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!

Here’s a crop showing household residents, ages, and the value of the house, or rent paid:

Employment information, including yearly salary:

I’m sure that other neighborhoods will be different, but this was a working-class area, and highest salary I saw was $2500 per year for the likes of cops, bakers, welders, firemen. Adjusted for inflation, this is about $40K per year. (The CPI for 1940 is about 16.)

Houses ran about $4000-$5000 for a 2-bedroom, 1-bath, and about $6000 for 3-bedroom, 2-bath. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $65-$100K which is pretty insane. Not sure on apartments, but you can figure out the percentage of salary that went into housing by looking at the rent. $25 to $35 seems typical, or about $400 to $560 in today’s dollars.

Here’s a map showing who lived in three of buildings along the 3200 block of Mission St, along with some of the census data.

(I cheated a bit and used the 1915 Sanborn map rather than the 1950 map –by 1940 few things had changed.)

Picking a name at random, Charles and Anna Lynch lived with their two girls (aged 3 and 1) at 3212 Mission, above what is now Mi Lindo Peru. They paid $27.50 each month for rent. Charles was a fireman and made $2500 a year, or $208 a month, so his rent was just 13% of his salary. I’m guessing that their landlady Philmena lived below them, along with Ed the motorman who worked for the Market St. Railroad.

Ironic footnote: 3212 Mission was the site of that fire last year.

Their next-door neighbors in 3214 were the Bamfords, originally from LA. He was a shoemaker who made $60 a month but paid $30 a month in rent.

Up the street, William Catalano, 25, his 23-year old wife Beatrice and their 5 year old son William Jr. lived in an apartment block that was torn down few decades later to make way for the Bank of America parking lot. William was a musician, working on a “music project”, pulling in $985 a year, or $82 a month, and paid $15 a month in rent.

William was a jazz drummer and a pretty kick-ass dad. How do I know that? Well, it turns out that a few years later, his son, “Billy” Catalano, picked up the trumpet in school and ended up a noted musician himself. He passed away in 2005, and his obituary was in the Chronicle.

“William “Billy” Catalano, Jr., a lyrical and passionate jazz trumpet player and teacher who performed in scores of San Francisco nightclubs and theatres and instructed thousands of young musicians in a career that spanned six decades, has died.”

Billy’s school band teacher tried to get him to play the trombone, and said that he could only play the trumpet if he supplied his own. So what did his dad do?

“The boy’s father, jazz drummer Bill Catalano, spent that night playing poker and won a silver trumpet on a turn of a card, which Billy proudly brought to school the next day.”

So, yeah, that was pretty cool random Google search.

None of these files are scanned or indexed yet, but you can most easily find your “Enumeration District” by searching at the site Steve Morse and Joel Weintraub have set up. Once you get the ED narrowed down, you can download the original census forms for that area, which will only be two or three blocks of homes, at least in San Francisco. Pro-tip: save yourself some time and just download the entire set of scanned images for your ED — the image browser is pretty hard to use.

The Catalano family is just one story. Time to start thinking about how to get the names and data onto a map to figure out some more.

Anyway, we’ve all seen the majestic glory of Old SF, who have revealed the secret history of the SFPL’s most excellent (though unfortunately lowish-resolution) photo archive.  I can’t tell you how happy I am that they took the time to geotag things.  It certainly makes my time-wasting more efficient.  (Hey, OldSFians, ping me, we need to talk about integrating the Sanborn maps!)

Geotagging these resources is but the first step.  There’s also the efforts of Historypin (who recently grabbed Jon Voss, of LookBackMaps fame) where we align photos and tag more information about them. (I cannot wait until we get a geohistory API…)

Anyway, many of you have probably seen the series of photos from the corner of 24th and Valencia from 1929.  This one looks east down 24th towards Potrero, standing next to Papalote. The building on the right (SW corner) and one across the street on the left (NE corner) are still there.

Hey, ice cream!  And we sure could use a deli on that corner again. Strangely enough, that’s a gas station across the street (where the church is now), and the Fiesta ice cream building will eventually flip to a gas station.

Another view looking south towards Bernal where you can see a lumberyard and a proto-fixie.

(If anyone wants to load these in historypin and do the before/after Google Street View thing, go for it, I’m so out of time it’s absurd.)

The Sanborn maps for this intersection are particular pain in the ass to put together — basically four different maps in two different volumes. But such is my love for you all and of history.

