Curious about some of the buildings in my neighbourhood, Cow Hollow, thought to share a running list of websites I enjoyed stumbling on:
- OpenSFHistory is an archive of pictures owned by a San Francisco photographer and collector active from the 1960s through the early 2000s. It’s a treasure trove of pictures of my area (April 2022) Cow Hollow.
- FoundSF is another sepia-tinted archive of photography, ordered by neighbourhood and including the Marina but excluding my narrow strip of territory in Cow Hollow (what!?). Have a look at the Marina page to see a picture of a squashed car during the October 1989 earthquake in which the third story of this local apartment building ended up being the ground floor with a car underneath it. Per the caption “The ground levels are no longer visible because of structural failure and sinking due to liquefaction”.Thirty structures were destroyed, and so your chances are OK with the extent of earthquake-proofing that has gone on since (but don’t quote me).
And these are two books on San Francisco that I’ve loved opening up on a Saturday morning every now and then, after (mostly) reading during my first few years here…
- The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld
- A Crack At The Edge Of The World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
- San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities We have to judge policy on results, and Schellenberger’s writing aligns with my instinct as to what is really going on in the mess you’ll see around us when you arrive in San Francisco.
