Timecapsule: November 18, 1865 Mark Twain's improbable wild west tale about an inveterate gambler and a jumping frog becomes the talk of New York City. Mark Twain -- or, let's use the name his mother gave him -- Samuel Clemens was not much of a miner. Up in the rainy foothills of the Sierra Nevada gold country, he preferred sitting around the camp tavern stove and listening to local characters tell tall tales. Now, a... [continue]

Timecapsule: November 15, 1856 We ran across this little item while looking for something else altogether, and couldn't resist passing along such an amazing and (almost) ready-for-Hollywood story. It was the era of the tall-masted clipper ship, an era of speed, adventure and danger, with every trip around the Horn a race against time, other ships, and the odds. In late June of 1856, three clippers cleared New York Harbour and set off for the... [continue]

Timecapsule: November 3, 1910 We noticed a short notice in the local papers from, oh, 98 years back, announcing that the entire theatrical wardrobe of Kolb and Dill -- the most popular comedy team in San Francisco -- was to be sold at auction. Clarence Kolb and Max Dill were just a couple of boyhood pals from Cleveland who'd decided to go into show biz. They honed their skills working every vaudeville and burlesque house... [continue]

Timecapsule: October 31, 1963 On Halloween night, the "Black Cat Cafe" -- that notorious, flamboyant and most historically significant of San Francisco's gay nightspots, held a final celebration before closing down for good. Though Prohibition had shuttered the venerable North Beach establishment in the '20s, the Black Cat proudly reopened in 1933. Number 710 Montgomery Street quickly became a magnet for artists, writers, and beatniks. Steinbeck, Saroyan, and Ginsberg all patronized the joint, and in... [continue]

Timecapsule: October 20, 1880 Sometimes we like to let the past speak in its own words, and even better, on subjects that never show up in history books. Here's an item from an 1880's edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, written at a time when the lively iniquities of the Barbary Coast were in fullest swing. The gang of "hoodlums" involved are the very kids who gave rise to that piece of homegrown slang --... [continue]

Timecapsule: October 15, 1863 The first Cliff House opened its doors on this date 145 years ago. The brainchild of a real estate speculator and a State Senator, this first of umpteen incarnations was a simple white clapboard affair. Despite its external modesty, it was a high-class joint, and quickly became the most fashionable destination in town. Presidents Ulysses Grant and Rutherford B Hayes would number among its many distinguished guests over the years, but... [continue]

Timecapsule: October 9, 1776 Two hundred and thirty-two years ago this week (!), the original "Mission San Francisco de Asis" -- better known as Mission Dolores -- was officially dedicated on the banks of Dolores Lagoon, in today's aptly named Mission District. We're not talking about the graceful white-washed adobe that stands at 16th and Dolores streets today -- it would be some 15 years before the good padres, in an early chapter of the... [continue]

Timecapsule: October 1, 1938 On a foggy Saturday in 1938, a swaybacked, 12-year-old horse named Blackie swam - dog-paddled, really - completely across the choppy waters of the Golden Gate. The horse not only made aquatic history with that trip, but he soundly defeated two human challengers from the Olympic Club, and won a $1000 bet for his trainer Shorty Roberts too. It took the horse only 23 minutes, 15 seconds to make the nearly... [continue]

Timecapsule: September 24, 1855 The preserved head of Joaquin Murieta and the hand of Three-Fingered Jack were sold at auction today to settle their owner's legal problems. Joaquin Murieta was a notorious and romantic figure in the early history of California. With Jack, his right-hand man, Murieta led a gang of Mexican bandits through the countryside on a three-year rampage, brutally "liberating" more than $100,000 in gold, killing 22 people (including three lawmen), and outrunning... [continue]

File this -- again -- under "there's ALWAYS a San Francisco connection". We recently discovered that Charlie Chaplin, America's favourite clown (and perhaps the most influential performer in motion picture history), shot one of his bazillion-odd silent movies on location in and around Golden Gate Park. "A Jitney Elopement" is classic slapstick, featuring a case of mistaken identity, a jitney (think "flivver"), a mustachioed scoundrel and -- inevitably -- madcap hilarity. This milestone 1915... [continue]

We perused the recent SFist post about the pitiable state of San Francisco's streets with a certain sense of nostalgia for the good ol' days. You know, the days before this newfangled "asphalt paving" even entered the scene. In the Year of the Gold Rush (1849-50ish), the city's population exploded from a cozy 500 citizens to almost 100 thousand -- and not a single one of those gold-crazed invaders wasted a second thinking the... [continue]

In the middle part of the 19th century, a thick set of whiskers were an essential facial feature of every man of Victorian respectability. These were not simply expressions of pride or masculine peacock vanity, but due to a whole rainbow of reasons, ranging from the fact that Man had been created in God's image, to the "fact" that beards protected the wearer against tuberculosis, and even that shaving led to immorality, murder, and... [continue]

Researching San Francisco history means spending way too much time sitting in the dark. In the library, we mean, staring at microfilm of old newspapers. Hours of scanning those scratched and blurry archives makes us a little punchy, so we blinked and rubbed our eyes at this gruesome headline from the February 13, 1902 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. We wondered momentarily if it was a prescient comment on the state of contemporary... [continue]

Ah, today should be a citywide holiday, it really really should. December 5th marks the 74th anniversary of the end of Prohibition, just a tick of the geological clock since that final state (Utah, who else) grudgingly ratified the 21st Amendment. You couldn't really blame the Prohibitionists for their distaste for John Barleycorn. A flood of cheap corn whiskey in the early years of the nineteenth century changed the way an already soggy American... [continue]

Yup, "the Paris of the West". It's a phrase that's been liberally applied to our fair city, perhaps most notably when the mayor of the Paris of, um, "France", arrived in San Francisco last November to commemorate the 10th anniversary of our "Sister Cities" agreement. Never heard it? A quick Googling brings up a hefty 7500 matches, and as the scanning of turn-of-the-century tomes marches forward, that number will certainly increase. But to the... [continue]

The violent melodrama characterizing the recent murder of a journalist investigating "Your Black Muslim Bakery" has conjured the entire Bay Area history of political violence into our memories. Dan White, James P. Casey, David S. Terry... the list is long and impressive. The anniversary of one of our bloodier favorites is coming up this Thursday -- it's hard to believe that a mere 128 years have passed since the editor of the San Francisco...... [continue]

The wildfire raging up near Lake Tahoe reminded us of our dear old cousin Mark. Mark Twain, that is, and what we remembered was his own brush with accidental arson up Tahoe way. It's a little-known fact, if "fact" be something that can safely ascribed to Twain's baroquely embellished reminiscences of his years out West, that he was solely responsible for a horrendous forest fire on the shores of Lake Tahoe. It was 1861,...... [continue]

Who knew that one of the five islands in San Francisco Bay was privately owned? Even stranger, "Red Rock Island" is now up for sale, for a paltry $10 million. The last time we remember one of our islands changing hands was way back in 1847, when Captain John C Fremont bought Alcatraz for $5000. Fremont was in town, as you no doubt remember, as the head of a surveying expedition. A man of...... [continue]

San Francisco was once pretty much a giant sand dune. We've even heard it said that the very name derives from the once common epithet "sands-can-drift-so", but we're pretty sure that this tale is apocryphal. Okay, we're positive, but a sunny weekend of wandering through Golden Gate Park prompted us to drift back to those early, sandier days. Golden Gate Park was established in 1868, and a local newspaper described it as a "dreary...... [continue]

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