series documents local history from the firefighters of New York to rural Texas counties. The San Francisco books, like the others in the series, are slender paperbacks that are long on vintage photos and short on type. Aside from an introduction and a few one- or two-page chapter intros, the text in these volumes consists of explanatory captions. But, bearing the wisdom of that old canard in mind, you don't really need more words when you have photos as evocative and riveting as these. The captions are filled with quotes, raw facts, and dates enough to make the pictures come alive in your mind.

Each of the books will appeal to a different kind of buff. If you're pleasing a world's fair collector, get your hands on San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Transportation fanatics will get a thrill from San Francisco's Powell Street Cable Cars. And then there is my favorite of the bunch: San Francisco's Richmond District.

Ah, the Richmond District, home to so many of the best things in San Francisco, from bookstores to bahn mi. You may think it's a vital neighborhood now, but when you check out its past in Lorri Ungaretti's San Francisco's Richmond District, you'll fall even more deeply in love with it. Fittingly, the Richmond was once part of the area known by the somewhat chilling name of "the Outside Lands" and consisted of mostly sand dunes and cemeteries. But starting in the 1880s, civilization began to move in. Although there were houses and stores by the turn of the century, the area was still very "mixed use": a 1908 photograph shows a farm with 20 or 30 head of cattle at 22nd and Clement.

Aside from sand and cows, the early Richmond was known for its amusements; some, like the many amusement parks (Playland, Chutes, Sutro Baths), were much-loved all-ages venues. But the Outer Richmond also featured several seamy roadhouses and shady hotels, where, the text notes, "people could engage in 'sinful' activities far from the eyes of the city." Ungaretti does a great job juxtaposing vintage photos with current ones to create a sense of what we had and lost. Playland photos from the 1940s, early '70s, and just after the park was razed could break a nostalgic amusement park fan's heart. Still, if it wasn't for progress, Rossi Park would still be the crematorium it was. On the other hand, even relative newcomers to the city may get a twinge seeing photos of long-running businesses that have disappeared in just the past five years, like Gillon Lumber and the Alexandria and Coronet theaters.

There is something you can do to keep the Richmond's past from disappearing totally. The Western Neighborhoods Project collects, shares, and documents the history of the Richmond (and the Sunset too, although we all know which is the more happenin' place to live). Check it out at www.outsidelands.org.

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Who would have thought that, less than a decade after the sheer devastation of the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco would host a world's fair so elaborate and successful that it would attract 18 million visitors in 11 months? Dr. William Lipsky's San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition tells the story of how San Francisco "turned 625 acres of landfill into a beautifully landscaped wonderland with 11 enormous exhibition palaces, dozens of state and foreign pavilions, and an amusement zone almost a mile in length."

The story starts with some amazing photos of the Panama Canal Zone, where, Lipsky notes, 5,600 people died during the building of the canal. Back in the Bay Area, every step of the exposition was devoured by eager San Franciscans – more than 10,000 people turned out for the groundbreaking – and so many people streamed into the fairgrounds every day (before it opened!) just to watch the construction, that the organizers began charging a gate fee. As you can imagine, opening day attracted epic crowds.

They were there to see wonders like the five-acre working model of the Panama Canal and the 400-foot Tower of Jewels studded with more than 100,000 cut glass gems. They came to get airplane rides and see a million-volt transformer and get a look at an actual Ford assembly plant that produced more than 4,000 newfangled automobiles during the fair. They came to ride thrill rides, buy souvenirs, and see Stella, a nude portrait that seemed to come alive. They came to look at the buildings at night, when San Francisco's fog created romantic effects from the exposition's light shows.

Today, there are still some potent reminders of that time – the Palace of Fine Arts, of course, rebuilt in the 1960s, but also the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a replica of the fair's French pavilion, as well as many of the fair's murals, some of which have been in storage and unseen by the public since 1915.

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There will definitely be people who pore incessantly over Emiliano Echeverria and Walter Rice's San Francisco's Powell Street Cable Cars. There will be those who delight in every photo of San Francisco's legendary cable cars and be able to notice the subtle differences between, say, the Carter Brothers' combination cars and the Mahoney Brothers' open cars.

Still others will thrill to the intrigues of the battle between the cable car enemies, including San Francisco's "businessman mayor," Roger Lapham, and cable car friends, such as the Citizen's Committee to Save the Cable Cars, over the fate of the expensive-to-run-and-maintain form of transportation.

But all cable car fanatics will be eager to study and memorize the handy page in the back that details everything about today's Powell Street cable cars, from steepest grades to information on each cable car on the line (including which cars are original, which have been rebuilt and when, and which are new).

Arcadia has a whole roster of San Francisco books as well. Military freaks will want to get their hands on Robert W. Bowen's San Francisco's Presidio. San Francisco's Financial District, by Christine Miller, paints a portrait of a city that is an economic powerhouse, quite different from the sybaritic Summer of Love ideal of San Francisco that many people have. It also has some of the earliest San Francisco photos as well as the most extensive coverage of the earthquake and fire of the ones I've seen. In fact, this series covers almost every neighborhood, from the Excelsior and West Portal to the Marina, Oakland, the Castro, Daly City, and more. Wherever in the Bay Area your friends and family live, you can cover your list with these stylish tomes.

Miriam Wolf, former features editor of the Bay Guardian, is a freelance writer living in Portland, Ore.

Lorri Ungaretti will give a slide presentation on San Francisco's Richmond District Dec. 8, 7 p.m., San Francisco Public Library, Richmond Branch,

351 Ninth Ave., SF. Free. (415) 355-5600.

Read more about the Arcadia Publishing series and Potrero Hill in particular at www.sfbg.com/40/03/news_record.html

San Francisco's Richmond District

By Lorri Ungaretti. Arcadia, 128 pages, $19.99 (paper).

San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition

By Dr. William Lipsky. Arcadia, 128 pages, $19.99 (paper).

San Francisco's Powell Street Cable Cars

By Emiliano Echeverria and Walter Rice. Arcadia, 128 pages, $19.99 (paper).