Portals of the Past

Charles Cora being taken away, Belle Cora weeps

San Francisco love story: A hooker, her gambling man and a

By Gary Kamiya

In Mission Dolores cemetery a tombstone bears the names of Charles and Arabella Cora, who were married for exactly two hours. It is a monument to a tragic only-in-San Francisco love story, involving a ...

U.S. Census workers would hit cheap hotels, missions and flop houses around Howard and Embarcadero Streets counting mostly men, eho lived around Skid Row, April 13, 1950 Photo ran 04/16/1950

SF ‘hobohemia’ transformed into Skid Row as jobs and city

By Gary Kamiya

San Francisco’s hobo population changed with the Depression, the evolving job market and the city’s long-running plans to transform the South of Market area

"Skid Row." Howard Street, San Francisco, California - Feb. 1937

Don’t call them bums: Hobos once filled the South of Market

By Gary Kamiya

For decades, thousands of hobos called San Francisco their part-time home. Living in cheap hotels and rooming houses, these itinerant workers came and went with the seasons. The center of “hobohemia” ...

The Chronicle August 16, 1959 front page, reporting on shootings by sniper, Thomas Antonio Gutierrez

It was just like the movies — only this SF sniper was for real

By Gary Kamiya

Spurned by a woman, a disturbed man takes to a rooftop in San Francisco and opens fire. It happened in a 1952 movie, and seven years later it happened in real life.

WBSCENIC25 NEW SCENIC DRIVE SIGN REX MAY, A SAN FRANCISCO ARTIST, WAS ANNOUNCED YESTERDAY AS WINNER OF THE DOWN TOWN ASSOCIATION'S CONTEST FOR A NEW SIGN FOR THE 49 MILE SCENIC DRIVE WITHIN THE CITY. MAY'S DESIGN, WHICH WON HIM $100, WILL BE REPRODUCED ON SOME 200 MARKERS, AND POSTED ALONG THE ROUTE. IN SELECTING THE CONTEST WINNER, THE JUDGES CONSIDERED MORE THAN 60 ENTRIES. THE WINNING DESIGN IS BEING SHOWN ABOVE BY MAY, WHO LIVES AT 139 NOE STREET, TO MODEL KARI SANDINO, AND THREE OF THE JUDGES, WARREN HOWELL, DIRECTOR OF THE CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY; ROSS SHOAF, OF THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS, AND VANCE LOCKE, PRESIDENT OF THE ARTISTS CLUB OF SAN FRANCISCO. OTHER JUDGES WERE ROBERT HOWARD, SCULPTOR AND WILLIAM G. MERCHANT, ARCHITECT.

San Francisco scenic treasure that locals overlook

By Gary Kamiya

The 49 Mile Scenic Drive has distinctive signs featuring a chummy-looking seagull and travels through neighborhoods predictable and less so. But for most locals, its route — not to mention its entire ...

Anton Refrigier murals at the Rincon Annex post office in san Francisco 05/12/1948

When a red-hunting Congress took on SF murals — and lost

By Gary Kamiya

The Rincon Annex murals by artist Anton Refregier, a sweeping, warts-and-all depiction of the history of San Francisco commissioned by a New Deal federal arts program, was attacked for years by right-wing ...

When conservatives went to war over SF post office murals

By Gary Kamiya

Throughout San Francisco’s history, conservatives almost invariably have been the ones leading the charge to remove “objectionable” art. One case in point: The Anton Refregier murals in the Rincon ...

San Francisco longshoremen are back at work after a strike , January 3, 1940 Longshoremen are shown here rigging lines before loading the freighter Associated Press photo

When the waterfront was San Francisco’s heart, soul and muscle

By Gary Kamiya

The City Front, as the waterfront was called, was the engine that drove San Francisco’s economy. It swarmed with longshoremen, sailors and other workers of all sorts.

An illustration of the Harbor View resort on San Francisco's Strawberry Island, taken from the 1884 book "Health Seekers, Tourists and Sportsmen's Guide to the Seashore."

San Francisco’s vanished island resort: Dancing, shooting and

By Gary Kamiya

Strawberry Island was hard to get to, and it wasn’t even a full-time island. But precisely for those reasons, it was among the most enchanting of San Francisco’s lost landscapes. For a few years, it ...

SFCOTTAGES11_059.jpg_
A set of three earthquake cottages, built in 1906 for people left homeless after the earthquake and fire, were moved from a lot in the outer Sunset dist and transported by truck to the San Francisco Zoo to be restored Saturday. The one-room cottages have already been stripped of their modern additions by a small volunteer army. By Lance Iversen/San Francisco Chronicle

Ran on: 03-11-2005
A cottage, built in 1906 for the homeless after the earthquake, is lifted across Kirkham Street in San Francisco on Saturday.

How 1906 quake helped thousands of San Franciscans own their

By Gary Kamiya

Most eartthquake refugees who ended up in city-provided cottages were working San Franciscans. About a third of them were Irish and Italian immigrants and their children, whose tenements in the poor, ...

Think SF’s housing crisis is bad? You should have seen it in

By Gary Kamiya

Nearly half of San Francisco’s population was homeless after the earthquake and fire of 1906. The relief effort to shelter thousands of people marked a shift in disaster recovery in the United States.

SS City of Rio de Janeiro built by John Roach & Son in 1878 at Chester, Penn. regularly transported passengers and cargo between Asia and San Francisco, photo taken at Nagasaki, Japan, 1894.

A heavy fog, a fateful mistake: How 128 people died in SF’s

By Gary Kamiya

The passenger ship City of Rio de Janeiro was already three days behind schedule when it was forced to wait in a heavy fog to enter the Golden Gate. Then the fog lifted — but only a bit. It was enough to ...

Fun and games on Monkey Island at Fleishhacker Zoo, November 24, 1974. Spider Monkeys and Sea Gulls

SF Zoo Monkey Island: Depression jobs and fun for humans, mixed

By Gary Kamiya

The monkey island at Fleishhacker Zoo was one of many the WPA built around the country to put people to work and lift families’ spirits during hard times. For the monkeys, the islands were an improvement ...

FILE--The Sing Fat Co. building, topped by an ornamental corner pagoda dominates this intersection at California and Grant Streets in San Francisco's Chinatown in this Dec. 1997 file photo. The building with its distinct pseudo-Chinese shape was designed to draw tourists. The building was was one of the first constructed in Chinatown after the 1906 earthquake and helped create a new shopping mecca. (AP Photo/Julie Stupsker,File)

San Francisco’s Chinatown was a seedy ghetto. Then a stage set

By Gary Kamiya

The pre-1906 district had a reputation for squalid conditions and sin. Neighborhood leaders rebuilt it with faux Chinese architecture to attract tourists and ease pressure from a white city government.

A fire, perhaps set by transients or youngsters, tore through the Fortman Mansion at 1007 Gough Street. It had been featured in the movie Vertigo, July 23, 1959

‘Vertigo’ mansion’s fate was a San Francisco horror story

By Gary Kamiya

The most recent Portals told the tumultuous early history of the Fortmann mansion, a Victorian at Gough and Eddy streets in San Francisco that plays a cryptic role in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, ...

The former Portman Mansion, located at 1007 Gough Street in San Francisco, gained notoriety as the "McKitterick Hotel" in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller "Vertigo."

That weird San Francisco mansion in Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’

By Gary Kamiya

Every year, throngs of people take “Vertigo” tours in San Francisco, visiting the sites where Alfred Hitchcock shot his 1958 masterpiece. Many buildings, such as the swanky Brocklebank apartments atop ...

Gold Rush satirist, impresario and Farallones egg-gatherer did it

By Gary Kamiya

One of the most rollicking characters in San Francisco during the Gold Rush years was David G. “Doc” Robinson, a man whose wild career could only have taken place in the instant city. Robinson made his ...

Haas-Lilienthal House is seen on Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif.

Pillars of Jewish community held one of SF’s most amazing

By Gary Kamiya

For decades, one of the most splendid Christmas celebrations in San Francisco took place at a grand Queen Anne Victorian on Franklin Street. Preparations for the holiday extravaganza started months before ...

SF Chronicle’s early days: Showbiz, pluck and cure-alls for

By Gary Kamiya

The newspaper you are reading came into existence because San Francisco was crazy about the theater. From its beginnings, San Francisco was stagestruck. The city’s young, mostly male, rough-and-tumble ...

The UC Berkeley-owned University City in Albany was a complex that provided housing for married students, seen here as it was announcing 50 new units in buildings like these, September 28, 1962. Handout Photo by University of California, Berkekey ASUC

When WWII brought blacks to the East Bay, whites fought for

By Gary Kamiya

Just north of Berkeley off San Pablo Avenue in Albany stands a housing complex called University Village, reserved for married students at UC Berkeley. Few realize that in the years after World War II, this ...

Returning soldies of World War I, including the 363rd division are given a heroes welcome. They would parade to City Hall Handout Photo credit:McCurry Foto Co. Sacramento

A party to end all parties: SF went wild when WWI ended

By Gary Kamiya

At 1 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 11, 1918, San Francisco held one of the greatest celebrations in its history. Shouting and singing, an army of men and women flowed up and down Market Street, waving flags and ...

Iconic SF building was home to Bohemians for decades. Then it was

By Gary Kamiya

The previous Portals told the story of how the Montgomery Block was erected in 1853 in response to devastating fires that ravaged Gold Rush San Francisco. It was the grandest building of its time, a ...

SF’s swankiest building was made to survive if city burned

By Gary Kamiya

Many beloved San Francisco buildings have disappeared over the years, from the original Mission Dolores to the City of Paris department store to the old Produce Market. But none was as rich in history as ...

A crewless out of control Navy Patrol Blimp landed in a street in Daly City, August 16, 1942 U.S. Nay photo Photo ran 08/17/1942, P. 3

Ghost blimp’s enduring mystery: How did crew vanish before Bay

By Gary Kamiya

Shortly before noon on an August Sunday in 1942, a solitary bather on a beach near Fort Funston looked up to see a strange sight. A Navy blimp was approaching the beach at extremely low elevation. As the ...

Prohibition meant party time in San Francisco

By Gary Kamiya

Much of America greeted Prohibition with great enthusiasm. San Francisco didn’t join the party. Temperance movements led by crusading Protestants, women’s groups and progressive reformers had been ...

