San Francisco

A city built by an emergency in 1849, destroyed by another in 1906, and rebuilt both times inside a decade. Gold, Angel Island, two bridges raised in the Depression, Howl on trial, the Haight, Harvey Milk, the epidemic, and every boom since, including the one currently deciding who can afford to stay.

A chronological documentary of 754 moments spanning 1776–2026 on Loreline.

Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-08-22

Eras

Everybody Came at Once, In 1848 San Francisco was a settlement of a few hundred people. Within two years it held tens of thousands, most of them young men who had crossed an ocean or a continent on a rumour. Ships were abandoned in the bay by crews who walked off to the goldfields and were built into the waterfront where they sat. The city was made by an emergency and has never entirely stopped behaving like one.
1906 Earthquake, At 5.12am on 18 April 1906 the San Andreas fault moved and the city fell over; then it burned for three days, because the water mains had broken with everything else. Around 3,000 people died and more than half the population was left homeless. The photographic record is extraordinary, including a film shot down Market Street days before, which turns out to be the last footage of a city that no longer existed by the end of that week.
Angel Island, Ellis Island processed arrivals in hours. Angel Island detained them for weeks, months, occasionally years, because its purpose was the opposite, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it a place designed to keep people out. Detainees carved poems into the barrack walls, which is how we know what it was like. Chinatown grew as both a refuge and a confinement, and in 1942 the city watched its Japanese residents removed to camps.
Building the Bridge, Both bridges went up in the Depression, which is the point: the Bay Bridge opened in November 1936 and the Golden Gate in May 1937, built with public money at a moment when there was none. The Golden Gate was the first job site to hang a safety net beneath the work, it saved nineteen men, who called themselves the Halfway to Hell Club, and eleven still died.
Rock, A fort, then a military prison, then the federal penitentiary that held Capone. It closed in 1963 because it cost too much to run on an island. Then in November 1969 a group of Native American activists occupied it for nineteen months, citing an 1868 treaty, and turned the most famous prison in America into the most visible protest of the era. The Presidio, meanwhile, was an army post continuously from 1776 to 1994.
Six Poets at the Six Gallery, On 7 October 1955 Allen Ginsberg read Howl aloud in a converted garage on Fillmore Street. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published it, was arrested for obscenity, and won, a 1957 ruling that a work with redeeming social importance is not obscene, which changed what American publishers could print. City Lights is still open. North Beach was cheap then.
Haight, A neighbourhood of a few thousand people received something like a hundred thousand arrivals in the summer of 1967, most of them broke, and a media apparatus that covered it as a spectacle. The Acid Tests, the Human Be-In, the Dead, Owsley's supply, and the moment it stopped being a scene and became a destination. Shared with our Psychedelics and LSD archives, because it is the same story told from the city's side.
Harvey Milk, Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977, one of the first openly gay elected officials in America, and was shot dead in City Hall a year later along with Mayor Moscone. When his killer got a manslaughter verdict the city rioted. Four years after that the same neighbourhood was the epicentre of the AIDS epidemic, and buried a generation while the federal government looked away.
Tech Boom, The city has had a boom roughly every fifty years and has never once handled one gracefully: gold, silver, shipping, the 1934 general strike that shut down the waterfront, the dot-com bubble, and the platform era. Each one arrived promising to remake the place and each one mostly remade who could afford to live in it.
What It Costs, A city of extraordinary wealth with people dying on its pavements, an argument about housing that has run for forty years without resolution, and a national commentary that treats it as either a utopia or a ruin depending on the week. Both readings flatten a place that has been simultaneously rich and broken since 1849.

1776 - Plano del nuevo Presidio de Sn.. 1776 por Dn. José Joaquin Moraga
1822 - Ohlone hunters with bows on the shore of San Francisco Bay. A hand-coloured plate of Northern Valley Yokuts and Ohlone people hunting on the bay, drawn by Louis Choris, the artist attached to the Russian Rurik expedition that called at San Francisco in 1816. Choris published it in his Voyage pittoresque autour du monde in 1822, engraved by Pierre Langlume. It is among the earliest pictorial records of Native life around the bay.
1822 - The presidio and the strait of the Golden Gate. Victor Adam's lithograph after a drawing by Louis Choris shows the Spanish colonial fort with the entrance to the bay beyond. It was published in 1822 in Choris's Voyage pittoresque autour du monde and is held by the New York Public Library.
1822 - Restored print of the presidio and the Golden Gate strait. A digitally restored version of the Adam lithograph after Louis Choris, published in the Voyage pittoresque autour du monde. The underlying artwork appears to date from around 1817, when Choris travelled the Pacific as artist to a Russian expedition, and the restoration is a featured picture on Wikipedia.
1822 - Spanish presidio above the entrance to the bay. A lithograph by Victor Adam after a drawing by Louis Choris, made for the illustrated account of a round-the-world voyage and held by the New York Public Library. It shows the Spanish colonial garrison and the strait later named the Golden Gate, decades before American settlement.
1822 - The Spanish presidio looking out to the Golden Gate. A lithograph by Victor Adam after a drawing by Louis Choris, published in the atlas to Choris's Voyage pittoresque autour du monde. Choris made the original view during his visit around 1817, when the presidio was still a Spanish colonial garrison guarding the strait. The plate is held by the New York Public Library.
1822 - The Spanish presidio drawn by a visiting expedition artist. Louis Choris sketched the presidio during a visit in the autumn of 1816 and published the plate in his Voyage pittoresque autour du monde in Paris in 1822. It is among the earliest surviving images of the Spanish garrison at San Francisco. The New York Public Library holds this impression.
1849 - Printed handbill advertising passage to the California goldfields. One of the advertising sheets put out during the Gold Rush to sell berths and outfits to men heading west. Notices like this one drove the steamship traffic that turned San Francisco from a small settlement into a port city within a couple of years.
1849 - Flyer calling men and women west to the goldfields. A recruitment sheet from the summer of 1849 aimed at both men and women willing to make the journey to California. Handbills of this kind fed the migration that passed through San Francisco's harbour on the way to the diggings.
1849 - White buckskin bag said to have carried gold rush gold. A soft white buckskin pouch reputed to have been used in the California gold rush by John T. Williams of Bonne Terre, Missouri. Bags like it held the dust and nuggets that men carried out of the diggings and spent in San Francisco. The object is in the collection of the Missouri History Museum.
1849 - Satirical lithograph of an overloaded prospector walking to California. A hand-coloured Currier print showing a comically over-equipped gold hunter on the plains some 350 miles west of St. Louis, captioned "I neither borrow nor lend". The print mocked the gold fever that pulled thousands of men across the continent toward San Francisco.
1849 - French satirical cartoon mocking the rush for California gold. An illustration published in the Paris journal Le Charivari, held in Harvard's Houghton Library. The paper treated the gold fever reaching Europe as a subject for caricature, evidence of how quickly the California strike became international news.
1849 - Joseph Goldsborough Bruff draws himself on the trail to California. A self portrait made by Bruff during his overland expedition to the goldfields. He was a trained draughtsman who kept an unusually full pictorial record of the journey, and lived a further forty years after making it.
1849 - Bruff's canvas mountain camp in the Sierra Nevada. Joseph Goldsborough Bruff painted his own mountain lodge in the Sierra Nevada, a cluster of joined white canvas tents around a conical centre tent. A man with a gun stands at the right, with a small yellow dog and tools scattered on the ground. Bruff led a company of overland emigrants and kept an unusually detailed visual record of the crossing.
1849 - Satirical lithograph on the defence of the California bank. A hand-drawn political caricature published as the gold rush began, using the imagined 'California Bank' to mock the international scramble for the new wealth. The cast includes send-ups of James K. Polk, Napoleon the Third and Isabella the Second of Spain. Prints like this carried news of the strike to audiences who would never see the diggings.
1849 - Engraving of a miners' encampment in the Sacramento Valley. J. H. Richardson's engraving of tents and prospectors in the gold country appeared in Holden's Dollar Magazine in New York in 1849. Pictures like this were how East Coast readers first saw the rush that turned San Francisco from a village into a port city within a year. The magazine is preserved in the Internet Archive.
1849 - Currier lithograph mocking the rush to California. A comic print published by Nathaniel Currier in the first year of the gold rush, showing the far-fetched means by which hopefuls proposed to reach California, rockets among them. It belongs to the Library of Congress collection of popular graphic arts and is one of the period's best-known satires on gold fever.
1849 - Gold Rush satire lithograph titled Things as They Are. A hand-printed lithograph satirising the California gold fever, issued as the rush drew tens of thousands west. The sheet belongs to a wave of political caricature that mocked both the prospectors and President James K. Polk, whose message to Congress had confirmed the gold discoveries. The print is held by the Library of Congress.
1849 - The place we hear about, a gold rush lithograph. A satirical lithograph on wove paper issued in 1849 as news of the California strike reached the eastern states. Prints like this fed and mocked the rush in equal measure; the sheet is held by the Library of Congress.
1849 - The California Gold Rush cartoon 1849 (The Wild West). Not many Americans lived in California, but that soon changed. By 1849 thousands upon thousands of people arrived in search of gold. Support the cartoons on patreon: Get your copy of Simple History: The Wild West today!
1849 - The California Gold Rush. What was the California Gold Rush and how did it change the United States during the era of Westward Expansion? In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, setting off one of the largest migrations in American history. This video introduces key events, people, and impacts of the Gold Rush in a c
1849 - Inside the California Gold Rush of the 1800's. Want to help support Me? Subscribe to my 2nd Channel! ⬇️ Thanks for Watching! Inside the California Gold Rush of the 1800's | Full Documentary
1849 - America the Story of Us: Gold Rush | History. Discover how the Gold Rush led to the creation of California. Own America: The Story of Us on DVD or Blu-ray! #HISTORY Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: ABOUT THE HISTORY CHANNEL: The HISTORY® Channel, a divisio
1849 - The History of the California Gold Rush and the 49ers | FOR KIDS!. LESSON PLANS: The California Gold Rush was the capstone of American westward expansion in the nineteenth century and fulfilled its Manifest Destiny. In this History For Humans for kids episode, students learn the amazing st
1849 - Buried Secrets of the Gold Rush (Full Episode) | National Geographic. Winners took all in the race to get rich in the California and Klondike gold rushes; unearthing the ships involved reveals the risks taken to go west. Explore the World with National Geographic subscriptions: ➡ Subscribe: ➡ Get more Nat
1850 - German engraved view of San Francisco in California. A plate from volume fourteen of Meyer's Universum, a German illustrated encyclopaedia of the world's notable places, showing San Francisco to a European readership. It appeared as the Gold Rush town was becoming an international name, and reached readers who would never see the bay themselves.
