The big question is how do we get this as a poster?

@peterhartlaub also has a great series of Sutro photos in his sfgate blog, including this original design for Sutro:

There were also references to a revolving restaurant (where I’d guess you’d cook your own food by holding it up over your head and it would self-microwave?) but that will require more research.

1954 San Francisco Chronicle found under my floorboards. Ad features "The Miracle Mile" of Mission st. campl.us/jDyp—
Fred Sharples (@fredsharples) May 22, 2012

And a proper, flat scan:

For those new to Mission history, the Miracle Mile was the second biggest shopping and entertainment district after downtown as we can see via the SFPL:

1958:

1949:

While the Miracle Mile lives on above That’s It sign, the suburban flight of the 1960s changed the neighborhood dramatically, from Irish/Italian to Mexican/Central American. Drastic changes were planned for the Mission in the 1960s, including Embarcadero-style redevelopment and highway running down Capp St. Thankfully we dodged those bullets.

The ad is complete with a list of stores which were pretty easy to cross reference with the 1954 city directory, which happens to have a list of street addresses in numerical order. In the interest of history, I pulled out the relevant business listings and glommed them together. I also pulled them out as text with links to street view for future searchability. Note that the current store listing is purely Googled, so let me know in the comments if it has changed or if I got it totally wrong.

Things get interesting around 21st, so I pulled out a bunch of consecutive entries and underlined the ones in the ad. This is the block with the New Mission and Crown Theaters.

See also: See’s Candies at 2534 Mission, which is now Foreign Cinema!!

New Mission Market was there:

(Mmmm, I’m hungry for some Supreme Ravioli.)

In fact, you just can see it on the right hand side of this 1957 SFPL photo:

I do love that awesome chicken icon and that font:

More detail and some historical tidbits on the 2500 block in their 2005 Business Improvement Plan.

From 22nd St southward, lots of interesting details, so I broke out the second half of the 2600 block.

Hey, the Lucky Pork Store was indeed there since 1949!

Um, OK, I guess they liked pork stores back in the day:

And the Mission Masonic Temple is still there, jammed up next door to the Walgreens.

I’m kind of surprised by how many telephone exchange names there were, much more than just MI-Mission (64x-) and VA-Valencia (82x-). I also see UN-Underhill (86x-), HE-Hemlock (43x-) and AT-Atwater (28x-).

A few more interesting addresses I came across in the 1954 directory:

Bruno’s and Big Beef must have been mortal enemies:

Hey, look, some bars! (Wonder if Anchor had anything to do with Anchor Brewing?) Anyway, neither are bars now.

Hey look, a surf bar! I wonder what that could be today? And 2779 Mission sounds really familiar, and is making me hungry for some mysterious reason.  What could it be? It’s almost as if it will change to another bar in the 60s, and then start serving burritos a few decades later.

I’ve seen a few Ken’s Flowers signs still around. And this is one of the few Mexican restaurants I saw:

By 1954, the railway through the Mission had been shut down for over a decade, and the property largely sold off. With Railroad Grocery and Fruit, we see some historical naming for a property next to the old Southern Pacific line:

Hmm, I wonder what the 2832 Mission, “under construction,” will become? Ah, it looks to be the current site of today’s Rosamunde! Sausage on the tracks!

OK, definitely hungry now.  Comment away!

1) My iPhone took better pictures of the eclipse than my real camera.

Note: other people were very good at taking pictures with real cameras (though taking them at sunset and sunrise probably helped).

2) Covering one’s iPhone telephoto lens with aluminum foil and making an offset pinhole leads to some very interesting visual effects, both of the eclipse and the landscape in general:

3) Internal refraction artefacts are a cool way to watch an eclipse.

I’m not sure if it was the light, but I got some cool Sutro fog shadows:

* Roche limit may not apply. Not all objects are to scale.

@davely attempted to rectify the situation:

@burritojustice I tried to add some sun effects, but this just looks like a nuclear bomb exploding over the Mission. yfrog.com/h7qd2vcj—
Dave Schumaker (@davely) May 03, 2012

(Either that, or Sutro is very, very angry.)

• The California Digital Newspaper Collection, a state treasure, needs your help.  The State Assembly and Senate eliminated their funding last year, and plans to do so again this year.
  
• Fill out this petition to request that funding be restored, and call your state senator and assembly member to request that the cuts to the California Newspaper Project in AB 121 be reversed in this year’s budget.
• The Senate Budget Subcommittee meets tomorrow, April 19th, and the Assembly Budget Subcommittee meets May 2nd. So call your State Senator NOW and ask that they restore funding to the California Newspaper Project.
  
• Also, consider making a donation to help maintain the archive.

When not creating Sutro animated GIFs, I sometimes write about local history. Pretty much anything interesting I find usually comes from one of three places:

• Sanborn Maps (via David Rumsey, or the SFPL)
• old SF city directories (via the directory of directories at SF Geneology, scanned by the Internet Archive)
• the California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC, UC Riverside)

The CDNC is a gold mine, a godsend, a treasured and fascinating view of a San Francisco and a California that are gone yet still with us every day. Where we work, where we live, where we eat and drink are all impacted by the people whose stories were captured by journalists and advertising from 100 years ago. These stories are brought back to life by the scans of the CDNC.

Just a few articles I’ve written that relied on the CDNC:

• Shipwrecks and captains
• Shipwrecks and beer
• Baseball (and beer)
• Valencia and 26th Street (and a bar)
• Valencia and 18th Street (and a beer garden)
• Baseball (and beer)
• The Bernal gold rush (and beer)

The amazing part is that the CDNC is free. This is by design:

“Simply put, we cannot and should not rely on commercial interests to properly digitize and protect our newspaper heritage for future generations.”

But we all know that free comes with a cost:

“The CDNC archive is immense: 20 terabytes of data and growing. All this data is being preserved on onsite and offsite servers and also with tape backups. Managing and safekeeping this archive requires a substantial investment in hardware and personnel.”

Over the past 10 years, the California State Legislature has funded this preservation of California’s history, scanning disintegrating newspapers and microfilm. Unfortunately I received this alarming note from the team at UC Riverside that runs the CDNC:

Last year Assembly Bill No. 121 (AB 121) eliminated all of the $216,000 in state funding for the California Newspaper Project.  This funding has also been eliminated from next year’s budget.

If State funding is not restored, work on preserving the remaining newspaper microfilm and digitizing state papers will come to a halt and will be difficult or impossible to fully resume again.

Please sign this petition requesting that the state resume funding for this educational resource that costs so little, yet gives so much.

Better yet, call your California State Senator and State Assembly Member and encourage them to restore funding for the California Newspaper Project (CNP) in this year’s budget that was eliminated last year in AB 121.

The Senate Budget Subcommittee meets TOMORROW, Thursday, April 19th, and the Assembly Subcommittee meets May 2nd, so contact them asap.