When the Army recruited incompetent troops in SF and armed them

By Gary Kamiya

On March 3, 1863, an advertisement appeared in El Voz de Mejico, a Spanish-language newspaper in San Francisco. The notice invited Californios — native Californians — to enlist in a new cavalry unit. ...

Whaling and whale hunters .. Handout photo From a jacket design by Samuel Bryant,1956 Photo ran 03/11/1956, p. 18 This World

SF whaling crews lived to regret it, if they lived

By Gary Kamiya

The previous Portals described how a young man named Walter Noble Burns, while eating breakfast in a San Francisco restaurant in the late 19th century, saw an advertisement in a newspaper for whaling crews ...

Whaling and whale hunters ..a dangerous occupation Handout photo From Scoreley Photo ran 03/29/1968, p. 30 This World

When ships hunted whales, SF Bay was their home

By Gary Kamiya

San Francisco has been called the Paris of the West, but for decades it could have been called the New Bedford of the Pacific. Between 1885 and 1905, San Francisco was the leading whaling ...

When derelicts from Down Under overran San Francisco

By Gary Kamiya

In the early years of San Francisco, one neighborhood was synonymous with vice, crime, degradation and all-around sleaze: Sydney-Town. Sydney-Town was located in the waterfront area around ...

The original Grizzly Adams kept his bears on a chain in SF

By Gary Kamiya

In 1856, San Franciscans who paid a quarter to venture into a large basement room found themselves a few feet away from half a dozen grizzly bears. Two of these ferocious beasts were in ...

Jimbo Edwards owner of the Jimbo's Bop City, a popular jazz club that closed in 1965 located at 1690 Post St., May 13, 1993

When Miles Davis and Charlie Parker were in SF, this was the

By Gary Kamiya

From 1950 to 1965, one of the greatest jazz clubs in America, Jimbo’s Bop City, could be found in the heart of San Francisco’s jumping African American nightclub scene. Every jazz ...

Battle-scarred heavy cruiser USS San Francisco returns to the Bay Area December 11, 1942
Official U.S. Navy photo

Photo ran12/12/1942, P. 1

How SF’s namesake ship survived a World War II ‘suicide’

By Gary Kamiya

In November 1942, the heavy cruiser San Francisco, flagship of an outgunned and outnumbered American task force, was ordered to stop a much stronger Japanese armada that was steaming toward the U.S.-held ...

The heavy cruiser USS San Francisco, April 28, 1934 World Wide Photos

In World War II, San Francisco’s namesake ship was a Navy hero

By Gary Kamiya

The most haunting war memorial in San Francisco stands near Point Lobos, above the Lands End trail overlooking the Pacific. On either side of a flagpole are set two large sheets of gray-painted metal, ...

May 19, 1949: The San Francisco Seals play at their longtime home in the Mission District, Seals Stadium. The working class stadium, which had a live seal in the lobby for many years, hosted the Seals from 1931 to 1957 and the San Francisco Giants during the team's first year after its 1958 move from New York. Rainier Brewery can be seen in the distance - there were multiple breweries next door to the ballpark, and the smell of hops was ever-present during baseball games. The photo was taken by Bob Campbell, a longtime staff photographer who joined the Chronicle after serving in World War II.

In the depths of the Depression, SF had the best ballpark in the

By Gary Kamiya

At the corner of 16th and Bryant stands a venerable bar and grill called the Double Play. This joint, which opened in 1909, is the only reminder of the most beloved of San Francisco’s neighborhood ...

The 19th century nude scene that took San Francisco by storm

By Gary Kamiya

On Aug. 24, 1863, a thunderbolt hit San Francisco. The sensation appearing at Maguire’s Opera House was all anyone could talk about. In 16 nights, 30,000 people came to see her — more than half the ...

Laurel Hill Cemetery Latham From the Wyland Stanley Collection

How San Francisco evicted thousands of dead people

By Gary Kamiya

The last Portals described how, starting in 1854, four cemeteries were installed in the then-desolate Lone Mountain area of the Inner Richmond District. Neighborhood boosters began a campaign at the turn of ...

Lone Mountain Cemetery 1861 From the Wyland Stanley Collection

Lively, lengthy battle over where to bury SF’s dead

By Gary Kamiya

From the 1868 squatters who used a cannon-armed gunboat to enforce their claim to Mission Creek to the egg-hurling commuter shuttle protesters of 2013, San Francisco has always been noted for the variety ...

The San Francisco Industrial School in an undated drawing. The San Francisco-San Jose Railroad, which shipped produce picked by children at the reform school, runs in front of the building.

Corrupt, inhumane reform school was SF’s first form of juvenile

By Gary Kamiya

Today, George M. Rush Stadium on the San Francisco City College campus is the scene of nothing more violent than football games. But during the 19th century, one of the grimmest institutions in the city’s ...

The Model T Ford is shown in this Library of Congress photo by Robert Runyon, 1881-1968 [Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile to the market on October 1, 1908.]
MEDIUM: 1 nitrate negative; 5x7 and smaller
DIGITAL COLLECTION: The South Texas Border
REPRODUCTION NUMBER: 08638
REPOSITORY: The Center for American History and General Libraries, University of Texas at Austin
SOURCE COLLECTION: Robert Runyon Photograph Collection

SF bad guys get away in a car. In 1915, that was big news

By Gary Kamiya

On the evening of Nov. 20, 1915, four masked gunmen barged into the Sloat Cafe, a dance hall in San Francisco’s sparsely settled hinterlands at Sloat Avenue and the Great Highway. After robbing the ...

A "fanciful" drawing of the Niantic, a Gold Rush ship who would be beached on Sansome St. A hotel would be built on the hull of the Niantic. Handout drawing courtesy of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Photo ran 05/11/1978, p. 2

How ships on dry land helped Gold Rush San Francisco grow

By Gary Kamiya

In the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid, under a high-rise a few feet to the east of verdant little Redwood Park, are buried the remains of a wooden ship whose story captures the entire history of Gold ...

The woman who fought Chinatown sex slavery for decades

By Gary Kamiya

Neither Chinese American leaders nor white officials in San Francisco made any real efforts to close the houses of prostitution that flourished in Chinatown in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Only one ...

Historic Chinatown
no other information,
Arnold Genthe photographer

Photo ran 04/07/1985 (pg 10-11 This World

How early SF police delivered sex slaves to the brothels of

By Gary Kamiya

The previous Portals described how sex slavery was widely practiced in 19th century Chinatown. Starting in 1852, secretive associations called tongs began kidnapping or buying young girls and women from ...

Dupont Avenue in Chinatown in San Francisco, 1890s. The first victim of the plague in San Francisco died on this street.
150 anniversary maybe

Shame of the city: When Chinese sex slaves were trafficked in SF

By Gary Kamiya

For more than five decades in the 19th and early 20th centuries, sex slavery was openly practiced in San Francisco. Young women who had been kidnapped or purchased in their native China ...

Evacuees from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in the days following the attack that drew the U.S. into World War II. The date of the photo is unknown.

SF’s tense Yuletide in 1941: wartime footing, evacuees and

By Gary Kamiya

The holiday season hardly felt like a time for rejoicing in 1941. Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor just 18 days before Christmas, thrusting the United States into World War II. Newspapers normally ...

ADVANCE FOR MONDAY, APRIL 8--FILE--A group of Chinese and Japanese women wait in a wire mesh enclosure for processing at the Angel Island barracks in this file photo from the late 1920s. The Island was the site of the Angel Island Immigration Station, California's version of Ellis Island, which processed one million immigrants from 1910 to 1040, mostly from China and Japan. (AP Photo/Files)

The historical legacy of Mayor Ed Lee

By Gary Kamiya

If one sign that a city has transcended racism is its willingness to criticize its citizens regardless of their race or ethnicity, San Francisco’s treatment of its late mayor, Ed Lee, ought to place it ...

"Elaine," by Toby Edward Rosenthal, 1874

When SF lost its mind over a stolen painting

By Gary Kamiya

In 1875, San Francisco went wild over a painting of a dead Arthurian maiden. Thousands flocked to see the artwork during its brief exhibition. When it was stolen, city residents reacted as ...

St. Junipero Serra statue in the Lower Presidio Historic Park overlooks the Fisherman's Wharf in Monterey, Calif. Thursday, May 18, 2017.

How Argentine-led invaders chased defenders from a Monterey fort

By Gary Kamiya

One day in 1818, a Spanish lookout in Monterey saw a pair of mysterious vessels approaching. The Spanish had been warned that enemy ships were planning to attack California, and the commander of the ...

Looking toward the Golden Gate, decades before the bridge was built, from The Presidio of San Francisco ca. 1880's.

When Argentina attacked Monterey: Part I

By Gary Kamiya

At 2 a.m. on Nov. 23, 1818, a soldier named Dolores Cantua galloped into the crumbling Presidio of San Francisco. He had ridden 90 miles through the night from Monterey, the capital of Spanish Alta ...

The D. H. Burnham plan for the beuatification of San Francisco. This is an original copy of the report that is housed at the San Francisco Public Library. This is for a John King story for our Earthquake package.
3/24/06
Photo: Mark Costantini/San Francisco Chronicle
Ran on: 05-09-2006
The original copy of the report that Daniel Burnham created for San Francisco prior to the 1906 quake.

SF’s lost opportunity to be reborn as ‘Paris, with hills’

By Gary Kamiya

In the last decade of the 19th century, San Franciscans were fed up with the physical condition of their city. Parks were neglected, and schools were falling apart. The shopping district had become so ...

When an outlaw’s severed head went on tour in SF

By Gary Kamiya

Many strange objects have appeared in San Francisco, but none odder than the head of Joaquin Murieta. For more than 50 years, the notorious outlaw’s head was displayed in various places ...

The Hippodrome on Pacific Street, San Francisco, in the Barbary Coast. The photo, dated November 2, 1933, stated that it was closed for fixing.

SF’s forgotten jazz pioneer

By Gary Kamiya

San Francisco’s Barbary Coast is remembered as one of the world’s most depraved vice districts. But in the years after the 1906 earthquake, it was also a hotbed of the swinging, improvised new music ...

Grant Avenue between O'Farrell and Geary Streets, in San Francisco. February 19, 1948.