1850 - Three men and a woman panning for gold at a creek. A rare Gold Rush image showing a woman working a pan alongside male miners. Women were a small minority in the diggings that supplied San Francisco's boom, and pictures placing them at the water's edge are uncommon.
1850 - California gold miners with long tom, ca.. 1850-1852; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
1850 - California gold miners with long tom, ca.. 1850-1852; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
1850 - River mining, North Fork of the American River, California. 1850-1855; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
1850 - River mining, North Fork of the American River, California (cropped). River mining, North Fork of the American River, California, ca.1850-1855; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
1850 - L. V. Helms - Drawing of San Francisco, California, August 1851. A painting of San Francisco, California by Danish adventurer, merchant, emissary and author Ludvig Verner Helms. The painting was likely created in August, 1850, although it is labeled as 1851; his book "Pioneering in the Far East" (1882) and other records record the visit occurring in 1850. Helms states the view was
1850 - Lithograph depicting the seens mining for gold during the Gold Rush.
1850 - Sailing card advertising the clipper California for San Francisco. A printed sailing card for the clipper ship California, run by the Merchant's Express Line out of Pier 13 on New York's East River under Captain Henry Barber, with gold rush scenes worked into the design. Cards like this were handed to shippers to book cargo for the fast passage around the Horn. It was printed by G.F. Nesbitt and Co.
1850 - Comic print of a gold hunter buried under useless gear. A Kelloggs and Comstock version of the Independent Gold Hunter cartoon, in which the prospector staggers under every appliance imaginable and regrets not sailing around the Horn or crossing at Chagres in Panama. The joke turned on the overland route being the harder way to reach California.
1850 - Cartoon of a gold hunter buried under useless equipment. A satirical print from the gold mania of 1848 and 1849, showing a prospector loaded with every conceivable appliance, most of it worthless in California. The figure regrets not having taken his grandmother's advice to sail around the Horn or cross at Panama instead. The Kellogg and Comstock lithograph is held by the California State Library.
1850 - A Native woman panning for gold in the diggings. An illustration of a Native American woman working a pan at a California claim during the gold rush. Native labour was widely used and widely coerced in the early diggings, though the artist and exact origin of this image are not recorded. It survives as one of the few period depictions of an Indigenous woman at the workings.
1850 - Californio woman photographed at the height of the gold rush. A black and white portrait of a Californio woman, made in August 1850 and looking directly at the camera. Californios were the Spanish-speaking residents of California from before American annexation, a population rapidly outnumbered by the gold rush influx. The photograph is held by the Oakland Museum of California.
1850 - Lithograph of miners at work in the California gold fields. A lithograph of daily life at the diggings, printed on blue paper and worked up from a photograph by Fishbourne and Gow of San Francisco. Joseph Britton, later a leading San Francisco lithographer, is credited as the artist. Images of this kind were sold to eastern buyers hungry for scenes of the rush.
1850 - Sailing card advertising the clipper ship California. A printed sailing card issued to advertise berths and cargo space on the clipper California, running from Pier 13 on New York's East River to San Francisco. The card promises a very quick trip and urges merchants to book at once, competing for gold rush traffic. Its border carries scenes of the California diggings; the ship was built by Samuel Hall of East Boston and printed matter came from G.F. Nesbitt and Co.
1850 - Portrait of a California Gold Rush Miner, by George H.
1851 - View of the conflagration from Telegraph Hill San Francisco. 3d, 1851/Map of the burnt district of San Francisco showing the extent of the fire.
1851 - Newspaper column reporting gold found at Sutter's Mill. Page two, column four of The Californian, carrying the notice of the discovery on the American River. This short item is among the first printed reports of the find, and word spreading out from it emptied San Francisco of workers before drawing tens of thousands back.
1852 - Ships rotting at anchor in Yerba Buena Cove. One plate from William Shew's five-part daguerreotype panorama of the San Francisco waterfront, taken from Rincon Point. The vessels were abandoned where they moored when their crews walked off for the gold fields, and are shown in varying stages of decay. Shew's panorama is one of the earliest photographic records of the harbour.
1852 - Miners working a claim on the American River. A whole-plate daguerreotype by George H. Johnson showing miners at work on the American River near Sacramento. The river was where James Marshall's 1848 discovery began the rush that turned San Francisco from a village into a port city. Photographs made on the diggings this early are rare, since the daguerreotype process demanded equipment few miners carried.
1852 - German engraving of gold washing in the California diggings. A steel engraving of miners washing for gold in California, published in the fifteenth volume of Meyer's Universum, a German illustrated survey of the world's sights. It was cut by the engraver Anton Rottmann for the Bibliographisches Institut at Hildburghausen. The plate shows how the rush was pictured for European readers who would never see the goldfields.
1853 - Portrait of a Cantonese gold miner in California. An 1853 likeness by Isaac Wallis Baker of a Cantonese miner working the California diggings. Thousands of men from Guangdong reached San Francisco in the Gold Rush years, and the city became the entry point and commercial base for Chinese labour across the state. Held by the Oakland Museum of California.
1853 - Lithograph of the gold camp at Springfield, Tuolumne County. A view of Springfield in Tuolumne County, drawn by George Henry Goddard and printed on blue paper by the San Francisco lithographers Britton and Rey. Britton and Rey were the leading printmakers of Gold Rush California, and their views carried images of the mining districts back east. The print is held by the Library of Congress.
1853 - A mining town street with the Rancherie House hotel. Robert H. Vance made this daguerreotype of a California mining settlement, its false-fronted buildings including a hotel and the Sweata and Francis premises. Vance was the leading daguerreotypist of the gold country; the plate is in the J. Paul Getty Museum.
1854 - Johnson's Daguerreian Rooms, San Francisco, ca.. 1854-1855; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
1854 - Johnson's Daguerreian Rooms, San Francisco, ca.. 1854-1855; Daguerreotype, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
1854 - A Case of Real Distress. A plea for charity in the (London) Jewish Chronicle for a Esther Solomon Levy, a woman with six living children and a seventh on the way, stranded in Gold Rush SF after her husband's death at sea near Panama.
1856 - San Francisco Vigilante Committee lithograph. Contemporary lithograph depicting James Casey and Charles Cora being taken as prisoners of the San Francisco Vigilante Committee on May 18, 1856.
1857 - McGOWAN, Edward (1807 or 1813-1893).. ). Narrative of Edward McGowan, Including a Full Account of the Author’s Adventures and Perils while Persecuted by the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856.... San Francisco: Published by the author, 1857.
1860 - "The Bummer", illustration from "A Peep at Washoe" by J.. 's Monthly Magazine, December 1860. A "bummer" was a man who had made his fortune mining and was now at leisure. This would be in California at the start of his story, before Browne journeys to other gold and silver mining areas.
1860 - "Going to Kern River", illustration from "A Peep at Washoe" by J.. 's Monthly Magazine, December 1860. This would be the Kern River, California gold rush of 1853.
1860 - "Returning from Kern River", illustration from "A Peep at Washoe" by J.. 's Monthly Magazine, December 1860. This would be the Kern River, California gold rush of 1853.
1860 - "Returning from Kern River", illustration from "A Peep at Washoe" by J.. 's Monthly Magazine, December 1860. This would be the Kern River, California gold rush of 1853.
1861 - Bandits ambush a traveller in the gold country. George du Maurier drew this scene for the story "Of a Man Who Fell Among Thieves" in the London weekly Once a Week, published 19 October 1861. It depicts an attack by bandits during the California Gold Rush, a staple of the lawlessness British readers associated with the gold fields. The engraving was cut by Joseph Swain's workshop.
1862 - Chinese miners washing gold sands with a rocker. An engraving of Chinese miners working a rocker, the hand-operated box used to separate gold from river sand, published in the French travel journal Le Tour du Monde. Chinese labourers arriving through San Francisco made up a large share of the goldfield workforce and were frequently pushed onto claims others had abandoned. Drawn by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques.
1862 - Engraved figure of a prospector setting out to look for gold. An illustration of a miner named Aubert departing on a discovery trip, engraved by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques for volume five of the French travel journal Le Tour du monde in 1862. European periodicals carried images like this to readers who followed the California rush from a distance. It belongs to a body of Gold Rush art rather than to photography.
1862 - Miners digging and washing sand from a riverbed. An engraving of placer work in the California diggings, showing crews lifting sand from the bottom of a river and washing it for gold. It was published in the French travel journal Le Tour du monde from a drawing by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques. The rush that drew these men through San Francisco turned the port into a city within a few years.
1862 - An arrastra grinding gold ore under a dragged stone. An engraving by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques published in the French travel journal Le Tour du monde, showing the mill Anglo miners nicknamed the Mexican merry-go-round. The device, brought north by Mexican miners, crushed ore by dragging heavy stones in a circle around a central post, and it was widely used in the California diggings before machinery arrived.
1862 - Engraving of hydraulic washing at a California gold claim. A wood engraving by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques showing gold being washed out of a hillside by hydraulic method, published in volume five of the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. High-pressure water jets let operators strip whole slopes, and the debris they flushed downstream reached the bay and the rivers feeding it. The plate presented California mining to European readers.
1862 - Engraved scene of daily life in a California mining camp. Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques drew the working life of the California miner for the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. Illustrated journals like this carried the diggings to European readers who knew the gold country only by report. The plate appeared in volume five of the series.
1862 - Miners raising gold ore up a shaft. An engraving of shaft mining in the California goldfields, published in the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. It illustrates the shift from surface panning to dug and timbered workings that followed the first rush years.
1862 - Engraving of miners crushing ore by the old Mexican method. An engraving by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques showing gold ore being crushed by the method Mexican miners had long used in the region, published in the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. Mexican techniques and labour shaped the early California diggings before industrial mills arrived. The plate appeared in volume five of the journal.
1862 - Chilean mills grinding gold ore. An engraving of the heavy stone mills used to crush ore in the California diggings, published in volume five of the French travel journal Le Tour du monde. The image is by Gustave-Adolphe Chassevent-Bacques and depicts the industrial phase of gold extraction that followed the early years of panning.
1862 - Portrait of a Californio miner working the diggings. An image by the illustrator Chassevent of a Mexican or Californio miner during the California Gold Rush. Spanish-speaking Californians and miners arriving from Sonora were among the earliest to work the gold fields, and were then pushed out by foreign miners' taxes and vigilante pressure. Held by the Oakland Museum of California.
1863 - Lazarus2. Joshua A. Norton (1819-1880), self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. Also showing Frederick Coombs aka George Washington II. (digging) It is cartoonist Edward Jump's famous pictur
1864 - The California Miner's Almanac - 1864 - Ghirardelli Chocolate. 1864 advertisement for Ghirardelli Chocolate, "only chocolate maker in California" (at the time), and still inb existence today.(Cropped)
1866 - Chinese Mercantile Houses, Dupont Street, San Francisco LCCN2002723035. Title: Chinese Mercantile Houses, Dupont Street, San Francisco Abstract/medium: 1 photographic print: half stereograph, albumen.