Anyway, here’s 1915 vs 1950 side by side. Goodbye lumberyards and the candy factory and light industry and the train station (which is a post in itself). (Click to make bigger.)

(I also did a quick and dirty map of that corner in 1899 for the 200 Yards project a while back.)

Zooming in 24th and Valencia, here’s 1915 vs 1950 in an animated GIF with a 35 year delta. The two photos were taken on the left looking right (east looking west), and top looking down (north looking south) respectively.

Click on it if nothing’s happening, or to get a wider version.

Given the title of the post, you can probably figure out where I’m going next.  The interesting thing about the 1929 photo is there are actually TWO of them, taken less than a minute apart. It’s as if the photographer knew that we would use a format invented in 1987 to animate his 82 year old images!   The detail in any one of these photos is impressive, but the animation below makes it that much more real.

(Click for a 1000 pixel wide version).

Note the kids hamming it up. They’re in their 90s now.

And check out the streetcar under the Fiesta Ice Cream sign! I never noticed it until I made this animation.

Anyway, enjoy the mildly coherent historic discourse and retina jarring animated GIFs.

The black and white images you often see here in the Burrito Justice Time Machine are merely scans of microfilm versions of the color originals. Mr Rumsey worked with the 6th Floor of the San Francisco Public Library to get the originals digitized, and the results are rather wonderful.

Oh, the irony of these volumes being damaged by fire in 1906.

I’ll obviously be digging into these a lot more over the next few weeks/months/years/rest of my life, but just for flavor, here’s the old Southern Pacific train station at Valencia and 25th.

Here’s the station itself:

1906, looking towards the city (well, northeast, actually). via Calisphere

Looking in the opposite direction (south):

(This and more in a nice collection of shots along the old SPRR line in this unfortunately stagnant blog.)

There’s another picture of policemen at the station waiting for President McKinley but I can’t find it right now. UPDATE: found it, but it doesn’t show the station — I think that’s looking north across the triangular yard towards the building across 25th St – 299 San Jose to be precise. You can see the funky bay window on the full map.  Nice turret! (That would make a great place to put a webcam! If, um, well you know what I mean.)

Oh, and for those concerned that there was only one saloon on this block (hi TK!) fret not as there was one just north of the station, and a ton up by 24th & Valencia, including a billiard-saloon combo! (Right next to a church.)

Anyway, here are the index files for our side of the city. Once your figure out the map number your block is on, it’s easiest to search for “[map number] Sanborn 1905″ in the search box. (At some point I will make a mapesque clickable HTML grid — today is not that day however.)

Volume 6: La Lengua, Noe Valley, Glen Park, Castro (basically east of Douglass, south of 17th, west of Mission) along with a little bit of the Sunset and Ingleside, Oceanview and Portola):

Volume 5: Mission, Bernal, Potrero, Dogpatch, Hunters Point (basically south of 16th, east of Mission):

Have fun. I apologize in advance for the massive drop in productivity in the Mission, La Lengua and Bernal this week.

UPDATE: To avoid hue and cry and accusations of Mission/ La Lengua favoritism, here are the index files to the other volumes:

Volume 1: Above Market , to Van Ness (North Beach, Downtown, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Civic Center)

Volume 2: South of Market, north of 16th, SE of market

Volume 3: Western Addition, Van Ness to Broderick, Market to the bay (Pac Heights, Cow Hollow, Marina-to-be, Duboce, Lower Haight)

Volume 4: Broderick to the beach (Upper Haight, and what will become The Richmond & Presidio Heights)

p.s. So it looks like the Luna viewer isn’t very (read: at all) iPad friendly. Anyone know of an iPad/iPhone MrSID viewer? Or better yet something in HTML5? (Though I would totally buy a David Rumsey iPad app. Hint hint, @DavidRumseyMaps.)

And as an added bonus for those of you who read this entire article, here is that map of the block of Valencia / San Jose / 25th / 26th in BurritoVision:

One day I dream of cropping, merging and converting this entire Sanborn map set into seamless Google Earth tiles.  Imagine an iPhone app where you could stand on a corner and pull up the Sanborn map to see what was there.  You turn around, and the map rotates with you. Awesome, no?

Here we have a map revealing 1924′s “contemplated projects” – Mission detail shown below, click the map to see the entire city.

Unlike the blight-driven plans of neighborhood-splitting projects like the Mission Freeway, it seems many of these came to pass. (Oh, people from the 1920s, your city planning is so quaint compared to the dreams of your children.) Two things stand out on this map:

1) Capp St extension — it was to be a backup artery to Mission St.  While it never hooked up to Van Ness, it did get slightly widened.