The streets of San Francisco: Here's the oldest one

By Gary Kamiya

From A Street to Zoo Road, there are 2,659 official streets in San Francisco. This cornucopia of streets, avenues, boulevards, lanes, places, alleys, walks, courts, terraces, stairways, plazas, paths, ...

SF’s early German Jews quickly became an aristocracy

By Gary Kamiya

The last Portals described how a small group of German Jews escaped the restrictions and prejudices of their homeland to prosper in Gold Rush-era San Francisco. By 1870, a group of several dozen families, ...

Levi's historian, Lynn Downey works inside the archive area at the Levi Strauss & Co. inside company headquarters in San Francisco, Ca. on Thursday August 4, 2011. A portrait of Levi Strauss hangs on the door of the archive safe.

Fleeing repression, Jewish immigrants found success in Gold Rush

By Gary Kamiya

Of all the groups that arrived in Gold Rush San Francisco, the Jews who fled a legacy of oppression in Europe may have experienced the most remarkable success. In their Central European ...

Illustration of the Pony Express arriving in Sacramento Handout

When the Pony Express came to SF, it was party time

By Gary Kamiya

[...] the Pony Express, a wildly ambitious enterprise that promised to cut that delivery time in half, fired the imagination of the residents of America’s most far-flung city. The final legs of the run ...

Illustration of the Pony Express titled "The Pony Express (reproduced from A.L. Stimson, History of the Express Handout

How the Pony Express linked an isolated SF to the country

By Gary Kamiya

The Pony Express, the short-lived mail service whose daring young riders and tireless horses raced back and forth across 2,000 miles of a mostly unexplored continent, fired the imagination of the entire ...

Clifford Wight's "Ironworker" at Coit Tower on Friday, July 7, 2017, in San Francisco, Calif.

How Coit Tower’s murals became a target for anticommunist

By Gary Kamiya

The murals were funded by a federal program called the Public Works of Art Project. In December 1933, the head of the de Young Museum, Walter Heil, and other officials chose 25 artists who would be paid ...

Different stages of work being done on the nearly 100-year-old O'Shaughnessy Seawall at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, California, by the The Historic Preservation Training Center (HPTC) on Thursday March 19, 2015. On left is damaged seawall planned to be removed, behind it is deteriorated rebar replaced with green non-rust reinforcing rods, at far right is HPTC forming the wall for new cement.

Death of SF’s boozy beach shantytown

By Gary Kamiya

At its height, Mooneysville consisted of about five dozen tents, shacks and frame buildings, and it purveyed whiskey, coffee, doughnuts and clam chowder, as well as various games and hustles, to the ...

Denis Kearney, San Francisco politician and activist non for his anti-Chinese policies in the late 1800s UPI photo received 09/25/1972 photo ran 07/25/1988

Whiskey by the waves: When squatters took over SF’s Ocean Beach

By Gary Kamiya

In keeping with their populist political stance, the squatters said they were justified in seizing beachfront land because the Park and Ocean Railroad, which was owned by the all-powerful Southern Pacific ...

A railroad to Ocean Beach: How ‘the Octopus’ got its way in

By Gary Kamiya

A reported 18,000 people filled the northern end of Ocean Beach, packed the Cliff House and spilled south toward Golden Gate Park. An 1863 toll road, Point Lobos Avenue, ran from Bush and Presidio to the ...

Sex and guitar lessons: SF’s sensational reefer madness trial

By Gary Kamiya

Sex and guitar lessons: SF’s sensational reefer madness trial [...] that recreational marijuana is legal in California, it’s easy to forget that cannabis was once regarded as a dangerous, even demonic, ...

How Chinese Americans won right to attend SF schools

By Gary Kamiya

The previous Portals described how Chinese Americans in 19th century San Francisco were subjected to racist city and state school laws. From 1871 to 1885, they were denied access to any public schools at ...

Very early, undated photo shows the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade.

How early SF kept Chinese children out of the schoolhouse

By Gary Kamiya

The Chinese Presbyterian Mission Church became the first U.S. church with an Asian congregation when it opened its doors in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1853. [...] it was a feeble exception to a long, ...

How Emperor Norton rose to power

By Gary Kamiya

From “Dirty Tom” McAlear, a 19th century Barbary Coast habitue who for a small coin would eat literally anything given to him, to the “12 Galaxies” man of our own day, the list of our fair city’s ...

The life and times of North Beach’s renowned Beat dive the

By Gary Kamiya

For seven years it was a favorite Beat hangout, famous for its anything-goes Blabbermouth Night, its poetry readings, jazz jam sessions, and its clientele of neighborhood ne’er-do-wells, lunatics and ...

Spanish cowboys in a drawing from 1870 rounding up bulls Courtesy of Bancroft Library

When bulls fought bears in brutal Mission District matches

By Gary Kamiya

Visitors file out of buses to tour the adobe church, while a couple of blocks away the queue for the Bi-Rite Creamery stretches around the corner. Few if any of the people in either line know that from the ...

He decided who thrived and who faded in SF’s high society

By Gary Kamiya

Not only did he have an unrivaled passion for the bubbly — he supposedly once consumed 25 bottles in a single day — but his position as the city’s master of entertainment allowed him to sell his ...

How red-baiting crusade collapsed in SF courtroom in 1960

By Gary Kamiya

The previous two Portals described how students protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in San Francisco in May 1960 were blasted with fire hoses, beaten and dragged down the stairs ...

Friday May 13, 1960: Protest and sit-in against House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) at City Hall, San Francisco. Police evict protestors using a fire hose, washing them down the steps. Mayor George Christopher Chronicle photographers Bob Campbell and Peter Breinig

The day SFPD turned fire hoses on protesters at City Hall

By Gary Kamiya

The previous Portals described how scores of demonstrators, mostly students from UC Berkeley, came to San Francisco City Hall on May 13, 1960, to protest hearings being held by the House Un-American ...

Members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) sit for an executive meeting, Washington DC, August 8, 1948. From left, future American President Richard Nixon (1913 - 1994), chief investigator Robert Stripling, and U.S. Representatives John McDowell (1902 - 1957), committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas (1895 - 1970), and F. Edward Hebert (1901 - 1979). (Photo by New York Times Co./Getty Images)

When Washington’s Red-baiting congressional committee came to

By Gary Kamiya

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, recently advocated creating a new version of the House Un-American Activities Committee to combat “Islamic ...

The Chutes.

Credit: Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

When the Chutes on Haight was SF’s go-to place for speedy kicks

By Gary Kamiya

The most beloved of San Francisco’s vanished pleasure grounds was Playland-at-the-Beach, which stood along the Great Highway beside Ocean Beach from 1921 to 1972. [...] Playland’s original name was ...

San Francisco’s off-kilter 1st suburb

By Gary Kamiya

The Lagoon Survey’s story begins in September 1847, when San Francisco was a growing village of 459 people whose built-up area encompassed about 50 square blocks surrounding Yerba Buena Cove. By 1847, ...

How an early SF lake went from jewel to cesspool

By Gary Kamiya

The Forty-Niners reported that Spanish and Indian women used the Laguna Pequeña to wash clothes, an activity that would be most associated with the lake and lead to a new moniker, Washerwoman’s Lagoon. ...

Joseph Coppa .. also known as Papa Coppa, ran restaurants in San Francisco, including Coppa's which was in the Montgomery Block, and was a hangout for Bonhemians during the late 19th and early 20th century Handout Photo dated 1906

SF’s first hipster cafe and its descent into ruin

By Gary Kamiya

The first and most legendary of all of San Francisco’s bohemian cafes was a restaurant called Coppa’s. Coppa’s crowning glory was its wildly creative murals, done on the fly by the artists and ...

the Old School house on Portsmouth Square
San Francisco's first school (?)

SF’s 1st street preacher brought God to a godless crowd

By Gary Kamiya

At 3 p.m. on Dec. 3, 1849, a tall, powerfully built man made his way through the throng in Portsmouth Square. Taylor climbed up on a carpenter’s bench in front of one of the gambling houses that lined ...

CLIFFHOUSE-B-1911-MN-UNKNOWN - The Cliff House at Ocean Beach, San Francisco. Photo taken about 1911.

SF’s Cliff House has seen thrills, chills ... and maybe a curse

By Gary Kamiya

The Cliff House, perched majestically above the ocean near San Francisco’s northwestern tip, has been one of the city’s most famous landmarks since it opened in 1863. An earlier Portals described how ...

The SF riots that brought out the National Guard

By Gary Kamiya

The previous Portals described how, on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon 50 years ago in Hunters Point, a white police officer shot and killed Matthew Johnson, an unarmed 16-year-old African American ...

Two black occupants of this car are held at bay by California National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets in the Hunters Point riot area of San Francisco, Sept. 28, 1966. The car was stopped when it was suspected of carrying guns and ammunition. The area was secured by Guardsmen who imposed curfew. (AP Photo/Robert H. Houston)

Officer’s ’66 killing of black teen sparked Hunters Point

By Gary Kamiya

Officer’s ’66 killing of black teen sparked Hunters Point riots Alvin Johnson, a white patrol officer with 23 years’ experience on the force, gave chase in his cruiser and tried to cut off Bacon and ...

GOLD RUSH 2/B/15JUN98/SC/HO--Early San Francisco pioneers: Samuel Brannan (top right), front row, left to right, Jacob P. Leese, Thomas O. Larking and W.D.M. Howard. Photo from an original daguerreotype, ca. 1850. PHOTO COURTESY CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, FN-10746

When SF journalism was a blood sport

By Gary Kamiya

Even before the Gold Rush, San Francisco’s two rival newspapers provided their readers with enough invective to make the late Warren Hinckle nod approvingly from his celestial barstool. The California ...

Just before the world rushed in: SF’s small-town early days

By Gary Kamiya

The event that had changed Yerba Buena from a speck on a Mexican map to a growing American town had taken place on July 9, 1846, when a band of sailors and Marines disembarked from the Portsmouth, marched ...

Valencia Gardens, low income housing project in San Francisco, 05/22/1952

The losing fight for integration in SF’s first housing projects

By Gary Kamiya

The whites-only policies in San Francisco’s first public housing projects in the early 1940s, described in the last Portals, were mainly aimed at keeping Chinese Americans in Chinatown and out of ...