1866 - Chinese Market, Sacramento Street, San Francisco LCCN2002724195. Title: Chinese Market, Sacramento Street, San Francisco Abstract/medium: 1 photographic print: half stereograph, albumen.
1866 - Original caption: "The Sacramento and Oakland steamers.. 316
1870 - Studio portrait of the sugar refiner George Gordon. Gordon was a San Francisco businessman and sugar baron who died in 1869. The portrait was made by the photographer Carl Hedler, also working as Charles W. Hedler, and survives in the Stanford University collections.
1870 - Studio portrait of George Gordon in full frame. The full portrait of George Gordon, made by San Francisco photographer Carl Hedler and digitally restored by the uploader with tilt correction and contrast adjustment. Gordon built his fortune in sugar refining and died in 1869. The source print is held at Stanford.
1870 - Tight portrait of sugar refiner George Gordon. A cropped close-up from a studio portrait of George Gordon, the San Francisco industrialist who founded the city's first sugar refinery and laid out the Rincon Hill enclave of South Park. It was taken by photographer Carl Hedler before Gordon's death in 1869. The original plate is held at Stanford.
1870 - Portrait of the shipping merchant Joseph-Yves Limantour. Limantour, born in Lorient in 1812 and dead in Mexico City in 1885, was a Breton shipping trader who became a figure in San Francisco's early history. The portrait is held by the Centro de Estudios de Historia de Mexico Condumex.
1870 - Phillip Alexander Bell. Phillip A. Bell, 19th century newspaper editor
1870 - Southern Pacific Bay City ferry circa 1885. The Southern Pacific Company's Bay City ferry plies the waters of San Francisco Bay sometime between 1870 and 1900.
1870 - Marie Suize Pantalon (Gravure cropped). Marie Suize, aka Marie Pantalon, came from France to California during the Gold Rush and ran her own business as a goldminer and winemaker. She was arrested several times for wearing pants.
1874 - Newspaper advertisement for the Spreckels family's Albany Brewery. An engraved advertisement for Spreckels and Company's Albany Brewery, printed in Henry G. Langley's San Francisco business directory. Claus Spreckels built his fortune in the city through brewing before turning to the sugar trade that made his name. The illustration is credited to T. C. Boyd.
1876 - Opium Den in San Francisco.. 1876.
1878 - Color lithograph of the City of San Francisco.
1878 - Color lithograph of the City of San Francisco.
1878 - Book illustration from an account of sailing to the gold fields. An engraving from Samuel C. Upham's memoir of his 1849 voyage to California by way of Cape Horn, published in Philadelphia in 1878. The surrounding text recounts prising forty-five dollars in nuggets from a crevice in the rock and keeping quiet about it. The volume was issued for the Associated Pioneers of the Territorial Days of California and digitised from a Library of Congress copy.
1879 - Interior of a Chinatown temple to Guan Yu. An engraved plate from The Pacific Tourist, a transcontinental railroad guide edited by Henry T. Williams and published in New York. The illustration takes visitors inside one of Chinatown's Chinese temples, a fixture of the guidebook itinerary for travellers arriving by rail. The San Francisco Public Library digitised the copy this plate comes from.
1880 - Chinese Mission House of the M.E.. 916 Washington Street. First established in 1868 at 916 Washington as the "Methodist Mission" or "Oriental Home and School" by Otis T. Gibson. This building was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire and rebuilt at 940 Washington. The new building at 940 Washington was later
1880 - Peter Donahue, ironworks owner and railroad builder. Donahue, born in 1822, ran foundry and rail interests in San Francisco and Sonoma County and was among the Irish-born industrialists who shaped the city's early manufacturing. He died in 1885; the portrait is held by the Bancroft Library.
1880 - San Francisco 1880 - 1950: Life in the Golden City (Colorized & Animated. San Francisco in Color (1880–1950) brings one of America’s most iconic cities back to life through carefully restored, colorized, reconstructed, and animated original photographs of the "Paris of the West." Special attention is given to the city’s evolution before and after the 1906 San Francisco ea
1881 - Claus Spreckels's new sugar refinery at Potrero Point. A Britton and Rey lithograph issued as a supplement to the San Francisco News Letter Christmas number of December 1881, showing the refinery shortly after it opened. Potrero Point was becoming the city's heavy-industry waterfront, and the Spreckels works were among its largest plants.
1881 - Enhanced detail of the California Sugar Refinery works. A cropped and digitally cleaned version of the Britton and Rey lithograph of Spreckels's refinery, bringing out the buildings and stacks at Potrero Point. The closer framing shows the scale of the plant that anchored sugar refining in San Francisco.
1882 - Chinatwn$disease-ghosts. Image representation of the dominant public opinion that persistent presence of these three diseases Malarium, Small Pox, and Leprosy were all the fault of the Chinese immigrants and their unsanitary living conditions
1882 - The Card Players, Wright visited gold rush California in 1857.. 1882, at the height of anti-Chinese sentiment. 24.25 in high by 29.5 in wide
1882 - Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. After a series of events including war, floods, droughts and crop failures drove tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants to San Francisco, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended Chinese immigration for a ten-year period. The Daily Dose provides microlearning history documentaries like this one
1882 - VampireLandlord1882. 1882 political cartoon, San Francisco, California, depicting San Francisco landlords as vampire bats squeezing the rent out of tenants, enjoying a fine meal, then being taken by death and thrown into hell.
1882 - Sketch of San Francisco in 1849 by Ludvig Verner Helms.. "Pantaloon" on an unsuccessful trade mission. The sketch was drawn from Flagstaff Hill, which no longer exists. Helms was a Danish adventurer, merchant, emissary, and author associated with th
1883 - Book engraving of a Chinese restaurant meal on Commercial Street. An illustration from William Henry Bishop's 1883 travel book Old Mexico and Her Lost Provinces, published by Harper and Brothers. The passage beside it describes a meal taken at a restaurant at the head of Commercial Street in San Francisco, served in bowls and eaten with chopsticks. The scan comes from the Brown University Library copy.
1883 - Miners working a long sluice to separate gold from gravel. Titled 'The Sluice', this Henry Sandham illustration shows crews running water and gravel down a wooden trough so that gold settles behind the riffles. It appeared in The Century illustrated monthly magazine in January 1883, part of a set on gold-rush mining methods. The Library of Congress holds the print.
1883 - A miner rocking a cradle to wash gold from gravel. Titled 'The Cradle', this Henry Sandham wood engraving shows the rocker box, a hand-worked wooden trough that let a small party wash far more gravel than a pan alone. It ran in The Century illustrated monthly magazine in January 1883 alongside other studies of gold-rush technique. The Library of Congress holds the print.
1883 - The Monitor: a hydraulic nozzle blasting a California hillside. Henry Sandham's print shows hydraulic mining, in which high-pressure water cannon known as monitors washed whole hillsides apart to reach the gold. The method moved enormous volumes of debris downstream and became one of the most destructive industrial practices in the state. The image was published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in January 1883.
1884 - Map shading the district burnt in the great fire. A plan shading the blocks destroyed when fire swept the young city over two days in May, drawn for Hubert Howe Bancroft's History of California. Fires repeatedly levelled San Francisco's timber-built centre during its first years, and maps like this were used to record the extent of each loss.
1884 - Chinese Musicians by Theodore Wores, 1884. Chinese Musicians [in San Francisco's China Town] by Theodore Wores, 1884, oil on canvas, private collection, photographed while on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
1885 - Mining and Scientific Press 1885 nameplate. Nameplate of the Mining and Scientific Press, a former mining and miscellaneous science newspaper published in San Fransisco, California
1886 - Cover of John Henry Brown's memoir of the early city. The bound cover of Reminiscences and Incidents of the Early Days of San Francisco, published by the Mission Journal Publishing Company. Brown, who lived from 1810 to 1905, ran a hotel in the settlement before the Gold Rush, and his account is counted among the eighty landmark books of California printing known as the Zamorano 80.
1888 - Engraved portrait of the lumberman Samuel Penfield Taylor. Samuel Penfield Taylor came to California in the gold rush and built a paper mill on Lagunitas Creek in Marin County, north of San Francisco. This likeness was engraved for the 1888 county history 'Pen Pictures from the Garden of the World'. The land around his mill is now Samuel P. Taylor State Park.
1889 - Looking across the western districts of the city. An albumen print by Alfred Judson Perkins showing San Francisco's western side before the sand-dune neighbourhoods were built out. It survives in the DeGolyer Library's U.S. West photographic collection at Southern Methodist University.
1890 - The front of a store building of Asian architecture.. 1891.
1890 - The front of a store building of Asian architecture.. 1891.
1890 - A Chinatown street photographed by Isaiah West Taber. The print carries a handwritten note on its reverse reading simply "China town in San Francisco, 1890". Taber ran one of the city's best-known commercial studios; this copy is in the Rijksmuseum collection.
1890 - Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Commissioner's private office. U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Commissioner's private office: From Photographs from the Hart Hyatt North papers: Angel Island
1890 - Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Approach from wharf to main building. U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Approach from wharf to main building.: From Photographs from the Hart Hyatt North papers: Angel Island
1890 - Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Bath room and lavatory. U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Bath room and lavatory: From Photographs from the Hart Hyatt North papers: Angel Island
1890 - Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Dining room. U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Dining room: From Photographs from the Hart Hyatt North papers: Angel Island
1890 - Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Examination room. U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Examination room -- main building: From Photographs from the Hart Hyatt North papers: Angel Island
1890 - Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Interiors of one of the wards. U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, San Francisco Bay. Interiors of one of the wards in the hospital: From Photographs from the Hart Hyatt North papers: Angel Island
1890 - A lateen-rigged fishing felucca of the San Francisco fleet. A drawing of a San Francisco fishing felucca, the lateen-rigged boat brought to the bay by Italian fishermen and used to work the local grounds. It was published by Joseph William Collins in Fishing Vessels and Boats of the Pacific Coast, a United States Fish Commission bulletin. The type gave Fisherman's Wharf its early character.
1890 - San Francisco fishing felucca under sail. An illustration of a San Francisco fishing felucca, the lateen-sailed boat brought to the bay by Italian fishermen and used to work the local grounds. It was published by Joseph William Collins in his survey of fishing vessels and boats of the Pacific coast for the United States Fish Commission. The report documented the small craft that supplied the city's fish markets.