Here’s a 1939 shot of Capp and 25th from our friends at the SFPL.

and today via MapJack:

Other than the tree and the curb very little has changed.

Here’s 23rd and Capp under construction in 1940:

And today:

Alas this widening did not stop folks from moving down to the Peninsula.

2) The widening of the Bernal Cut certainly happened.

A very narrow Bernal Cut was originally dug out for the San Francisco San Jose Railway in the 1850s. Here is the Southern Pacific train in the cut, “looking north near Milton St”.  Think of this while you take the San Jose exit off 280.

And “looking south near Charles St.”

(You really ought to buy the Arcadia Press Bernal Heights book — our friends at the Bernal History Project did some fine work on that one – lots of incredible pictures, especially one of the Cut that is simply amazing.)

Anyway, Charles and Milton are way the hell apart but it sure looks like the same house and tree up on the top of the cut. Could it have been the house  at Mateo and Arlington?  1899 map below.

The there is the mystery of Charles St. A Twitter conversation arose on what happened to the 0-100 block of Charles St got me curious. I originally thought they widened the cut mostly to the east.   The eastern-most block of Charles St also got lost in the widening, but Eric Fischer let me know that they moved Arlington as well on the west side of the cut.

Anyway, here is our vanished bridge across the cut at Charles street:

and a water main that crossed at Fairmount over to Appleton (I imagine from the Holly Park reservoir?)

(This was the weird looking one you can see in all the construction photos.)

Out of sheer amusement for making map 1000 pixels long, here are a bunch of the 1899/1900 Sanborn maps I glued together showing the cut. (The 1886 maps don’t show all of it.) You can see the two bridges quite easily.

As we all know from the San Jose exit off 280, the cut is rather larger now than the train pictures above.

Here’s a shot from Jan 1929 with the widening of the cut is well underway.  This is at Bosworth (hint: you know you are in a depression when people are pushing mud around).

And later that year we see pretty much what we have today. The Richland (foreground) and Highland Street bridges, Oct 1929. (Taken at about the same place as the first train shot above).

Same view today:

I’m guessing they took out the two center supports and put those wonky braces up in the 50s when they shut down the Union Pacific rail line? (Muni didn’t run through Balboa until 1991.)

See more before/after San Jose time magick over at Bernalwood. And I just found this interesting before/after comparison video of the Cut on YouTube:

and the same person put up this rather remarkable then & now of a house in Glen Park. But I digress.

Here’s a shot from the Richland bridge in 1942 looking south towards St. Mary’s and Mateo @ Arlington.  Interesting that the railroad tracks are on the inner edge of the curve, and San Jose on the outer part.

Notice the landslides on both sides of the road — that’s why we have those tall concrete walls today.

Waaait a second — that’s no solar panel truss, it’s a fire escape!

Ahhh, it looks like I lost perspective. It’s actually a picture of yesterday’s sky over the Mission taken by @eviloars.

In other space perspective news, astronauts (and presumably cosmonauts) are building a Lego space station aboard the real space station.

And some real (and rather spectacular) pictures from the ISS.

Also, Telstar Logistics notes Sunday’s hypnotic video of Endeavour departing the ISS for the last time, with some spectacular shots over Oceana.

(click image to zoom)

UPDATE: Fundraiser for the displaced La Lenguans who lost their homes in the fire this Friday night at El Rio (8pm-2am, donations at the door, Hard French DJs will be spinning)

I’ve previously written about the Willows and the 18th St. Gulch (aka Gulchie, the Valencia St Hotel eating monster). But architect Glen Lym has taken it to the next level.  You know those contour lines on the 1853 and 1859 US Coast Survey maps I traced in such brutalist fashion?

Our esteemed architect has taken the map into THE THIRD DIMENSION and made a freakin’ CAD model of 1850s San Francisco. Looking northeast:

Here we are looking west at the Willows, with Mission Dolores and Twin Peaks in the background (along with what will become Dolores Park):

Modern streets are overlaid on the map. To the right of the Willows is 18th.  The street in front is Mission, then San Carlos / Lexington / Valencia. Glen notes, “Funny that The Commonwealth restaurant now sort of sits on top of where The Willows used to be.”

A lower view to give you a better sense of the depth of the ravine:

and its proximity to Mission Creek.

Here’s an overview of the Mission, looking north, from above 24th and South Van Ness.