Valencia Gardens, low income housing project in San Francisco, December 1942 Handout

How SF’s Housing Authority kept its early projects all white

By Gary Kamiya

The ubiquity of public housing makes it easy to forget that government didn’t supply any until late in the Depression, when the plight of working people who had been pushed into destitution led Congress ...

GOLDENDRAGON-5 SEPT77
INTERIOR OF THE GOLDEN DRAGON RESTAURANT, SCENE OF MASS MURDER IN WHICH 5 DIED. photo by Terry Schmidt on SEP, 4, 1977.
Photo ran 09/05/1977, P, A1

Chinatown gang feud ignited one of SF’s worst mass homicides

By Gary Kamiya

Few Chinatown restaurants besides the cheap noodle joint Sam Wo across Washington Street were still open, and about 100 tourists and locals were seated at the restaurant’s two dining levels. Louie and ...

Sunday recreation of the Spainiards in early California. Title of the painting is "The Horse Race". Photo is from the Chronicle archive.

SF’s 19th century Burning Man: Party all night, and then some

By Gary Kamiya

The party was thrown by Yerba Buena’s second Anglo resident, an Ohio-born adventurer and businessman named Jacob Leese. The Mexican governor, eager to stimulate commerce in the sleepy hinterlands of Alta ...

German crew members from the cruise ship Columbus are housed at the immigration station at Angel Island, hoping to be able to travel west ,eventually back to Germany 01/30/1940 photos ran 02/04/1940, p. 14

Hundreds of Germans spent early days of WWII on Angel Island

By Gary Kamiya

The strange saga started Aug. 19, 1939, when a German luxury liner called the Columbus sailed from New York with 750 passengers, mostly Americans, and 579 German crew members on a 12-day cruise to the West ...

When S.F.’s rich and famous lived atop Rincon Hill

By Gary Kamiya

San Francisco’s first fashionable neighborhood was not Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights or Nob Hill. Unlike most of the city’s sandy terrain, it was a wooded promontory covered with shrubbery and ...

Dawn in Gold Rush San Francisco found the settlement awake and hustling. Along its unpaved streets, in a picturesque pageant of the frontier, moved the Chinese, the Mexican, the bearded '49ers.

When the Mission District was home to horse racing

By Gary Kamiya

When the Mission District was home to horse racing The first news account of a horse race in San Francisco appeared on Page 2 of the Californian newspaper on March 15, 1848. The editors deemed this contest ...

This photo of the Topaz, Utah Relocation Center, where many San Mateo Japanese Americans were housed during the war. The photo is from the book "Building a Community: The Story of Japanese Americans in San Mateo County."

Troubles, tensions for Japanese American internees in WWII

By Gary Kamiya

The previous Portals described how in April 1942, 7,800 Bay Area Nikkei — people of Japanese ancestry — were imprisoned in horse stalls and other makeshift shelters at the Tanforan Racetrack in San ...

7,800 imprisoned in San Bruno for just 1 crime: being Japanese

By Gary Kamiya

If it weren’t for a small commemorative rock garden and plaque near the main entrance, there would be no sign of the fact that during the spring and summer of 1942, 7,800 Japanese Americans from San ...

** FILE ** Richard Helms, U.S. Ambassador to Iran, left, speaks with President Nixon, right, in this 1973 file photo at the White House in Washington. Helms, the spymaster who led the CIA through some of its most difficult years and was later fired by President Nixon when he refused to block an FBI probe into the Watergate scandal, died Tuesday night, Oct. 22, 2002. He was 89.(AP Photo/File)

When the CIA ran a LSD sex-house in San Francisco

By Gary Kamiya

Yet from 1955 to 1965, this building was the site of “Operation Midnight Climax” — a top-secret mind-control program in which CIA agents used hookers to lure unsuspecting johns from North Beach bars ...

The passionate 1879 battle over ‘The Passion’

By Gary Kamiya

After a bizarre globe-trotting career that included managing an Australian hotel, traveling to Crimea during the Crimean War, running a ranch in Mendocino, and trying to pull off a land-speculation scheme ...

Headstones from some of the earliest interred have toppled over the decades at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, Calif. on Friday, June 19, 2015. The resting place for over 177,000 souls celebrates its 150th anniversary on Saturday.

Deadly serious: Early SF’s shortage of decent graveyards

By Gary Kamiya

[...] World War II, tens of thousands of bodies were interred in numerous cemeteries and informal burial sites all across town, before they were removed in extremely haphazard fashion. The graveyard at ...

Kilo, a seven-year old Australian cattle dog, tastes the water from Lobos Creek at Baker Beach in San Francisco, Calif. on Wednesday, May 25, 2011. Lobos Creek recently received a letter "F" grade for in non-profit environmental group Heal The Bay's 2011 annual beach report card for its poor water quality and health risks.

Gold Rush S.F.’s water supply switched from barrels to creeks

By Gary Kamiya

Early San Franciscans bought their water from street vendors, who made the rounds with large wooden barrels mounted on mule-drawn carts. [...] most came from springs on the Sausalito ranch of William ...

The shell mound as it appeared before it was razed in the 1920s.

Ran on: 03-25-2005
The shell mound as it appeared before it was razed in the 1920s.

Ran on: 03-25-2005
Emeryville shellmound

How the Bay Area’s first residents lived

By Gary Kamiya

San Francisco’s first permanent inhabitants, a linguistically distinct group of Ohlone Indians known as the Yelamu, settled here around 4,500 years ago, drawn by the food-rich environment on the bay. ...

San Francisco Mission Indians with ceremonial headdresses. (Drawing by L. Choris, 1816)

S.F.’s first residents: Marshlands drew Indians to a barren

By Gary Kamiya

What led the Yelamu to make this barren peninsula their permanent home was the creation of San Francisco Bay. Around 11,000 years ago, the glaciers of the last ice age began melting and sea levels began to ...

Shoppers outside of Mocca on Maiden Lane in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, July 8, 2015. New landlords have forced Mocca to close by the end of next month.

For decades, sex trade thrived on S.F.’s Maiden Lane

By Gary Kamiya

Last week’s Portals described how Union Square evolved in the 19th century from a wasteland of sand dunes to a landscaped public square surrounded by churches and a thriving, diverse residential ...

A historical shot of Union Square shortly after the 1906 earthquake. San Francisco Examiner photo.

When Union Square was a desolate sand dune

By Gary Kamiya

Surrounded by brilliantly lit department stores, swanky hotels and high-end retailers, Union Square is the most intensely urban space in town — San Francisco’s Times Square or Piccadilly Circus. By ...

Carnage collides with cheer at Christmas 100 years ago

By Gary Kamiya

On Christmas Eve 100 years ago, San Francisco was a happy and prosperous city, its streets thronged with shoppers and carolers and its big downtown retail stores doing record business at the end of the ...

Woodward's Gardens was a combination of park, museum, zoo and circus.

City’s top ‘pleasure garden’ created by hotelier who banned

By Gary Kamiya

During the city’s early years, before it had public parks, San Franciscans flocked to privately owned “pleasure gardens” for fresh air, greenery and entertainment. An irresistible combination of ...

S.F.’s old-time pleasure gardens: Parks for a city that had

By Gary Kamiya

During San Francisco’s early years, its most popular destinations for recreational outings were “pleasure gardens.” The pleasure gardens provided oases of greenery, fresh air and entertainment in a ...

CAMPUSNOTES
6/16/06

At UC Berkeley, a statue of the California State Fossil "Smilodon", the Saber Tooth Tiger appears to be trying to claw its way into a construction company's trailer during the building of the new Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies and C.V. Starr East Asian Library. The new facility is slated to open in Fall 2007. The phrase "Ill huff and I'll puff were also written on the trailer near the statue. More info on the center is at http://tiencenter.berkeley.edu/

THIS IS FOR THE "CAMPUSNOTEBOOK" EDUCATION PAGE IN THE 6/18/06 SUNDAY PAPER.

PHOTO: MARK COSTANTINI / SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Ran on: 06-18-2006

Ran on: 06-18-2006

When lethal beasts roamed free in the Bay Area

By Gary Kamiya

For millennia, the Bay Area teemed with enormous beasts, including Columbian mammoths, giant bison, ground sloths, American horses and camels. Last week’s Portals described how these gargantuan animals ...

This skull and tusks of a Columbian Mammoth were on display in 2010 at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco

When Columbian mammoths roamed San Francisco

By Gary Kamiya

[...] for more than 100,000 years, San Francisco was truly a wild kingdom, one traversed by the most awe-inspiring mammals ever to walk the Earth. The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the ...

Aquatic Park visitors walk along the promenade in front of the Maritime Museum in San Francisco, Calif.

How the WPA saved S.F.’s Aquatic Park

By Gary Kamiya

Last week’s Portals described how San Francisco started building it during the Depression, but ran out of money. In 1935, with the project on life support, assistant city engineer Clyde Healy went to ...

This photo taken in 1880 shows Bay Street between Hyde and Larkin In the center foreground is the Montgomery House. The large building in the background is the Pioneer Woolen Mills and the arm of the bay is the West end of Aquatic Park.
Photo ran 3/29/1948, p. 8

Handout

S.F. once treated Aquatic Park as a dumping ground

By Gary Kamiya

After the Gold Rush, some Argonauts willing to trade a long walk into town for a beachfront residence erected two dozen buildings near the shoreline, which at the time was several blocks farther south, ...

A pelican flies near the white cliffs, that Sir Francis Drake noticed on his arrival at Drakes Bay.

Spanish discovered S.F. Bay through misfortune and blunders

By Gary Kamiya

Last week’s Portals told the story of San Francisco Day at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which commemorated two monumental events in the city’s history: its rebirth after the 1906 ...

Aeroplane view of main group of exhibit palaces, Panama-Pacific International Exposition [right panel from Views of the Panama -Pacific International Exhibition in Natural Colors]. c. 1914 Gabriel Moulin; Courtesy California Historical Scoiety CHS2014.1866[b].

San Francisco’s biggest party ever

By Gary Kamiya

Season ticket holders were urged to purchase a separate ticket for the day to support it, and everyone who bought a ticket received a lapel stub reading, “I Paid.” Gov. Hiram Johnson declared the day a ...

San Francisco view, 1878, Currier & Ives, NY. Showing a view of the city from the SE.