1890 - Cartoon drawing of gold miners headed by boat for California.. "Ye High Seas Showinge Ye Vesseles Bound for Calyfornya." A caricature of the time from "Punch" by Richard Doyle. From the Center for Sacramento History
1891 - Phillip A. Bell
1891 - Gold Rush Miners' Ball. "Miner's Ball," 1891 etching by Andre Castaigne that imagines a men only ball during the 1849 California Gold rush
1892 - 362 MSS P 24 B3 F2. A horse and cart in front of Colombo Co., a store in a building of slightly Asian architecture, (Chinatown, San Francisco). Back label- C.R. Savage, Art Bazar.
1892 - A horse and cart outside a Chinatown cigar dealer. The storefront of Colombo and Co., cigar manufacturers and dealers, occupies a Chinatown building trimmed with paper lanterns and Asian-styled detail. Charles Roscoe Savage made the photograph and issued it through his Art Bazar studio.
1892 - A building of Oriental architecture.
1892 - Newspaper engraving of the Mary Ellen Pleasant and Bell mansion. An 1892 newspaper illustration of the San Francisco mansion where Mary Ellen Pleasant lived with the family of financier Thomas Bell. Pleasant, an entrepreneur and abolitionist, financed and ran the household and was later dragged through the press over the Bell estate. The image was clipped from a newspaper of 17 October 1892; the artist is unrecorded.
1892 - Newspaper engraving of the staircase where Thomas Bell died. An illustration from an 1892 newspaper report showing the staircase in the San Francisco house of banker Thomas Bell, who died there on 16 October 1892. Press artists routinely drew the scene of a prominent death for readers who would never enter the house. The clipping is preserved as a record of the case.
1892 - Newspaper portrait of the capitalist Thomas Bell. An engraved likeness of Thomas Bell, printed in a San Francisco newspaper at the time of his death in October 1892. Bell was a financier whose fortune and household were closely tied to the city's Gilded Age business class. The clipping is one of the few widely circulated images of him.
1894 - The mock forty-niner camp at the Midwinter Exposition. The California Midwinter International Exposition, staged in Golden Gate Park, included a reconstructed gold rush mining camp as one of its attractions. It presented the 1849 rush as heritage to fairgoers barely forty-five years after the event.
1895 - Chinese American men doing business on a Chinatown street. A street view of Chinatown showing the district's shopfronts and architectural detail, with Chinese American men conducting business in the roadway. Wilhelm Hester, better known for his photographs of sailing ships in Puget Sound, made the exposure around 1895. It records the business district a decade before the earthquake and fire.
1896 - The southern edge of Chinatown. Arnold Genthe photographed the boundary where Chinatown met the rest of San Francisco, part of the body of work he made in the quarter between 1896 and the 1906 earthquake. The negative is held by the Library of Congress in the Genthe Collection.
1896 - The sign of the pawn shop, Chinatown, San Francisco LOC agc.7a08895. Title: The sign of the pawn shop, Chinatown, San Francisco Abstract/medium: Genthe, Arnold, 1869-1942, photographer. Physical description: 1 negative:
1896 - A goldsmith at work in his Chinatown shop. Arnold Genthe photographed the interior trades of Chinatown as well as its streets, here a goldsmith's premises among the quarter's shops. The negative dates from his long Chinatown project, begun in 1896 and continued for decades. The Library of Congress holds the Genthe Collection from which it comes.
1896 - A grocery shop in Chinatown photographed by Arnold Genthe. A grocery storefront in San Francisco's Chinatown, from Arnold Genthe's long photographic study of the quarter. Genthe worked the Chinatown streets from 1896 onward, and much of the district he recorded was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. The image is held in the Genthe Collection at the Library of Congress.
1896 - The Apricot Spring Orchard drugstore in Chinatown. A Chinese pharmacy photographed by Arnold Genthe, who worked the streets of Chinatown from 1896 onward and left the fullest surviving picture of the quarter before the fire. The Library of Congress dates the negative to somewhere in that decade of work.
1896 - Chinese American men and a child beneath hanging lanterns. Arnold Genthe photographed this group standing in front of a Chinatown building strung with lanterns. Children appear rarely in his Chinatown work, which makes them a recurring point of interest in the series. The gelatin silver print is held by the Library of Congress.
1896 - Chinese American woman and child photographed in Chinatown. Arnold Genthe made this gelatin silver portrait in San Francisco's Chinatown in the years before the 1906 fire destroyed the district. His street work there is the fullest surviving photographic record of the old quarter and its residents.
1896 - A Chinese girl photographed in the streets of Chinatown. One of Arnold Genthe's Chinatown negatives, made in the decade before the 1906 earthquake destroyed the quarter he was documenting. Genthe worked with a concealed camera on the street, and his surviving plates form the fullest visual record of pre-earthquake Chinatown. The negative is held by the Library of Congress.
1896 - Chinese and American women passing on a Chinatown street. Arnold Genthe photographed the two groups of women in the same frame somewhere in San Francisco's Chinatown between 1896 and 1906. Such street encounters were a recurring subject for him, and the pictures document the quarter as an ordinary part of the city rather than a spectacle. Held by the Library of Congress.
1896 - A young Chinese girl photographed in Chinatown. Arnold Genthe made this portrait in San Francisco's Chinatown sometime between 1896 and 1906, during the years he worked the quarter's streets with a concealed camera. His Chinatown pictures are among the fullest surviving views of the neighbourhood as it stood before the earthquake and fire destroyed it. Held by the Library of Congress.
1896 - Men standing and walking along a Chinatown street. An unposed street view from Arnold Genthe's long photographic survey of San Francisco's Chinatown, made at some point between 1896 and 1906. Genthe worked with a concealed camera to catch the neighbourhood's ordinary traffic rather than arranged portraits. Everything he recorded here was destroyed in the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake.
1897 - San Francisco Call report on a brawl at Irish Hill. A clipping from page six of the San Francisco Call for 8 November 1897, describing a police roundup after a drunken fight on Irish Hill. The neighbourhood was a working-class enclave wedged among the shipyards and ironworks of the Potrero waterfront. Digitised from the Chronicling America newspaper archive at the Library of Congress.
1897 - An arrest in Chinatown watched by a street crowd. An Edison company film showing a Chinese man being arrested and carried off through Chinatown as onlookers gather. The charge is not recorded; the Library of Congress notes it may relate either to the smuggling of immigrants barred by the exclusion quotas, or to the tong warfare that broke out after the killing of Fong Ching, known as Little Pete, in January 1897. The party climbs from the area around 830 Washington Street, an address then used to house new arrivals.
1897 - A Chinatown restaurant illustrated for railroad tourists. The plate comes from To California and back, a guidebook published in 1897 by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad to sell rail travel west. Its Chinatown chapter walks readers through fortune-telling with joss sticks and the quarter's eating houses, treating the neighbourhood as a tourist attraction.
1897 - Engraved illustration of a Native archer with a fur quiver. A book illustration of a Native American bowman carrying a fur quiver, printed in the 1897 Cincinnati edition of John Clark Ridpath's Universal History. The surrounding text discusses the Shoshone and neighbouring peoples, and the plate derives from the work of Louis Choris, the artist who drew Ohlone people around San Francisco Bay during the Rurik expedition. The engraving is a nineteenth-century rendering, not a document made from life.
1898 - Troops marching out through the Presidio's Lombard Gate. Soldiers leave the Presidio of San Francisco bound for Manila during the mobilisation for the Spanish-American War. The post served as the staging ground for American forces shipping across the Pacific, and the Lombard Gate was the route out to the city.
1899 - Book illustration of a Chinatown alley by George Roux. A plate drawn by George Roux for Jules Verne's novel The Will of an Eccentric, whose contest carries its players across the United States. The archive files the image among streets and alleys of San Francisco's Chinatown, a quarter that European illustrators of the period rendered largely from description.
1900 - Scow schooners unloading hay at the Third Street channel wharf. The scow schooner Annie L. lies at the San Francisco hay wharf with a full deckload, other loaded scows crowding around her, and the schooner Paul and Willie berthed inside. Their shallow draft let them load at river landings and sloughs no other craft could reach, carrying hay from around the bay into the city. The Annie L. was built at Hunters Point in 1900 by Emil Munder.
1900 - The first Chinese telephone operator in Chinatown at the switchboard. A studio-quality print recording the first Chinese telephone operator working in San Francisco's Chinatown. The neighbourhood ran its own exchange, where operators were expected to handle calls in several Chinese dialects as well as English. The photograph comes from the George Grantham Bain news agency collection at the Library of Congress.
1900 - Market Street looking east past the Flood Building. A colour postcard view down the city's main thoroughfare, with the Flood Building at Powell Street on the near left and the Emporium department store to the right. The building the photographer shot from is gone, cleared to open Hallidie Plaza above the Powell Street station.
1900 - Studio portrait of Ralphine North McDonald. A formal portrait of a woman from a California family with mining business interests dating to the gold rush era. Neither the photographer nor the studio is recorded.
1900 - Alvin Aaron Coffey Sr.. (1822–1902) American miner, the only Black member of the California Society of Pioneers
1903 - Teddy Roosevelt, San Francisco, 1903.ogv. President Roosevelt reviewed the school children of San Francisco from 10:00am to 10:30am on Wednesday, May 13, 1903. An estimated 40,000 school children gathered along both sides of Van Ness Avenue, west of the downtown area, for the parade. The wide north-south boulevard, partially lined with the mansions of the weal
1903 - Midnight in Chinatown, a Willard Worden print. A gelatin silver print by Willard Worden, made in the Chinatown quarter three years before the 1906 earthquake destroyed it. Worden's San Francisco photographs were later gathered by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
1903 - Chinatown street life recorded by Frances Benjamin Johnston. A photographic print of Chinatown made by Frances Benjamin Johnston, one of the first American women to build a national career as a professional photographer. She worked in San Francisco three years before the earthquake and fire levelled the district. The print is in the Library of Congress collections.
1903 - Willard Worden's night view of a Chinatown alley. Willard Worden's gelatin silver print Midnight in Chinatown shows a San Francisco Chinatown street after dark, three years before the quarter burned in the 1906 fire. Worden was among the photographers who built a commercial market for atmospheric Chinatown night scenes. The print is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
1906 - Mission Dolores, reproduced from an old print. An illustration of Mission Dolores reproduced from an early print, scanned from Frank Aitken and Edward Hilton's account of the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906. The plate sits in the book's opening chapter on the old San Francisco that the disaster erased. The volume was published in the city by the E. Hilton Co. in the year of the quake.
1906 - Rows of refugee tents pitched at the Presidio after the earthquake. The army opened the Presidio's grounds to people burned out of the city, and camps of regulation tents were laid out in ordered streets to house them. Tens of thousands sheltered in such camps across San Francisco through 1906. The photograph is held by the National Archives.
1906 - Refugee tents at the Presidio after the earthquake. The Army opened the Presidio grounds to civilians burned out of the city in April 1906, laying out ordered rows of tents as emergency shelter. The photograph is held by the National Archives.