The dunes that Market St had to cut through are quite evident at the top of the picture. The big flat area in the forground was the home to the Union Race Course.

It’s hard to grasp the size of the Mission’s ravines — the best analogy I can come up with is to stand at 27th and Guerrero and look north towards Cesar Chavez.  Imagine twice the depth in half the distance.

Man, what I would give to have a beer at the Willows. Here’s an old ad:

(via SFPL)

I can only assume Miss Lotta is the fountain‘s namesake, Lotta Crabtree.

But wait — skating and beer?!‽ (Ocean Beach, I just topped your ghost ice rink.) The Willows was evidently run by Canadians.  (Seriously, Canadian-San Franciscans, let’s get a new rink in the Mission.  Or at least a street hockey game as a float in the Carnaval parade. That would be pretty sweet.)

Via the California Digital Newspaper Archive we find some more ads for the Willows.

1857 – new shells walks!  Hansome summer houses! All kinds of refreshments!

Notice the omnibus references — It looks like this ad was announcing the opening of the omnibus line from downtown. (Previously you had to get out at the Nightingale on Mission and 16th – a little more on that area here.)

(via SFPL)

The Willows was popular with the ladies — in the Daily Alta’s gossip column we see the shocking news of a FEMALE equestrian who rode to the Willows!

(I guess she got fined for the modern equivalent of drag racing — considering inflation, that $20 in 1857 is like $500 today.)

Getting to the Willows could be hard work — here we have the tale of “clerks” drunk driving on the plank road (maps and pix here) and not quite making it there:

The Willows was also a place of refuge for newsman having a bad day:

Best to stick to the Omnibus for 25 cents (aka $6 today)

(Ha, “the benefits to be derived are too well understood to need any comment at this time” — I am so using that at work.)

In addition to beer, the Willows also had “barbacue”:

(How can you not have a grand time with beer and BBQ?)

It looks like the Willows got a new owner in 1860, François Pioche, who actually built the Market Street Railway. (I had no idea how much SF infrastructure he financed — how does he not have a street named after him?) Anyway, he made the Willows all fancy.

Here in this 1860 ad, we hear about the massive upgrade to the Willows — I suspect this is the building we see in the picture at the top of this increasingly long article. Kitchens! Private saloons! And wait for it…not one, but TWO BOWLING ALLEYS:

The great flood of 1862 (24 inches of rain in one month) hit San Francisco hard — the Mission plank road washed out, the road to San Jose was impassable, a Mission Woolen Mills storage building collapse, 8-10 feet of water in basements downtown, and Mission Creek flooded the Willows:

They quickly rebuilt:

I get the feeling the early 1860s was the heyday of the Willows. I’m not entirely sure when the it shut down, but in 1871 Mark Twain wrote of “the dingy horrors of San Francisco’s pleasure grove, the Willows.” That can’t be good.

Thanks again to Glen Lym and his 3-dimensionality! Also check out Bernalwood’s analysis of the missing hills of Bernal.

Check out the Mission SnowCam uStream courtesy the awesome folks at Orange Design.

WBTC brings us Fillmore Discount Name Fail: “National Dollar: Everything’s $1.25“

Hey, with deflation, maybe we’ll get our Dollar Stores back! Wait, inflation’s actually good — in that it encourages people to spend money rather than hoard.  Viva the $1.25 store! (as long as it doesn’t turn into Weimar wheelbarrows…)

Of course, this leads to the question — at what point did inflation cause a dollar store to resonate in society?  References to 1960s prices in Mad Men are probably the greatest cause of hits on inflation calculators in all of history.  Over the course of say 50 years, a dollar stopped being a lot of money, then was a good value, but soon started seeming cheap. My guess was the 70s.

We have evidence of this from the history of the Mission! (Big surprise, I know). Look to the right of this 1970 shot (SFPL) of the Grand Theatre — it’s an 88 cent store!

88¢ in 1970 is nearly $5 today!  Where’s my $5 store, dammit? (Of course, let’s remember that Doc Brown gave Marty McFly $50 to buy a Pepsi in 2015, so the Fed seems to be keeping inflation under decent control all things considered.)

Summary view of the Grand and its neighbors in 1970, 2007, 2010. Until a few years ago, the Grand Theater was the “China Bazaar Wholesale“, while the former home of 88¢ delights is a video game store.

And in what I can now only call historical and economic fate, the Grand Theater is now ONE $ ONLY! (Well, I suspect the goods are $1, not the entire building.)