Life among the trash: the rise and fall of S.F.’s Dumpville

By Gary Kamiya

The 150 men who lived in Dumpville — they were all men — slept on mattresses made of sacks filled with straw and covered with old coats and torn blankets. Scrap metal brought in a cent a pound, while ...

Big homeless camp today near S.F.’s old Dumpville

By Gary Kamiya

In the 19th century, a shantytown called Dumpville existed just a few blocks to the east, where the stream that used to flow along what is now Division Street trickled through mudflats into Mission Bay. ...

How Mark Twain got fired in San Francisco

By Gary Kamiya

The experience was critical in his development as a writer and a man, but it was also a time when he hit rock bottom. When the former Samuel Clemens rode the stagecoach into San Francisco from Virginia ...

Old adobe Customhouse built in 1835 by the Spanish on the Plaza of the town of Yerba Buena. The Plaza is now Portsmouth Square and the town was soon to be renamed San Francisco.
Ran Sept 6, 1928

Ellis’ saloon in Yerba Buena, the place to get a real stiff

By Gary Kamiya

Ellis’ saloon in Yerba Buena, the place to get a real stiff drink Last week’s Portals related how a saloon and billiard parlor run by a Swiss named Jean-Jacques Vioget was the center of social life in ...

HILLS07.JPG

Watercolor by Jean Jacques Vioget, Master(??) of the Ecuadorian Del Mira.

Bay in 1937 looking to San Francisco and Golden Gate from Yerba Buena Island.

HO

Early S.F. saloon served as raucous epicenter

By Gary Kamiya

Much of what did happen in Yerba Buena took place in one of its first buildings, a ramshackle saloon and billiards parlor built in 1840 by a Swiss named Jean-Jacques Vioget. Vioget’s saloon, on Clay ...

Mission Dolores with the Mansion House next door.
British wanderer Robert Ridley was a singular and comical man -- a great story teller in the 1840s. He ended up running a decrepit tavern next to Mission Dolores, which he whimsically named the Mansion House and was famous for milk punches. His hard-living ways caught up with him and he died at Mission Dolores at age 32.
Date: 1851, filed date: AUG 29, 1929

San Francisco’s eccentricity dates back to Yerba Buena years

By Gary Kamiya

Anyone who wanders the streets of San Francisco has come upon a disproportionate number of people who do not conform to societal norms. Recent years have featured such oddballs as the “12 Galaxies” ...

1918 Influenza epidemic
Oakland Civic Auditorium converted to a hospital in response to the spread of the flu

Credit: Oakland Public Library

A city of masks: When the flu tore through San Francisco

By Gary Kamiya

Everyone who lived in or visited town was required to cover his or her mouth and nose in public. The streets of the city looked like they were full of bank robbers, surgeons, attendees at a Venetian ball ...

Lottery enabled France to get rid of thousands

By Gary Kamiya

Last week’s Portals described how the French government, in a time of political and economic crisis, saw the discovery of gold in California as an opportunity to get rid of undesirables. In 1850, it ...

A golden opportunity for France’s undesirables

By Gary Kamiya

On Feb. 28, 1852, a ship from Le Havre sailed through the Golden Gate, rounded Clark’s Point at what is now Broadway and Battery and unloaded 200 specimens of the finest flotsam and jetsam of France, ...

V-J Day celebration in San Francisco ..August 14-15 1945 End of World War II, Japan surrenders

S.F. whitewash covered up ‘peace riots’ at end of WWII

By Gary Kamiya

A huge mob mostly composed of drunken sailors embarked on a three-night celebration that degenerated into an orgy of vandalism and worse. When it was over, 13 people were dead, more than 1,000 were ...

V-J Day celebration in San Francisco ..August 14-15 1945 End of World War II, Japan surrenders Men standing on top of a bus

‘Peace Riots’ left trail of death at end of WWII in S.F.

By Gary Kamiya

The news at 4 p.m. Pacific time that Tuesday opened the floodgates to probably the greatest explosion of mass euphoria in American history. From Seattle to New Orleans, Minnesota to Maine, Americans let ...

How a Mime Troupe arrest sparked Bill Graham’s promoting career

By Gary Kamiya

Fifty years ago this weekend, police prevented the San Francisco Mime Troupe from performing a play in Lafayette Park, arresting the company’s founder as 1,000 people jeered. The dramatic encounter ...

Gray-eyed Man of Destiny met fate in Central American invasions

By Gary Kamiya

Editors today are generally normal, respectable citizens, who become violent only when repeatedly forced to clean up dangling participles or run-on sentences. But in San Francisco’s ...

Eating out was hot even in the Gold Rush

By Gary Kamiya

[...] there are more than a few parallels between the prospectors who drove the restaurant craze back then and the new fortune-seekers who are largely responsible for our current feeding frenzy. In 1849, ...

Boss Abe Ruef and S.F. political machine brought down

By Gary Kamiya

Schmitz was a two-term mayor, handsome and popular, who had been handpicked for the job by “Boss” Ruef. Together they controlled the Board of Supervisors and every other arm of government, giving them ...

S.F. corruption machine humming along before, after 1906 quake

By Gary Kamiya

The election was a triumph for the handsome, bearded violinist and his Union Labor Party, but the real winner was the city’s political boss and power behind the throne, Abe Ruef. Alarmed, Ruef called the ...

S.F. ‘Boss’ Abe Ruef took unusual route to power

By Gary Kamiya

To understand the rise and fall of “Boss” Ruef, “Handsome Gene” Schmitz and their cronies, one first has to understand the peculiar way that many American cities functioned from the post-Civil War ...

Psychedelic rock era opens with gig at Wild West saloon

By Gary Kamiya

Psychedelic rock era opens with gig at Wild West saloon Fifty years ago this month, an unknown San Francisco rock group called the Charlatans played at the opening of a saloon in Virginia City, Nev., ...

Miners near French Corral in Nevada County, California, located in the Sierra Nevada, use water hoses to wash gold away in this picture dated circa 1866. A new report from the San Francisco Estuary Institute shows the huge quantity of mining sediments that has been moving through San Francisco Bay since the Gold Rush has been depleted, abruptly leading to a bay that is significantly clearer.

The man who hated San Francisco

By Gary Kamiya

Gold Rush San Francisco had its detractors. Visitors’ letters routinely featured complaints about its immorality, roughness, weather and expense. But no one bashed the city more enthusiastically than a ...

Chronicle front page, January 26, 1917 headline refers to confrontation between San Francisco prostitutes and the Rev. Paul Smith of the Central Methodist Church.

Revolt of the hookers: How prostitutes stared down a priest

By Gary Kamiya

The Chronicle’s front page of Jan. 26, 1917, screamed: “ ‘What of Us?’ Ask Magdalenes Who Crowd Church.” Beneath the headline, readers were treated to exhaustive coverage of one of the most ...

San Francisco's exuberant mayor, "Sunny Jim" Rolph, was a man of many guises. Chronicle Archive

Preacher’s call for day of reckoning for ladies of the evening

By Gary Kamiya

On January 25, 1917, 300 San Francisco prostitutes marched to the Central Methodist Church at O’Farrell and Leavenworth, where they got into a heated exchange with the church’s minister, who was trying ...

Steep S.F. hills overcome with Hallidie’s cable car

By Gary Kamiya

Nob Hill and Russian Hill were so steep and sandy that it was difficult to climb them on foot and impossible with horses. Even after the dunes on Market Street were removed and the small downtown area ...

Yosemite Valley, in Yosemite National Park across the Merced River

Photo dated 04/14/1966

Photo courtesy of National Park Service

Photo ran 3/04/1990, P. 58, p. F6

Yosemite Indians, white ally fell victim to white vigilantes

By Gary Kamiya

In December 1850, hostilities broke out between the Indians who inhabited the foothills near Yosemite and the white miners and settlers who had encroached on their lands. To pacify the Indians and force ...

A mountain man’s flawed attempt at peace with California

By Gary Kamiya

A mountain man’s flawed attempt at peace with California Indians San Franciscans in the crazy Gold Rush year of 1850 were used to unusual sights, but even they gaped at the party that marched down ...

People walk past the Roald Amundsen monument near Beach Chalet in San Francisco. The Norwegian explorer’s ship, the Gjoa, was beached in S.F. for more than 60 years. It is now gone and the lone remaining sign of its presence is the 10-foot-tall granite monument.

S.F. welcomed 1st Northwest Passage sailor but mistreated sloop

By Gary Kamiya

S.F. welcomed 1st Northwest Passage sailor but mistreated sloop Just north of San Francisco’s Beach Chalet, across the Great Highway from Ocean Beach, stands a 10-foot-tall granite pillar with a bronze ...

A bird's eye view map of San Francisco in 1873.

African American witness stands his ground in 1873 murder trial

By Gary Kamiya

Around 9 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1873, Ned Allen, the flamboyant proprietor of a notorious Barbary Coast dive called the Bull Run, was stabbed to death after getting into an altercation with a man he was trying to ...

Allure of the old Barbary Coast: bloodshed, sordid sex for hire

By Gary Kamiya

“Women, the very lowest and most abandoned of their class, haunted the place by night, and hideous noises and drunken revelry made the place a synonym of all that is low and vile,” The Chronicle wrote. ...

U.S.S. Oregon built at the Union Iron Works (now Bethlehem Steel Co) in San Francisco and delivered July 1896,
Famous battleship of the Spanish-American War

Handout

How S.F.-built warship’s journey sparked Panama Canal fervor

By Gary Kamiya

The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, a civic triumph whose centennial is being marked this year, celebrated two signature achievements of the 20th century — San Francisco’s recovery ...

Chimney Rock is seen on the eastern tip of the Point Reyes peninsula during a cruise recreating explorer Sir Francis Drake's arrival at Drakes Bay in Point Reyes, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 11, 2009.

What might have been when Europeans first met California Indians

By Gary Kamiya

In 1565, a Spanish treasure ship called the Manila galleon began making an annual voyage between Mexico and the Philippines. Many of the ships’ crew members died of scurvy, and British privateers like ...

Anger arising from S.F.’s 1st murder case helped topple

By Gary Kamiya

Singularly horrific, shrouded in mystery, it involved some of the most famous Californios — native Californians of Hispanic descent — and helped ignite political passions that toppled the Mexican ...