1906 - Refugee camp at the Presidio after the earthquake. Emergency shelter set up on Presidio ground for San Franciscans burned out by the April earthquake and fire. The military reservation became one of the city's largest relief sites, absorbing thousands who had lost their homes. The photograph is held by the U.S. National Archives.
1906 - Chinatown buildings in ruins after the earthquake. A Chicago Daily News photographer recorded the collapsed and burned-out blocks of San Francisco's Chinatown following the 1906 earthquake and fire. The district was among the hardest hit, and its destruction opened a fight over whether the Chinese community would be allowed to rebuild on the same ground.
1906 - Army blueprint of Fort McDowell on Angel Island. A War Department blueprint of Fort McDowell, the Army post on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. The island served as a military reservation long before and alongside its use as an immigration station, and drawings like this one recorded its layout for the Corps. The sheet comes from the War Department Map Collection at the National Archives.
1906 - Collapsed Chinatown buildings after the earthquake. Chinatown buildings standing in ruins after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fires that followed. The photograph was made by an uncredited Chicago Daily News staff photographer and survives in the Library of Congress collection. The quarter was flattened almost completely, and its rebuilding was fought over by city officials who wanted the residents moved elsewhere.
1906 - San Francisco, April 18, 1906.. 1 slide: lantern; 4 x 5 in. or smaller.
1906 - Book illustration of the First Baptist Church of Oakland after the quake. An illustration from James Russel Wilson's 1906 volume on the San Francisco earthquake and fire, compiled from eyewitness accounts. The caption identifies the First Baptist Church of Oakland, across the bay, and presents the damaged building as evidence of the shock's reach. The scanned copy comes from the Library of Congress.
1906 - Rubble along Dupont Street in Chinatown. The main commercial street of Chinatown after the earthquake and fire, its buildings reduced to debris. Dupont Street was later renamed Grant Avenue. The print is attributed to Stoddard and held by the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University.
1906 - Salvaged goods pulled from the rubble of Chinatown. A gelatin silver print attributed to the photographer Stoddard, showing objects recovered from Chinatown after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Such pieces were sold and traded as "relics" to visitors in the months after the disaster, a small trade that grew up in the ruins. The print is held by the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University.
1906 - Burnt-out Chinatown with the Fairmont Hotel standing above it. Arnold Genthe photographed Chinatown after the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake, with the shell of the Fairmont Hotel visible on Nob Hill in the distance. Genthe had spent the previous decade photographing the neighbourhood before it burned, which makes his post-fire negatives a direct record of what was lost. Held by the Library of Congress.
1906 - On the ruins (April 1906), Chinatown, San Francisco LOC agc.7a55000. Title: On the ruins (April 1906), Chinatown, San Francisco Abstract/medium: Genthe, Arnold, 1869-1942, photographer. Physical description: 1 transparency:
1906 - On the ruins (April 1906), Chinatown, San Francisco LOC agc.7a08972. Title: On the ruins (April 1906), Chinatown, San Francisco Abstract/medium: Genthe, Arnold, 1869-1942, photographer. Physical description: 1 negative:
1906 - Chinatown photographed by Arnold Genthe on the morning of the earthquake. Arnold Genthe made this negative on 18 April 1906, the day the earthquake struck San Francisco. He had spent the previous decade photographing Chinatown and returned to the same quarter as it burned, producing one of the few first-hand photographic records of the disaster's opening hours. Held by the Library of Congress in the Genthe Collection.
1906 - Genthe negative exposed in Chinatown on the day of the quake. Another of the frames Arnold Genthe exposed on the day of the earthquake, catalogued by the Library of Congress with his other Chinatown pictures from that date. Genthe photographed with a borrowed camera after his own equipment was lost, working through streets that were being consumed by fire. The negative survives in the Genthe Collection.
1906 - Chinatown on the morning of the earthquake. Arnold Genthe photographed the city on 18 April 1906, the day the earthquake struck and the fires began. Having documented Chinatown for a decade, he recorded the quarter as it was being destroyed. The negative is in the Library of Congress.
1906 - Genthe's negative exposed on the day the earthquake struck. A negative Genthe made on 18 April 1906, the morning of the earthquake, held with the rest of his collection at the Library of Congress. It is grouped with his Chinatown and earthquake photographs. The catalogue confirms the exact date but records nothing about the subject in the frame.
1906 - Chinatown streets after the earthquake, photographed by Arnold Genthe. Arnold Genthe photographed the city on the morning of April 18, 1906, working through the district he had spent a decade documenting. This negative belongs to the group covering the earthquake's effect on Chinatown. It is held in the Genthe Collection at the Library of Congress.
1906 - Arnold Genthe's view of Chinatown on the morning of the earthquake. Genthe photographed the city on 18 April 1906, the day the earthquake struck and the fires began. He had spent years documenting Chinatown before the disaster, and the quarter he had recorded was destroyed within days of this negative being exposed.
1906 - Arnold Genthe's view of the city on earthquake day. Arnold Genthe photographed San Francisco on 18 April 1906, the morning the earthquake struck and the fires began. Genthe was already known for years of street photography in Chinatown, and his earthquake images became among the most reproduced records of the disaster. The transparency is held by the Library of Congress.
1906 - Genthe transparency made in Chinatown as the city burned. One of Arnold Genthe's exposures from 18 April 1906, catalogued by the Library of Congress among his photographs of the earthquake in Chinatown. Genthe's own studio and negative files were destroyed in the fire, so the surviving images are the remnant of a much larger body of work. This example is held as a colour transparency rather than a negative.
1906 - Chinatown after San Francisco Earthquake 1906. There are bed frames and some columns of bricks standing on the left and right of the photograph amidst debris and rubble from crumbled homes. There is a large, destroyed building on the right.
1906 - Our San Francisco (1906 earthquake) 1. A photograph of the destruction caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, for the article "Our San Francisco," by James Hopper in Everybody's Magazine, June 1906 (3 months after the fire). The article was an eyewitness report of the earthquake by the author who was working for the Call and staying in t
1906 - Our San Francisco (1906 earthquake) 2. A photograph of the destruction caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, for the article "Our San Francisco," by James Hopper in Everybody's Magazine, June 1906 (3 months after the fire). The article was an eyewitness report of the earthquake by the author who was working for the Call and staying in t

…454 further moments continue the chronology here. Full text archive: /loreline-text/san-francisco.md

2021-05-02 - Trailer for the ruth weiss documentary. ruth weiss escaped Nazi Europe as a ten-year-old refugee and became a jazz-backed poet in North Beach, one of the few women given standing in a scene remembered almost entirely through its men. The trailer for this Emmy-winning documentary sets out a life that spanned ninety-two years.
2021-05-17 - City Lights marks McClure's last book of poems. The first day of City Lights' memorial tribute to Michael McClure, who died in 2020, built around Mule Kick Blues, his final collection. Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles and Garrett Caples read from the work of the last surviving reader from the 6 Gallery bill.
2021 - San Francisco's Hidden History: The Trail Most Tourists Miss. Today, I spend six hours exploring San Francisco's Barbary Coast Trail. It is an urban hike that takes you from Downtown SF and walks you through some of the most historical sites in the city. The walk is steeped in the city's fascinating history starting in the Gold Rush Era to 1906; when it went
2021 - The Fight to Save the Cable Cars | HISTORY. The Cable Cars of San Francisco are unique, there are no others like it in operation anywhere in the world today! But preserving them has been quite an uphill battle. Here now is their story from inception and construction in 1873, to the present day (2021). To get exclusive content and videos fea
2021-11-10 - Lincoln Cushing on the home front that remade Bay Area labor. Historian Lincoln Cushing presents for the Rosie the Riveter Trust on the wartime home front seen through the Kaiser shipyards at Richmond. The period reshaped labor organising, race and gender relations, and health care, with the Permanente Health Plan opening to the general public on 21 July 1945. The Richmond yards delivered 747 ships before closing in 1945 and 1946.
2022-03-23 - How a Kaiser in-house poster became a labour icon. Historian Lincoln Cushing traces the Westinghouse-era poster now universally known as Rosie the Riveter from obscure workplace notice to political shorthand. The Rosie the Riveter Trust recorded the talk in 2022. Cushing's point cuts against the image: the real Richmond job was overwhelmingly welding, and welders were over forty per cent female by 1944.
2022 - San Francisco Cable Car. *This video received 2nd Place, Documentary for SCAN NATOA Awards 2023 and also was nominated in the California Emmy Awards 2023* Cable cars were invented by Andrew Smith Hallidie here in San Francisco in 1873. By 1947, the lower operational costs of buses prompted Mayor Roger Lapham to declare, "t
2022 - Emperor Norton: America's Most Unconventional Leader. Invest in blue-chip art for the very first time by signing up for Masterworks: Purchase shares in great masterpieces from artists like Pablo Picasso, Banksy, Andy Warhol, and more. How Masterworks works: -Create your account with crypto wallet or traditional bank
2022-07-22 - A maritime museum traces the long career of Harry Bridges. An hour-long museum programme from Foss Waterway Seaport on the Australian-born longshoreman who chaired the 1934 strike committee and led the ILWU from its 1937 founding until 1977. Employers and federal prosecutors spent three decades trying to deport him. The talk was recorded and published in 2022.
2023-03-06 - San Francisco before the strike of 1934. The opening chapter of the Strikestory documentary, on the conditions that produced the walkout: the shape-up on the Embarcadero, the company union, and the Depression-era waterfront. It sets up the eighty-two-day coastwide strike and the four days in July when roughly 130,000 San Francisco workers stopped work.
2023-03-23 - Sid LeProtti and the music of the vice quarter. Jazz researcher Dave Radlauer on pianist Sid LeProtti and the Barbary Coast music scene, built on the district's own venues and recorded recollections. The quarter's clubs included Purcell's So Different Club at 520 Pacific, Black-owned and home to the So Different Jazz Band, and the Thalia at 732 Pacific with its double-tiered slummers' balconies. LeProtti remembered the literal last night in March 1921, when a corporal walked in and stopped the music at one o'clock.
2023 - Absolute Mad Lads - Emperor Norton. Go to my sponsor to get a 14 day free trial and see if your personal information has been leaked online ===== LINKS ===== PayPal Donations: Patreon: Subscribestar:
2023 - How They Work: SF's Cable Cars and PCC Cars. Experience the thrill of San Francisco's famous cable cars as we take you behind the scenes to uncover the secrets of these incredible historic marvels. How do they manage to tackle some of the steepest hills in any city without an engine? We'll show you! We also explore the PCC Streetcars, the mo
2023 - How they work - what's happening out of sight on the San Francisco Cable. Here's a more in-depth look at the workings of San Francisco's unique cable cars. What goes on below the slot - how does the cable stay in tension and how does the grip work? I've already looked at the history and taken a ride in this film This is a closer look at the
2023 - The Last Surviving Cousins Of The San Francisco Cable Car. Cable tramways - or in North America, cable cars - were once common in cities across the United States. But famously, San Francisco is the only American city that still operates them today. Less famously, the United Kingdom used to have cable tramways too. And one of them still survives! But why did
2023 - Garcia on Wolfe. Jerry Garcia on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's 1968 account of Kesey's bus, the book that fixed the era's image for everyone who wasn't there.
2024-01-12 - Supreme Court agrees to hear the anti camping case. In January 2024 the Supreme Court agreed to review the Ninth Circuit rulings that barred West Coast cities from clearing encampments when shelter beds were unavailable. The case, Grants Pass v Johnson, was decided on 28 June 2024 in favour of the cities, and San Francisco began aggressive sweeps the following month.
2024-02-10 - Waymo robotaxi burned by crowd in Chinatown. On the evening of 10 February 2024, during Lunar New Year weekend, a crowd surrounded a driverless Waymo Jaguar on Jackson Street in Chinatown, smashed its windows and threw a firework inside, and the unoccupied car burned out. It was reported at the time as the most destructive attack on a driverless vehicle in the United States, and became the defining image of San Francisco's backlash against autonomous vehicles.
2024-02-10 - Crowd smashes and burns a driverless taxi in Chinatown. On the evening of 10 February 2024, during Lunar New Year weekend, a crowd surrounded a driverless Waymo Jaguar I-Pace on Jackson Street in Chinatown, broke its windows, sprayed it with graffiti and threw a firework inside. The car burned out completely; it was carrying no passengers and nobody was hurt. The burning white robotaxi under Chinatown lanterns became the most widely circulated image of the city's backlash against autonomous vehicles.
2024-02-10 - Crowd burns a driverless Waymo in Chinatown. On the Saturday of Lunar New Year weekend, a crowd surrounded an unoccupied Waymo Jaguar I-Pace on Jackson Street in Chinatown, smashed its windows, sprayed it with graffiti and threw a firework inside. The car burned out completely and no one was hurt. It was described at the time as the most destructive attack on a driverless vehicle in the United States.
2024-02-10 - Waymo robotaxi burns on a Chinatown street. On the Saturday night of Lunar New Year weekend a crowd surrounded a driverless Waymo Jaguar I-Pace on Jackson Street in Chinatown, smashed its windows and threw a firework inside, and the car burned out completely. No one was aboard and no injuries were reported. It was described at the time as the most destructive attack on a driverless vehicle in the United States.
2024-02-10 - Waymo robotaxi burned in Chinatown on Lunar New Year. On the evening of 10 February 2024, during Lunar New Year weekend, a crowd surrounded an unoccupied Waymo Jaguar I-Pace on Jackson Street, smashed its windows, sprayed it with graffiti and threw a firework inside; the car burned out completely. No one was injured, and it was reported as the most destructive attack on a driverless vehicle in the United States to that point.
2024-02-12 - Investigators work to identify who torched the robotaxi. Two days after the Chinatown burning, a reporter package covered the effort to identify the people who destroyed the vehicle. The attack came as Waymo was expanding driverless service across San Francisco, and it became the defining image of local resistance to autonomous vehicles.
2024-02-19 - Chinatown press conference demands robotaxi shutdown. Nine days after a driverless Waymo was burned on Jackson Street, labor and community groups held a press conference in San Francisco's Chinatown calling for driverless vehicles to be pulled from the streets. The footage records the organised political response to the February 2024 attack rather than the attack itself.
2024-04-17 - Police name teenage suspect in Waymo arson. San Francisco police announced on 17 April 2024 that they had identified a 14-year-old as a suspect in the burning of a driverless Waymo Jaguar on Jackson Street in Chinatown that February. The fire, set during Lunar New Year weekend after a crowd surrounded and smashed the unoccupied car, was reported as the most destructive attack on an autonomous vehicle in the country to that point.
2024-06-14 - Walking the emptied mall under its old name. A walkthrough of the mall months after the receiver renamed it Emporium Centre San Francisco, reaching back past the mall era to the nineteenth-century department store that occupied the Market Street site. Westfield and Brookfield had stopped paying the mortgage in 2023 and ceded the property to lenders; Bloomingdale's was still trading as the last anchor.
2024-07-06 - Skaters move a block to bomb the hill. After the 2023 Dolores Hill Bomb ended in mass arrests, police tried to shut the event down with barricades, and skaters relocated one block away to bomb a parallel slope. The turnout was far smaller than the previous year, and the fire department reported at least two injuries, both to skaters without helmets.
2024-07-06 - Skaters move the hill bomb one block from the barricades. After the 2023 event ended in mass arrests, police barricaded Dolores Street to stop the annual hill bomb. Skaters relocated to a parallel slope on Church Street and bombed it instead; officers were present but did not intervene, and the gathering was far smaller than the previous year.
2024-08-10 - SoMa residents kept awake by honking driverless cars. Residents of South of Market reported that Waymo vehicles converging on a parking lot were honking at each other through the night. The complaint marked a quieter register of the city's autonomous-vehicle conflict, in which the machines became a neighbourhood nuisance rather than a target.
2024-08-13 - Robotaxis honk at each other overnight in South of Market. Residents near a Waymo parking lot reported being woken around four in the morning by driverless cars honking at one another as they manoeuvred in the depot. The complaint marked a quieter register of the same argument as the Chinatown fire: what it means for a residential block to host autonomous vehicle infrastructure.
2024-10-02 - The Harry Bridges School of Labor teaches the general strike. A 2024 session of the Harry Bridges School of Labor on the 1934 San Francisco general strike, covering the conditions that produced it, the strike itself and its aftermath, and screening part of an older ILWU documentary. Bridges led ILA Local 38-79 in 1934 and went on to serve as ILWU president until 1977. The union still stops work in every West Coast port each 5 July.
2024-11-06 - Elections department counts ballots as mayoral race hangs. The day after the 2024 election, San Francisco's Department of Elections was still processing close to 160,000 ballots, leaving the mayoral result unresolved under ranked-choice tabulation. Daniel Lurie ultimately led through all fourteen rounds of counting.
2024-11-07 - London Breed concedes the mayoralty to Daniel Lurie. Two days after the election, incumbent mayor London Breed conceded to Daniel Lurie, who had won the final round of ranked-choice counting by more than 34,000 votes. Breed had led the city since 2018; her defeat by a first-time candidate marked the pivot point of San Francisco's post-pandemic politics.
2024-11-07 - London Breed concedes the mayoral race at City Hall. Mayor London Breed addressed reporters at City Hall on 7 November 2024 after conceding to Daniel Lurie, ending her tenure as mayor. Lurie led every round of the ranked-choice count and took the final round by more than 34,000 votes, unseating an incumbent with a candidate who had never held office.
2024-11-07 - Breed concedes the mayor's race to Lurie. KRON4's report on London Breed's concession, posted to social media on the afternoon of 7 November 2024, in which she thanked the city that raised her. Breed had served since 2018 and was the first incumbent San Francisco mayor unseated in decades.
2024-11-07 - London Breed concedes the mayoral race. Election coverage of Mayor London Breed conceding to Daniel Lurie, two days after voting closed and while ranked-choice rounds were still being tabulated. Breed lost the final round of ranked-choice tabulation by more than 34,000 votes to a candidate who had never held elected office.
2024-11-08 - Mayor-elect outlines his plans in first address. Daniel Lurie's first public remarks after London Breed's concession, reported by KPIX. He ran on public safety, drug enforcement and downtown recovery, and would be sworn in two months later.
2024-11-08 - Lurie speaks after Breed concedes the mayoralty. Associated Press footage from 8 November 2024 of Daniel Lurie at a news conference the day after Mayor London Breed conceded. Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir and Tipping Point founder who had never held elected office, led through all fourteen rounds of ranked-choice tabulation and won the final round by more than 34,000 votes.
2024-11-08 - Lurie speaks after Breed concedes the mayoral race. Wire footage of Daniel Lurie addressing supporters at a news conference the day after Mayor London Breed conceded. Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir and founder of the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point, had never held elected office and led through all fourteen rounds of ranked-choice tabulation.
2024-11-15 - Homelessness advocates weigh the incoming administration. Following the 2024 election, homelessness service providers and advocates set out what they expected of the incoming Lurie administration. The question followed a year in which the Supreme Court's Grants Pass ruling and a state executive order had cleared the way for aggressive encampment sweeps.
2024-11-18 - Lurie sits for his first local interview as mayor-elect. Daniel Lurie gave his first Bay Area television interview after winning the mayoral race, weeks before taking office. The Tipping Point founder and Levi Strauss heir had never held elected office and had led through all fourteen rounds of ranked-choice tabulation.
2024-11-25 - Mayor-elect Lurie interviewed on his plans for downtown. Three weeks after his election, Daniel Lurie sat for a televised interview on returning workers to downtown offices, public safety, and broadening the city's economy beyond technology. Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir and founder of the anti-poverty group Tipping Point, had never held elected office before defeating incumbent London Breed.
2025-01-04 - Mayor-elect joins neighborhood cleanups before taking office. On the weekend of 4 January 2025, three days before his swearing-in, Daniel Lurie hosted volunteer street cleanups at Ocean Beach, Ingleside and Bayview. The events set the presentational tone of an administration that would make visible street conditions its central measure.
2025-01-07 - Interfaith ceremony on the eve of inauguration. A KPIX report on the interfaith unity ceremony Daniel Lurie held on 7 January 2025, the day before he was sworn in. The gathering opened the transition from London Breed's administration to the city's forty-sixth mayor.
2025-01-07 - City prepares for the swearing-in of its new mayor. A report filed on the eve of Daniel Lurie's inauguration, covering the preparations at City Hall and the incoming administration's stated plans for law enforcement. Lurie was sworn in the following day.
2025-01-08 - Lurie delivers his inaugural address. The new mayor's speech to the crowd immediately after being sworn in. He took office facing a fentanyl crisis he had promised to attack in his first six months, and would shortly be granted emergency contracting powers by the Board of Supervisors to do it.
2025-01-08 - Oath of office administered to the forty-sixth mayor. The oath itself, administered after remarks by Lurie's wife Becca Prowda, completing the transfer of the mayoralty from London Breed. Breed had conceded on 7 November 2024 after losing a ranked-choice contest she led as the incumbent.
2025-01-08 - Inside City Hall on inauguration day. An unedited walk through San Francisco City Hall on the day Daniel Lurie was sworn in as the city's forty-sixth mayor. The footage records the building, the crowd and the ceremony staging rather than the speeches, following the day as it ran.