Men sail home at the end of a day of construction work on the original Bay Bridge in 1935.

Mighty Bay Bridge endures as engineering marvel

By Gary Kamiya

For months, workers have been dismantling the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, the almost 2-mile-long stretch that runs from Yerba Buena Island to Oakland. In February, Caltrans announced that it was ...

Poet Bill Margolis posts
a poem against police brutality as a result of Officer William Bigarani’s notorious tormenting
of the Beatniks.

Beatniks’ battle with S.F. police goes national with poems

By Gary Kamiya

In 1959, the long-simmering fight between the North Beach beats and a particularly zealous San Francisco police officer went national. Officer William Bigarani, who made up half of the Police ...

the Co-Existence Bagel shop
UPI photo
04/27/1958

Also ran 2/19/1982

Police Officer William Bigarani came down hard on beatniks

By Gary Kamiya

Just before 2 a.m. on Oct. 21, 1958, a San Francisco police officer named William Bigarani accosted a 20-year-old Berkeley resident and former college student named Wendy Murphy as she tried to enter the ...

Bare majority: victory for nude art in unusual election

By Gary Kamiya

There have been many odd votes in San Francisco history, but none stranger than the Great Nude Vote of 1880 — when thousands of aroused citizens pored over a painting of a naked woman, then voted on ...

The Colombo Market arch in Sidney Walton Square Park at the Golden Gateway development

Photo shot 06/14/1965

Odd arch is last remnant of bustling produce market built in 1874

By Gary Kamiya

[...] this mysterious arch is the sole survivor of one of the most bustling, beloved and smelly institutions in San Francisco’s history: the Colombo Market. The Genoese, sharp dealers who came from a ...

Cheating, violence in the cards at Gold Rush’s gambling dens

By Gary Kamiya

The gambling dens of Gold Rush San Francisco brought together heavily armed men, lots of alcohol, high-stakes games of chance and the occasional cheater. “And from each gambling hall the losers would ...

What was Gold Rush-era S.F.’s favorite pastime? Place bets

By Gary Kamiya

Gambling was the amusement, the grand occupation of many classes … the life and soul of the place,” wrote Frank Soule, John H. Gihon and James Nisbet in the 1855 book “The Annals of San Francisco. In ...

Farallone Islands

Photo taken 04/24/1954

The centuries of treasure ships that failed to notice S.F. Bay

By Gary Kamiya

Every week, ships loaded with Chinese appliances, electronics, furniture, clothing and other goods steam past the Farallon Islands on their way to San Francisco Bay. [...] amazingly, ships laden with goods ...

The Crystal Palace Salt Water Baths, later known as the Crystal Plunge, at 775 Lombard St., was home to a swim instructor who started a women’s swimming team in 1926 and coached Olympian Ann Curtis.

Odd apartments mark pool site where famed female swimmer trained

By Gary Kamiya

Odd apartments mark pool site where famed female swimmer trained The 700 block of Lombard, between Mason and Taylor and just across Columbus from the new North Beach library, is a pleasantly unassuming ...

San Francisco’s weirdest murder case

By Gary Kamiya

[...] the morning after Mrs. Bowers’ death, the coroner received an unsigned letter hinting that her untimely demise might not have been of natural causes. The inquest was held at the Arcade House on ...

When a wild night on the town meant Chinatown

By Gary Kamiya

Last week’s Portals described how an ambitious entrepreneur named Charlie Low opened a nightclub just outside Chinatown with the irresistible name Forbidden City. Newspapers and magazines, including ...

circa 1955: Chinese dancers Mae Tai Sing and Tony Wing perform an elaborate floor show at Forbidden City, a nightclub in Chinatown, San Francisco. (Photo by Orlando /Three Lions/Getty Images)

Forbidden City ushered in golden age of Chinatown nightclubs

By Gary Kamiya

In the days before the Empress of China closed forever on New Year’s Eve, its retro sixth-floor bar was packed with people soaking in its revelatory views of Chinatown, the weary tuxedoed waiters and ...

Mare Island’s key place amid the tides of history

By Gary Kamiya

Alcatraz was a U.S. military base before it was a prison, Nike missiles once bristled on Angel Island, and Treasure Island was a naval base for decades before it was sold to San Francisco in 2009. [...] ...

The ghost town of Drawbridge on Station island located on the southern end of San Francisco Bay within the city limits of Fremont
( Shipbuilder Billy Robinson's house
Photo shot 6/17/1085
Photo ran 08/10/1985, P. 11

Bay Area’s only ghost town, Drawbridge, is on an island

By Gary Kamiya

Located at the sluggish southern end of the bay within the city limits of Fremont, Station Island was uninhabited until 1876, when the Southern Pacific Coast Railroad built a narrow-gauge line through it. ...

Seeking gold, the 49ers found a sad, sodden S.F.

By Gary Kamiya

San Franciscans may be running out of dry socks during this December of welcome if relentless rain. The afternoon westerlies, unchecked by buildings or trees, whipped through the sand that covered much of ...

S.F. founder’s rudeness led to disgrace, bloody end

By Gary Kamiya

In last week’s Portals, we told the story of a brewing feud between Capt. Fernando Rivera y Moncada, the first non-Indian to explore San Francisco and the military governor of California, and Lt. Col. ...

1st non-Indian visitor to S.F. largely lost in the fog of history

By Gary Kamiya

In the rigid racial and class hierarchy that prevailed in the New World colonies, Criollos ranked beneath the Spanish-born Peninsulares in status. After helping to establish Spanish outposts at San Diego ...

The steam ferry boat Eureka heads back to San Francisco and the Hyde Street Pier Photo ran 05/17/1990, P. A7

When the flow of traffic was all aboard the ferries

By Gary Kamiya

Each was more than 400 feet long and capable of carrying an entire passenger train, including the locomotive, in four parallel lines on its decks. Most were much shorter, including a line called the Six ...

When bombings menaced a North Beach church

By Gary Kamiya

Hundreds of neighbors in their nightclothes rushed to the scene, along with every available police officer. A police officer was stationed at the church, but was taken by surprise and was unable to catch ...

After long legal fight, life of Black Cat Cafe comes to an end

By Gary Kamiya

Last week’s Portals told the story of how the second incarnation of the Black Cat Cafe became famous after World War II for its daring, edgy atmosphere. From the days of the old Barbary Coast — which ...

The Black Cat Cafe on Montgomery Street, with a reputation as a daring, very San Francisco place to go, attracted a wide range of clientele and tourists.

Drag act turned Black Cat Cafe into gay bar in 2nd life

By Gary Kamiya

Twelve years later, it reopened across town — and this incarnation would become a legendary watering hole and the stage for one of the city’s most unforgettable characters, Jose Sarria. The joint was ...

Boisterous dive’s saga is the story of S.F.’s seamy side

By Gary Kamiya

In 1913, an advertisement in The Chronicle touted the joint’s “spirited corps of feminine beauty” and said it was “fast becoming the most popular entertainment and eating resort in bohemia.” ...

Old railroad tracks from the State Belt Line remain along the waterfront route, as shown here on Green Street. The sturdy little line didn’t close until 1993.

Tiny railroad pulled its weight on S.F.’s waterfront

By Gary Kamiya

Because the all-powerful Southern Pacific controlled the area south of the Ferry Building, it was only in 1910, when reforming politicians challenged the “octopus,” that the State Belt began running ...

Explorer Cabrillo made his name with bold, bloody exploits

By Gary Kamiya

Long stretches of Highway 1, one of the most scenic roads in the nation, are named after the Spanish explorer, as are schools, ships and streets, including one in San Francisco. The Spaniards stopped at a ...

Rufus Porter's 'Aerial Transport' dirigible airship, expected to fly from New York to the gold country in seven days in 1849.

Photo ran 09/20/1970
Handouthandou

Imagination took flight with airship experimentation in S.F.

By Gary Kamiya

Getting to the gold fields was difficult, dangerous and time-consuming, so in 1849, inventor Rufus Porter, the founder and first editor of Scientific American, proposed an alternative: a huge “aerial ...

Archaeologist Eric Brandan Blind excavates the walls of the Presidio Officers’ Club in June 2005.

Presidio’s colorful history preserved at Officers’ Club

By Gary Kamiya

Today, thanks to archaeological excavations taking place near the rehabilitated Presidio Officers’ Club, you can see a piece of San Francisco history that dates back to the year Napoleon was exiled for ...

'Hoodlums’ a 'distinctive San Francisco product’ of the 1870s

By Gary Kamiya

Almost a century before the phenomenon of the “juvenile delinquent” alarmed 1950s America, San Francisco was plagued by its own homegrown crop of youthful miscreants, one as authentically San Franciscan ...

Dupont Avenue in Chinatown in San Francisco, 1890s. The first victim of the plague in San Francisco died on this street.

S.F. leaders denied, concealed major plague epidemics

Gary Kamiya

Bubonic plague is one of the most terrifying and lethal diseases in human history. Its most infamous outbreak took place in the 14th century, when the Black Death ravaged the entire world. In Europe, it's ...

Ishi, 'last wild Indian,' embraced adventure of life in S.F.

Gary Kamiya

Ishi spent decades hiding out from white settlers' genocidal campaign against California Indians. Then he spent five years as an object of civilization's fascination with his vanished way of life. Last ...

Ishi making a wood harpoon, Deer Creek, 1914.

Ishi, considered the last aboriginal California Indian, in Tehama County, in 1914. He was found near Oroville in 1911 and taken in by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber.

Ishi, last 'wild' Indian, found refuge in S.F.

Gary Kamiya

For 4 1/2 years, a unique saga played out on San Francisco's Parnassus Avenue. On that lofty street at the base of Mount Sutro, overlooking Golden Gate Park, Marin and the Farallon Islands, the last "wild" ...

Frederick Freeman a beacon during S.F.'s darkest hour in 1906

Gary Kamiya

There have been many heroes in the annals of San Francisco, from the faculty wives who spearheaded the Save the Bay movement to the nurses and doctors on Ward 5B at San Francisco General Hospital who ...

Chinatown school was at center of anti-Japanese crusade in S.F.

Gary Kamiya

Few people know that in its earliest incarnation, it was the focus of a racist school segregation law that led to a diplomatic crisis so serious that President Theodore Roosevelt was forced to intervene. ...

Ayala Cove on Angel Island ( also known as Hospital Cove)

Photo ran 07/17/1966 , page 4

Cursed ship San Carlos' luck turns: 1st to sail into S.F. Bay

Gary Kamiya

The San Carlos had seemed cursed from its first voyage in 1768, when it left San Blas, north of present-day Puerto Vallarta, bound for La Paz at the tip of Baja California. The voyage across the Sea of ...

The Beatles perform at Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966.

By the Candlestick concert, the Beatles detested touring

Gary Kamiya

On Aug. 29, 1966, the Beatles appeared at Candlestick Park - the final stop not just on the group's three-continent tour, but in their life as a touring band. [...] the four Beatles were among the most ...

This is a photo of "Fort Gunnybags," headquarters of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856. It was on Sacramento street between Davis and Front streets. It is one of many historic photos on exhibit at 1 Sacramento street.

1856 vigilantes changed corrupt political system

Gary Kamiya

The vigilantes who seized control of San Francisco in 1856 had more on their minds than exacting street justice - they wanted to change the city's entire corrupt political system. The Second Committee of ...

Demagogue editor fired up readers, revolutionaries

Gary Kamiya

Enraged at the big financiers whom he blamed for his ruin, he started a newspaper, the Evening Bulletin, that became the most ferociously outspoken daily in the city. King was humorless and self-righteous, ...

Amid old S.F. newspaper wars, real blood was shed

Gary Kamiya

[...] the 19-year-old "boy editor" of the Star, Edward Kemble, soon returned to San Francisco with blistered feet, a sore back and a renewed certainty that his career lay in newspapers, not standing in a ...

The discovery of gold was the biggest story ever to hit California, but it wasn't good news for California's first two newspapers.

Gold Rush stopped the S.F. press as editors fled to get rich

Gary Kamiya

First they nearly missed the story altogether. Semple was a 6-foot-4, buckskin-clad dentist, doctor, printer and adventurer who had played a major role in the Bear Flag revolt two months earlier. Colton ...

Daniel Boone Arena. Golden Gate Park. California Midwinter International Exposition, San Francisco, 1894

Photo courtesy of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Wonders of world, 1 death part of 1894 exposition

Gary Kamiya

The nabobs in their ludicrously ornate mansions atop Nob Hill were symbols of Gilded Age excess, while at the bottom of the hill murderous tongs ran riot in Chinatown and the Barbary Coast was a synonym for ...

The case of Laura Fair, San Francisco 1870

Gary Kamiya

On a chilly evening in 1870, an attractive 33-year-old blond woman, her face and body obscured by a veil and a cloak, hurried through the decks of a San Francisco-bound ferry, looking for her prey. The ...

Spanish street names upset Sunset, Richmond residents

Gary Kamiya

In 1909, outraged residents of the Richmond and Sunset districts staged a public protest. What set off the good people of western San Francisco was not a tax increase, a zoning change or a political ...

Footprints of history on the streets of S.F.

Gary Kamiya

San Francisco has 2,657 named streets, from A Street to Zoo Road, from the celestial Polaris Way to the poetic Recycling Center Access Road. Hidden behind these names is a cornucopia of fascinating ...

The Jeremiah O'Brien entering the English Channel

The Jeremiah O'Brien travelled from San Francisco to Europe in 1994 to join the 50th anniversary ceremonies for D-Day

Photo credit the Royal Navy

D-Day invasion's final active ship houses history in S.F.

Gary Kamiya

Seventy years ago, the largest armada in history delivered U.S.., British and Canadian troops onto the beaches of Normandy to push the Nazis out of France. Just one ship among the 5,000 that took part in ...

Notorious Lola Montez kept the men in S.F. panting

Gary Kamiya

[...] her erotic exploits, political intrigues, violent temper and extraordinary beauty had made headlines throughout the world. Who became the lover of the famous virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt? Who moved ...

S.F.'s early stages: how theater tradition got its start

Gary Kamiya

Starved for entertainment of any kind, yearning in equal parts for high culture and female flesh, early San Francisco's mostly male audiences devoured a rich and motley diet of Shakespeare, minstrel shows, ...

Miscarriage of justice sends 2 innocent men to prison

Gary Kamiya

On a sultry July afternoon in 1916, as thousands of flag-waving San Franciscans clogged Market Street for a "Preparedness Day" parade to support war readiness, an explosion killed 10 people and set in ...

Prostitutes from France charmed S.F. during Gold Rush

Gary Kamiya

Most of the women who arrived early on in the chaotic instant city were practitioners of the world's oldest profession, a fact commemorated in a famous bit of doggerel: The miners came in '49, the whores in ...

Promoter hit it rich in boxing, awed world with speed travel

Gary Kamiya

Coffroth was a promoter who built his open-air arenas just across the city line - one of them made Colma famous for something besides dead people - and helped put boxing on the silver screen. [...] Sunny ...

Great Diamond Hoax of 1871 has lingering mystery

Gary Kamiya

Before they left, they made Roberts promise not to say anything about their discovery until they could investigate further. [...] began the Great Diamond Hoax. The Comstock Lode in Nevada was pumping out ...

Illustration of Bishop Vladimir, lay name Vasily Sokolovsky, 1890's leader of Russian Orthodox church in San Francisco.

S.F.'s 19th century Russian battle over bigamy, child abuse

Gary Kamiya

For four years in the late 19th century, a lurid controversy racked the small Russian community of San Francisco - one that featured a pair of strong-willed antagonists hurling accusations of bigamy, arson, ...

Audacious 1946 escape attempt left Alcatraz bloodstained

Gary Kamiya

[...] from the locations of the guard towers to the design of the cell blocks, the guard-inmate ratio, and the practice of counting inmates every half hour, everything about the prison made breaking out ...

The first Cliff House was a modest structure that opened in 1863. On Christmas Day, 1894, a fire destroyed the building.

S.F.'s spectacular Cliff House has a turbulent past

Gary Kamiya

Today's Portals relates the rollicking tale of the first Cliff House - a clapboard structure built by real estate tycoon Charles Butler in 1863. Rough tripThat was the difficulty of the 6-mile ride from ...

Black Bart: Man of culture led secret life of crime

Gary Kamiya

In the 1870s and 1880s, a certain well-spoken, finely groomed man was a regular fixture in respectable San Francisco society. Unfailingly polite and with a droll sense of humor, the prosperous mine owner ...

Travelers in 1939 board a Key System train inside the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco.

How ambitious Key transit network reached the end of the line

Gary Kamiya

By offering a mass-transit connection to San Francisco - highlighted by a 16,000-foot-long pier that ran from the Oakland waterfront almost to Yerba Buena Island - the Key System played a major role in the ...

How Asbury Harpending wound up accused of high treason

Gary Kamiya

Precocious and large for his age, he dropped out of college at 15 and ran away to join a "filibustering" expedition to Nicaragua led by a former San Francisco newspaper editor named William Walker. A ...

Pioneer Park Observatory. Showing time Ball, maintained by U.S. Hydrographic Office. Circa, 1884.

19th century sport, big in old S.F., was hurting for fans

Gary Kamiya

The sport was mounted broadsword combat, and it did not comply with SPCA guidelines for the treatment of animals, NFL concussion protocols or any other safety regulations. Ross - a superb specimen who had ...

In page of S.F. history, literary carnival created a frenzy

Gary Kamiya

Of all the mass entertainment ever put on in San Francisco, the most memorable may have been the Authors' Carnival of October 1879 - a kind of combination literary Academy Awards, tableau vivant, male and ...

Quarrymen hit few obstacles to blowing up hills around S.F.

Gary Kamiya

Perched on the sheer eastern face of Telegraph Hill, with a majestic view of the Bay Bridge, the Ferry Building and downtown, Calhoun Terrace is one of the most dramatic streets in San Francisco. [...] few ...

Celebrated true tale of love and tragedy in early S.F.

Gary Kamiya

The most star-crossed and mythical of all San Francisco love affairs took place during the Spanish years, when the only structures were a handful of adobe huts in the Presidio and a cluster of buildings ...

How S.F.'s cable cars were saved after an uphill battle

Gary Kamiya

An East Coast shipping tycoon who had been elected on a platform of modern efficiency and "progress," Lapham had "all the sentiment of a Pismo clam," as Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg wrote in the 1951 book ...

How S.F.'s cable cars rose to become emblem of the city

Gary Kamiya

A San Franciscan of the late 19th century could, with a few line changes, ride from the Ferry Building to the bottom of Diamond Heights, from the edge of the Presidio to 24th Street and Potrero, from ...

S.F. real estate deals were truly underwater in the 1800s

Gary Kamiya

San Francisco's real estate wars may be vicious now, but they're nothing compared to what went on along the waterfront during the Gold Rush. Forget the Ellis Act and owner move-ins - in those days, ...

Wharf debt turns lumber baron into embezzler

Gary Kamiya

Meiggs' Wharf soon became popular, both as a place for ships to berth and as a promenade and place of amusement for San Franciscans. The overextended Meiggs, who had built streets to reach his wharf and ...

1850s San Francisco rallied to free a slave

Gary Kamiya

Many of the city's 1,000 or so African Americans - merchants, cooks, barbers, deckhands and laborers - headed down to the Market Street and Vallejo Street piers, where two steamers were ready to weigh ...

KIDS 1/C/26JUL96/DD/HO
View of San Francisco, Taken from Telegraph Hill, 1850.
Credit: California Historical Society

No summer of love in S.F.'s vigilante days

Gary Kamiya

In one of the odder tours of duty in U.S. military history, the First Regiment of New York Volunteers, commanded by Col. J.D. Stevenson, was sent in 1846 via Cape Horn to fight in the Mexican War, with the ...

Candlestick Park.
Largest crowd ever for Giants/Braves series, 50,205.
Photo was taken June 19, 1983.

Remembering Candlestick fondly is a breeze

Gary Kamiya

On Monday the 49ers will play their last regular season game at Candlestick Park, and sometime in 2014 the old stadium will be blown up. For the fans who watched Willie Mays patrol center field, the ...

"The menaced privilege of liberty and loving San Francisco - a free lunch counter on the cocktail route." Originally published August 1, 1896.

Trail raised the bar for tipplers in old S.F.