2025-01-08 - Full ceremony as Lurie is sworn in as mayor. ABC7's unedited recording of the 8 January 2025 inauguration of Daniel Lurie as San Francisco's forty-sixth mayor. He took office having never held elected office, after unseating an incumbent mayor two months earlier.
2025-01-08 - Steve Kerr speaks at the mayoral inauguration. Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr delivered remarks at the ceremony installing Daniel Lurie as the forty-sixth mayor of San Francisco. The appearance placed the city's basketball franchise, resident at Chase Center since 2019, inside the civic ritual.
2025-01-08 - Lurie sworn in and lays out his agenda. A local television report on the inauguration of Daniel Lurie and the priorities set out in his first address as mayor. He entered office having campaigned on the fentanyl crisis, street conditions and downtown recovery.
2025-01-08 - Agency footage of the mayoral oath at City Hall. News agency material from 8 January 2025 showing Daniel Lurie signing the oath of office indoors with his family and then taking the oath at the outdoor ceremony on the City Hall steps. The wide shots record the civic setting of the transfer of power from London Breed.
2025-01-08 - Full inauguration ceremony for Mayor Daniel Lurie. Unedited coverage of the 8 January 2025 ceremony at City Hall at which Daniel Lurie was sworn in as San Francisco's forty-sixth mayor. Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir and founder of the anti-poverty organisation Tipping Point, took office having never previously held elected office.
2025-01-08 - Inaugural address sets the new administration's agenda. A broadcast package on the agenda Daniel Lurie laid out in his inaugural address: a fentanyl emergency response, expanded shelter and treatment capacity, and a push to refill downtown. He could not lawfully declare a state of emergency on taking office, since city code reserves that power for sudden and unforeseen events, and the Board of Supervisors later voted him the equivalent powers.
2025-01-08 - Chinatown marks the new mayor's inauguration. Street footage of Chinatown observances tied to the swearing-in of Mayor Daniel Lurie. The neighborhood's organized turnout for a new administration is a recurring feature of San Francisco civic transitions.
2025-01-08 - Lurie sets out his agenda after taking office. The new mayor's inaugural address on Civic Center Plaza, in which Lurie promised to restore trust in city government. Within his first months the Board of Supervisors granted him emergency powers over the fentanyl crisis, waiving competitive bidding on some contracts and allowing private donations toward shelter beds and public-safety hiring.
2025-01-08 - Full inauguration ceremony for the forty-sixth mayor. Daniel Lurie was sworn in as San Francisco's 46th mayor on 8 January 2025, having won the November 2024 election through all fourteen rounds of ranked-choice tabulation. The ceremony is recorded here in full, from the procession to the inaugural address setting out his agenda on fentanyl, shelter and downtown recovery.
2025-01-08 - Lurie sworn in, names fentanyl the first priority. Daniel Lurie took the oath of office as San Francisco's forty-sixth mayor and said the fentanyl crisis would be his administration's first priority. He could not legally declare a state of emergency on day one, and the Board of Supervisors later voted him extraordinary powers to act on it.
2025-01-08 - Crowd at the mayoral inauguration on Civic Center Plaza. Attendee footage from the swearing-in of Daniel Lurie on 8 January 2025, held outdoors on Civic Center Plaza before a crowd reported at around three thousand. The open-air ceremony was staged as a public event rather than a City Hall formality.
2025-01-08 - Daniel Lurie sworn in at Civic Center Plaza. The full inauguration ceremony for San Francisco's 46th mayor, held outdoors at Civic Center Plaza. Lurie was the first person since 1911 to win the office without having previously served in city government, taking over after defeating the incumbent in November.
2025-01-18 - Activists march through the city before the inauguration. Two days before Donald Trump's second inauguration, demonstrators marched through San Francisco streets against the incoming administration's immigration and reproductive-rights positions. The march came months before the June 2025 downtown protest against ICE arrests that ended in more than 150 arrests.
2025-01-21 - Bloomingdale's to close its Union Square flagship. Broadcast report on Bloomingdale's announcing it would close its San Francisco flagship. With Nordstrom gone since August 2023, the departure emptied the second of the San Francisco Centre's two anchors and left the mall without a department store.
2025-01-21 - Bloomingdale's to close its Market Street flagship. Bloomingdale's announced in January 2025 that it would close its store at the San Francisco Centre in the spring, in favour of suburban locations. With Nordstrom gone since August 2023, the departure left the mall without either of its anchor tenants.
2025-02-15 - Chinatown Lunar New Year parade for the Year of the Snake. The full length of San Francisco's Lunar New Year parade for the Year of the Snake, filmed from the route. The parade has run since the Gold Rush era and remains the largest event of its kind outside Asia, staged through the same Chinatown streets where a driverless taxi had been burned during the previous year's holiday weekend.
2025-02-15 - Culinary showcase during NBA All-Star Weekend. A food event staged alongside NBA All-Star Weekend, the first held at Chase Center since the arena opened in 2019. The All-Star Game itself was played on February 16, 2025, and the surrounding programme spread across San Francisco and Oakland.
2025-02-16 - Curry takes All-Star honours in the Chase Center game. The 74th NBA All-Star Game was played at Chase Center on February 16, 2025, the first held in the arena since it opened in 2019, before an announced crowd of 17,539. Stephen Curry was named most valuable player. The weekend was one of the largest events the city hosted between the pandemic and Super Bowl LX.
2025-02-16 - Inside Chase Center for the All-Star Game. The 74th NBA All-Star Game was played at Chase Center on 16 February 2025, the first All-Star Game held at the arena since it opened in 2019, before an attendance of 17,539. Stephen Curry was named most valuable player and the weekend's earlier events ran across the city and Oakland Arena.
2025-03-29 - How Did The Six Gallery Reading Get Its Name? - Im a 50s Baby. How Did The Six Gallery Reading Get Its Name? Step back in time to a moment in American literature that still sparks creativity and inspiration. In this engaging video, we’ll take you to the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where a gathering of poets and writers came together on October seventh, ninete
2025-04-03 - Bloomingdale's clears its shelves as the mall empties. Shoppers filled Bloomingdale's for a seventy-percent-off clearance while the surrounding San Francisco Centre stood largely vacant. The store's announced departure early in 2025 removed the building's second anchor, Nordstrom having closed in August 2023.
2025-04-07 - Zara to open a new flagship on Union Square. A year after closing its Union Square store, the Spanish retailer announced a new San Francisco flagship, later confirmed as more than forty thousand square feet in a historic four storey corner building at 400 Post Street. The announcement was made alongside the mayor and treated as evidence that national brands were returning to the district.
2025-04-16 - Groundbreaking for affordable housing on South Van Ness. The Mission Economic Development Agency and the Chinatown Community Development Center broke ground on Casa Adelante at 1515 South Van Ness, a project bringing 168 affordable homes to the Mission District. The ceremony marks construction starting on subsidised housing during the city's long argument over what housing costs.
2025-05-30 - Mayor unveils a budget against an eight hundred million deficit. Lurie presented his first budget proposal, built to close a shortfall approaching $800 million. The gap defined the fiscal frame of his first year in office and preceded the department job cuts proposed the following spring.
2025-06-08 - Driverless cars burned during immigration enforcement protests. On 8 June 2025 protests against federal immigration enforcement and the National Guard deployment to Los Angeles spread through downtown San Francisco, and driverless vehicles were vandalised and set alight. Waymo went on to curtail service across parts of the city, publishing a map of the affected zones on 13 June. A later downtown protest that month ended with more than 150 arrests.
2025-06-09 - Mission District rally against immigration raids. Protesters gathered in the Mission District as immigration enforcement raids swept California and the National Guard was deployed to Los Angeles. Demonstrations continued across San Francisco through June 2025; a downtown protest later that month ended with more than 150 arrests.
2025-06-09 - Union leaders denounce immigration raids at downtown rally. Union members rallied in downtown San Francisco on June 9, 2025 against federal immigration enforcement, with labor leaders speaking to a chanting crowd. The rally came during the wave of Bay Area protests over ICE arrests and the National Guard deployment to Los Angeles; a downtown demonstration later that month ended with more than 150 arrests.
2025-06-10 - Police confront anti-ICE protesters near Twenty-Fourth Street. Splinter groups broke from a larger San Francisco demonstration against federal immigration enforcement, and a McDonald's beside the 24th Street BART station was graffitied before police moved in. The June 2025 protests followed ICE arrests and the National Guard deployment to Los Angeles; a downtown march that month ended with more than 150 arrests.
2025 - Nine lions dance at the Chinatown night market. A lion dance with nine lions, a green dragon and martial arts weapon demonstrations at the Chinatown Night Market. The night markets were introduced to draw evening foot traffic back to the neighbourhood's commercial blocks.
2025-06-29 - Pride parade and festival fill Market Street. Walking footage of the San Francisco Pride parade and Civic Center festival, filmed the day of the event. Pride remains the city's largest annual public gathering and one of the few that reliably fills Market Street end to end.
2025-08-19 - A filmed portrait of the City Lights publisher. A biographical profile of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born 1919 and dead in February 2021, tracing the Paris bookshop world he came of age in and the San Francisco store it inspired. It covers his role as the publisher who took on Howl and the ACLU-backed defence he arranged before the book was ever printed in England.
2025-08-27 - SoMa encampments clear out before the sweep arrives. The city posted notice that it would sweep encampments in South of Market, and most tents had gone before crews appeared. Residents interviewed said clearing sidewalks moved people rather than housing them, the standing objection to a sweep policy the city retained after settling the Coalition on Homelessness lawsuit.
2025-09-20 - Lowriders roll through the Mission District. The King of the Street lowrider parade ran through the Mission District on 20 September 2025. Lowriding is a Chicano tradition rooted in the Mission and long the target of cruising bans, and the parade is one of the neighbourhood's largest annual street gatherings.
2025-10-06 - Uniqlo announces a return to downtown. Uniqlo, which shut its three-floor flagship at 111 Powell Street in 2021 during the downtown retail exodus, announced it would reopen at 801 Market Street in the former Old Navy flagship. The announcement was read locally as the clearest reversal of the departures that had emptied Union Square.
2025-10-23 - Mission housing nonprofit marks fifty-two years. The Mission Economic Development Agency gathered partners, staff and community members at the War Memorial Green Room for its fifty-second anniversary, under the theme La Union Hace la Fuerza. Mayor Daniel Lurie addressed the event, one of the Mission's principal affordable-housing and community-development organisations.
2025-10-31 - Halloween block party fills a Noe Valley street. Avila Street's annual Halloween block party, filmed the length of the evening as neighbours and visitors gather among decorated houses. The neighbourhood parties have absorbed much of the costumed Halloween crowd since the city ended the official Castro street celebration.
2025-11-01 - Castro Night Market on Halloween night. Walking footage of the final Castro Night Market of 2025, held on Halloween, with costumed crowds, music and food vendors filling the street. The market is a city-permitted successor to the neighbourhood's Halloween street gatherings, which were shut down in the 2000s after repeated violence.
2025-11-12 - Waymo opens freeway rides between San Francisco and San Jose. Waymo began public freeway robotaxi service on 12 November 2025, merging its Bay Area territory into a single zone of more than 260 square miles running down the Peninsula. Riders in the early-access group could hail a car in San Francisco and be driven roughly forty-five miles to curbside at San Jose Mineta airport, turning a city-centre novelty into regional infrastructure.
2025-11-12 - Waymo opens freeway rides to the public. Waymo began carrying public passengers on freeways in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, opening the service to early-access riders first. In the Bay Area the change merged the service area into a single zone of more than 260 square miles running on US-101 and I-280, reaching down the Peninsula. It marked the point at which the robotaxi stopped being confined to the city core.
2025-11-12 - Waymo opens paid robotaxi rides on freeways. Waymo began carrying public riders on freeways in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix on 12 November 2025, and merged its Bay Area territory into a single zone of more than 260 square miles reaching down the Peninsula. The change moved the robotaxi from a downtown novelty to regional infrastructure, with rides possible from near City Hall to San Jose.
2025-11-13 - Atmospheric river brings wind and rain to the city. Broadcast coverage of an atmospheric river striking San Francisco and the wider Bay Area with heavy rain and destructive gusts. Thousands lost power, flights were delayed or cancelled, and an 80 mph gust was recorded in the Marin Headlands.
2025-12-15 - Union Square merchants describe a retail rebound. By late 2025 Union Square was signing tenants again after the flagship exodus of the pandemic years, with Pop Mart, Nintendo and John Varvatos among the arrivals. Uniqlo had announced in October that it would return downtown at 801 Market Street, the former Old Navy flagship, four years after closing its Powell Street store.
2026-01-03 - Mayor signs a reparations fund for Black residents. Lurie signed a measure establishing a reparations fund for San Francisco's Black residents, drawing both support and criticism because the fund carries no taxpayer money for direct payments. The signing came as the city faced a budget shortfall of nearly eight hundred million dollars.
2026-01-08 - Residents take stock of the mayor's first year. A local news package marking one year of the Lurie administration, gathering residents' assessments of the public-safety priority the mayor set on taking office. Contemporaneous reporting recorded 588 overdose deaths in 2025 against 635 the year before, roughly 500 treatment beds delivered against a promised 1,500, and a street tent count down to 162 structures by December.
2026-01-09 - Mayor describes the talks that halted the federal immigration surge. Lurie discusses the conversations with President Trump that preceded the calling off of a threatened surge of federal immigration agents into San Francisco. The plan, announced by the Department of Homeland Security, was scrapped in October 2025 after Trump cited conversations with the mayor and with tech executives who live in the area.
2026-01-09 - Gig drivers protest as robotaxis stall in a blackout. Gig workers gathered in San Francisco on 9 January 2026 after driverless vehicles stalled on city streets during a power outage. The protest followed two years of friction over autonomous vehicles, from the Chinatown burning in February 2024 to Waymo's opening of freeway service across a single 260 square mile Bay Area zone in November 2025.
2026-01-11 - Crab sold off the boats at Fisherman's Wharf. After weeks of delay to the Dungeness season, crabbers began selling their catch directly to buyers at Fisherman's Wharf at about eleven dollars a pound. It was the fourth year of off-the-boat sales, a working remnant of the waterfront economy inside a tourist district.
2026-01-15 - Lurie delivers his first State of the City address. Daniel Lurie gave his first State of the City address, recorded in full by the city's government channel. He pointed to declining crime, an expanded police hiring pipeline, added treatment capacity under a recovery-first approach to fentanyl, and a family zoning plan alongside permitting reform, arguing the city was on the rise.
2026-01-20 - Downtown mall announces its final week of trading. A broadcast report from the week the San Francisco Centre confirmed it would shut for good. The Market Street mall opened in 1988 and was expanded in 2006; it lost its Nordstrom anchor in 2023, was handed to lenders after its owners stopped paying the mortgage, was renamed the Emporium Centre in 2024, and lost Bloomingdale's in 2025.
2026-01-24 - Mayor backs state legislation targeting sideshows. Mayor Daniel Lurie announced his endorsement of state legislation intended to curb sideshows in San Francisco. The brief broadcast item records one of the administration's street-enforcement positions during its second year.
2026-01-24 - Last week of the San Francisco Centre mall. ABC7 reports on the imminent permanent closure of the San Francisco Centre, which opened on Market Street in 1988 and shut for good on 24 January 2026. Nordstrom left in 2023 and Bloomingdale's announced its exit in January 2025, emptying both anchors before the building's owners handed it to lenders.
2026-01-24 - A last walkthrough of San Francisco Centre. A full walk through San Francisco Centre in its final days, recording the spiral escalators under the glass dome, the vacated storefronts and the concourse connection to the Powell Street station. The mall closed permanently on 2026-01-24 after thirty-seven years.
2026-01-24 - Last days of the San Francisco Centre mall. The San Francisco Centre, opened in 1988 on Market Street and expanded in 2006, closed permanently on 24 January 2026, two days ahead of its announced date. Its owners had stopped paying the mortgage in 2023 and ceded the building to lenders; Nordstrom left in 2023 and Bloomingdale's in 2025.
2026-01-24 - Final walkthrough of every floor before the mall closes. A floor-by-floor record of the San Francisco Centre in its last days of trading, shot before the building closed permanently on 24 January 2026, two days ahead of its announced date. The spiral escalators rising under the glass dome were among the most recognisable interiors in the city.
2026-01-25 - A farewell party for the shuttered downtown mall. San Franciscans gathered for an impromptu goodbye at San Francisco Centre the weekend after it closed for good. The Market Street mall opened in 1988, was expanded in 2006, and shut permanently on 2026-01-24, two days ahead of its announced date.
2026-02-03 - Security briefing before Super Bowl week. Federal, state and local agencies briefed reporters in San Francisco on preparations for Super Bowl LX, played on 8 February 2026 at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara with the fan facing week staged in the city. The mayor ran a street cleanup and safety operation through the Emergency Operations Center, and the city opened shelter beds for unhoused people displaced during the week.
2026-02-03 - Agencies outline Super Bowl security and confirm no ICE role. NFL, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and local police chiefs set out security plans for Super Bowl LX, covering road closures, flight restrictions and bag policies, and stated that no immigration enforcement agents were assigned. The game was played at Levi's Stadium on February 8 with the fan-facing week staged in San Francisco.
2026-03-02 - Drivers and Teamsters rally against robotaxis at City Hall. Professional drivers and Teamsters members rallied outside City Hall before a Board of Supervisors committee meeting on autonomous vehicles, arguing that robotaxis and workplace automation threaten their livelihoods and public safety. The rally followed Waymo's expansion onto Bay Area freeways in November 2025, which turned the service from a city-centre novelty into regional infrastructure.
2026-03-02 - Drivers and unions rally against robotaxis at City Hall. Teamsters Joint Council 7 and SEIU 1021 members rallied on the City Hall steps to demand that Waymo vehicles be removed from San Francisco streets over safety concerns, timed to a city hearing. By late 2025 Waymo had extended its Bay Area service onto freeways and across a single 260-square-mile zone.
2026-03-03 - Mayor calls for hundreds of job cuts across city departments. Facing a budget deficit, Mayor Daniel Lurie proposed eliminating hundreds of positions across municipal departments. The shortfall had run near $800 million during his first year, and the cuts set the terms of the city's second post-pandemic budget argument.
2026-03-03 - City departments ordered to cut five hundred jobs. The mayor directed departments to eliminate at least five hundred positions to cut one hundred million dollars in personnel spending. San Francisco entered 2026 facing a shortfall of nearly eight hundred million dollars, the fiscal backdrop to a year in which office leasing recovered faster than street level activity.
2026-03-07 - Crowds fill the Chinese New Year parade route. Tens of thousands turned out for San Francisco's Chinese New Year Parade, the largest Lunar New Year celebration outside Asia, with Olympic gold medallist and city native Eileen Gu serving as grand marshal and a drone show accompanying the procession. The parade runs through the same Chinatown streets where a driverless taxi was burned during the 2024 holiday weekend.
2026-03-25 - Rideshare drivers rally outside the Waymo depot. Uber and Lyft drivers organised by SEIU California massed outside Waymo's San Francisco depot to demand passage of SB 1246, a bill regulating autonomous taxis, arguing enforcement standards differ between human and driverless fleets. The rally followed Waymo's expansion onto Bay Area freeways the previous November.
2026-05-27 - Howl Audio Commentary. Howl is a 2010 American film which explores both the 1955 Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of 20th-century American poet Allen Ginsberg's noted poem "Howl". The film is written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco as Ginsberg.
2026 - Dragon dance and firecrackers through Chinatown. The Lunar New Year parade ran through Chinatown with lion and dragon dances, floats and firecrackers. The parade is the city's largest annual Chinese community event and fills the same streets where a driverless taxi was burned during the 2024 holiday weekend.
2026 - Mayor Lurie delivers his first State of the City address. In his first State of the City address Daniel Lurie pointed to declining crime, an expanded police hiring pipeline, added treatment capacity and a recovery-first approach to fentanyl, alongside a Family Zoning plan, permitting reform and childcare subsidies. The speech closed his first year in office.
2026 - Walking the Chinatown street fair on parade day. A continuous walk up Grant Avenue from California Street to Broadway during the Chinatown Community Street Fair, held on the day of the Lunar New Year parade. The fair fills the neighborhood's main commercial spine with drumming, vendors and crowds, and remains among the largest Lunar New Year celebrations outside Asia.
2026-06-28 - Pride parade fills Market Street. Bystander footage of the San Francisco Pride parade along Market Street. The march remains among the largest annual gatherings staged in the downtown core.
2026-06-28 - Highlights from the Pride parade on Market Street. Broadcast highlights of the 2026 San Francisco Pride parade down Market Street. The parade remains the city's largest annual public gathering and its most durable civic ritual.
2026-06-28 - Pride parade fills Market Street again. The 2026 Pride parade drew visitors from outside the region along its Market Street route. The march remains the city's largest annual public gathering and one of the few that reliably fills the downtown corridor.
2026-07-04 - Police in riot gear clear Mission District fireworks. Block after block of the Mission District hosted impromptu illegal fireworks displays on the Fourth of July. San Francisco police in riot gear closed streets after 10pm and dispersed hundreds of people.
2026-07-29 - Mayor pushes charter reform onto the ballot. A report on three ballot measures promoted by Mayor Daniel Lurie to amend the city charter. The push came in a year when San Francisco voters were also being asked to decide new transit taxes against a projected Muni funding shortfall.

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