Gary Kamiya

The Route's all-male ranks of regulars included respectable businessmen and politicians, as well as a miscellaneous crew of drink cadgers, skirt chasers and opportunistic gourmands known as "free-lunch ...

Pearl Harbor injured arrive in S.F. on Christmas Day

Gary Kamiya

On board the largest luxury liner built in the U.S., the President Coolidge - now painted dark blue - and a smaller Army transport were 180 men who had been badly wounded at Pearl Harbor, as well as women ...

People walk past the statue of Thomas Starr King, a 19th century Unitarian minister, in Golden Gate Park, Tuesday November 26, 2013, in San Francisco, Calif.

Pre-Batkid, Starr King rallied S.F. for a cause

Gary Kamiya

Two weeks ago, people around the world were touched when San Franciscans came together to make a dream come true for a little boy being treated for leukemia. But 150 years before Batkid-mania, the city by ...

Yerba Buena Island: goats, bull, squatters and king

Gary Kamiya

Native remnants, including worked bone and stone objects and human remains, have been discovered on Yerba Buena's northeast corner. According to California historian John Hittell, Mexican Gov. Juan ...

Limits of free speech tested at Jazz Workshop

Gary Kamiya

Bruce, 35, was a rising star in what Time magazine dubbed "sick comedy" - "social criticism liberally laced with cyanide," further distinguished by "a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the ...

Morning traffic passes by the Old Ship Saloon on the corner of Battery and Pacific in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday, Nov. 8, 2013.

Waterfront spot where the drinks had a brutal chaser

Gary Kamiya

Today the Embarcadero is a lively promenade, filled with locals and tourists enjoying the bay vistas. For the next year or two, he would labor under harsh conditions, eating bad food, protected by no laws ...

274 Shipley st is seen in morning light, Calif. on Friday, Nov. 1, 2013.

Half-buried buildings a weird relic of 1906 quake

Gary Kamiya

More than 3,000 people were killed, 28,188 buildings destroyed and 522 blocks leveled in the 4.7-square-mile burned area - one twice as large as that consumed by the great Chicago fire of 1871. South of ...

Barbary Coast joint hosted jazz pioneer

Gary Kamiya

For a few months in 1919, visitors to San Francisco's Barbary Coast who wandered into a cellar nightclub called the Jupiter might have seen a slender, elegantly dressed piano player leading a 10-piece ...

1895 murders - was Mission District church cursed?

Gary Kamiya

The case entered the public eye via a short item in The Chronicle on April 10, 1895. The clean-cut young man acknowledged riding with Dumont, but said he had gotten off after a short ride and hadn't seen ...

The Call Building was built in 1898 and survived the 1906 earthquake, only to be remodeled in 1938 with all the cool stuff on top taken off Credit must read "Courtesy San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library"

The S.F. press of old - newsrooms gone wild

Gary Kamiya

Many of the innumerable pieces in each eight-page issue of the Call - a typical front page might contain 80 stories - were dedicated to holding up to public contempt men who misbehaved toward women. The ...

Baseball fans during opeaning game at Seals Stadium. (Photo by Jon Brenneis//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

S.F. has had a run of eccentric ballparks

Gary Kamiya

Soon after the last 49ers game, demolition crews will place charges throughout the stadium, someone will push a button and the great concrete bowl off Jamestown Avenue will implode, an arena that produced ...

This is a generic illustration of the historic Juan Bautista de Anza National Historical Trail which recognizes the 18th century route taken by Anza and his military and settlers party of discovery from Sonora, Mexico to CaliforniaÕs Bay Area. The trail promotes the preservation of, public access to and enjoyment and appreciation of historic and cultural resources and associated outdoor areas related to the Anza expedition, its descendants and the American Indians who allowed them passage. NPS headquarters for this is in Oakland, CA.

Mountain Lake brims with historical import

Gary Kamiya

The underground water that feeds Mountain Lake is also the source of the city's lone remaining free-flowing stream, Lobos Creek, which meanders through a beautifully restored meadow and then past Sea Cliff ...

Alfredo Capobianco and Family Symbolically Sketched / Palazzo del Capobianco 1937, ink on rag paper, 25 x 38" by A.J. Rizzoli

Artist's strange work gets viewing in Venice

Gary Kamiya

There's nothing on the outside that helps passersby know how the old owner of 1668 Alabama, A.G. Rizzoli, created one of the most remarkable alternate universes of the 20th century. Rizzoli made exquisite, ...

Historic tails of S.F. denizens Bummer and Lazarus

Gary Kamiya

Dogs roam happily all over the city, from the elegant George Sterling Park on Russian Hill, to the rugged cliffs of Fort Funston, to the lagoon at Crissy Field, to the endearingly irregular rectangle of ...

Location: Lyon Street, Marina district, S.F.
Site: Lyon Street steps

Juana Briones - San Francisco's founding mother

Gary Kamiya

All day long, joggers huff and puff up these steps, which feature a spectacular view of the Palace of Fine Arts and the bay. At the bottom of the steps, there is an odd indentation in the adjoining ...

The '39 world's fair: an island of joyous excess

Gary Kamiya

Treasure Island was built to celebrate the opening of the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, both completed during the depth of the Depression, and to show the world that San Francisco was vibrant ...

One can approach the Prayerbook Cross from a path off John F. Kennedy Drive Thursday August 8, 2013. The 57 foot high Celtic cross called Prayerbook Cross is one of the few surviving relics of the Midwinter Exposition of 1894. It stands next to the top of Rainbow Falls in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

How Sir Francis Drake sailed into West Marin

Gary Kamiya

Despite its 57-foot height, the Prayerbook Cross is unobtrusive, a quality that may have spared the city a lawsuit for violating the separation of church and state like the one that forced the sale of the ...

UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1993: Fossils - Detail of head and shoulders of a Megatherium skeleton. From Southern America. (Photo By DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini/Getty Images)

Portals of the past: where mammoths roamed

Gary Kamiya

A frantic dig In 1983, workers building the foundation for the Pansini Building, on the south side of Pacific a few yards east of Columbus, found fossilized bones in dark clay soil, 15 feet below street ...

Portals: 1855 South Park party got way too hearty

Gary Kamiya

In 1959, a little book titled "Around the World in San Francisco" featured alphabetical entries on no less than 66 ethnic, racial and religious groups, including Estonian, Gypsy and "Negro." The city's ...

The last of Carville at the Beach on the East side of 48th Ave. near Jade St. on 1372-48th Ave. Photo taken Feb. 1925.

From S.F.'s past: a crazy car colony in the dunes

Gary Kamiya

For 20 years or so, a motley collection of old retired wooden horse cars and cable cars, whose owners had acquired them dirt-cheap and repurposed them into houses in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways, ...

Although the barber shop is no longer there, this is the location along st that Chinatown Boss "Little Pete" was murdered at on January 23rd 1897. Thursday, July 11, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif.

Saga and assassination of Chinatown's 'Little Pete'

Gary Kamiya

On the south side of Washington Street, just above Waverly Place and directly across from Ross Alley in the heart of Chinatown, stands a four-story brick building whose ground floor is now occupied by the ...

A man crosses Montgomery Street where it intersects Jackson Street in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday, July 5, 2013. A small wooden footbridge once stood where the intersection now is, providing a crossing over a small lagoon for inhabitants during the Gold Rush era.

1st S.F. civic improvement: Yerba Buena footbridge

Gary Kamiya

The corner of Jackson and Montgomery falls within the Jackson Square Historic District, a remarkable oasis containing some of the only Gold Rush-era commercial buildings to survive the 1906 fire. In the ...

The old Mile Rocks Lighthouse off the Land's End on Thursday, June 27, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif. The lighthouse is no longer present but its base remains and a helicopter pad resides on top of it.

Mile Rocks a reminder of tower, tragedies

Gary Kamiya

Mile Rocks today are marked by a squat, utilitarian tower that houses an automated light and serves as an emergency helicopter pad. In 1889, the officials who headed the civilian organization that became ...

The sprawling La Galleria condominiums on the corner of Bush and Taylor streets in downtown San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday June 20, 2013. Once the site of an infamous raid at the gay nightclub Tay-Bush Inn. The raid was pivotal point in the history of gay San Francisco.

1961 police raid pivotal for gay rights in S.F.

Gary Kamiya

The impersonality of this sprawling structure makes it hard to imagine that more than 50 years ago a small, rollicking gay club called the Tay-Bush Inn stood here - or that it was the site of one of the ...

Undated picture of two muzzle-loading dueling pistols believed to be used in the duel between Senator David Broderick and Judge David Terry in San Francisco on Sept. 13, 1859.

Unpretentious spot with a gory history

Gary Kamiya

Down a little dead-end street, near an unexpected gated community and just beyond a forlorn picnic area, there's a small ravine. Drawn by gold fever to San Francisco in 1849, shrewd and ambitious, he ...

Digging bodies out of the ruins, Sixth and Howard Sts., San Francisco, California after the 1906 earthquake.

Sixth and Howard, where hundreds died

Gary Kamiya

Plans are afoot to raze the 104-year-old Hugo Hotel next year and replace it with a nine-story apartment complex featuring 67 units of affordable housing. In the early 20th century, the South of Market ...

The night vigilantes took over old S.F.

Gary Kamiya

[...] one June evening during the Gold Rush, a desperate aquatic chase took place near this spot, the consequences of which shook the city to its foundations. From there he planned to row to Clark's Point, ...

In the Farallones, egg wars once broke out

Gary Kamiya

Barren, precipitous - their highest point is 348-foot Tower Hill - haunted by great white sharks and uninhabited except for a handful of researchers, they are probably the most godforsaken piece of real ...

The former George's Log Cabin sits precisely on the San Francisco-San Mateo County boarder on Thursday, May 16, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif.

Where carousing crossed the line: a history

Gary Kamiya

The reason carefree patrons could order triple shots of Kessler at 3 a.m. while flipping off the police, state alcohol regulators, their spouses and anyone else who disapproved was simple: In addition to ...

The violet facade of the Victorian at 1712 Fillmore Street is seen on Thursday, May 2, 2013.

S.F. building escaped rampant demolition

Gary Kamiya

[...] the 1906 earthquake and fire - the first of three cataclysmic events to hit the neighborhood - changed its character for good. Poor and working-class people from the burned-out South of Market and ...

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