Welcome, 2018

Nothing like a nice cold jump in the Bay on New Year’s Day to greet the brand new year. Well, I’m not going to do that, but I’ll start the calendar out with some more of the pictures I took over the Holidays.

We’ll start out at the crookedest of crookedest streets in the world, Vermont Street on Potrero Hill. This street has tighter turns than the more famous Lombard Street on Russian Hill. I drove down Vermont for the first time Christmas day and you do have to drive slower than when on Lombard. The vintage picture is by photographer Fred Lyon.

Tillman Place, off Grant Avenue circa 1925: I’ll bet I’ve walked past this alley a hundred times and never paid attention to it. It’s interesting how they had crate-like stands in the vintage picture and fence-like stands today. (OpenSFHistory.org)

Young ladies hopping on a cable car in the 1930’s and these days: The hair styles and color may be a little different.

The Moon Bridge in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, probably near when the attraction opened in 1894: Three of those four Victorian ladies were really pretty! Well, let’s face it, the one on the right wasn’t. She’s like one of those blind dates you get when friends describe your date as “She (or he) is really nice!”

Speaking of the Japanese Tea Garden, here are a couple of ladies from the 1920’s in front of the old and now closed off entrance to the attraction in a photo from the Shorpy Photo Archive. I could easily spend time doing nothing but then and nows on the terrific pictures from the Shorpy collection!

An OpenSFHistory.org photo of the old de Young Museum taken from the California Academy of Science circa 1954: I could easily spend time doing nothing but then and nows on the terrific pictures from the OpenSFHistory.org collection! Oh, wait, I already said that about the Shorpy Archive in the previous picture. The statue the two pictures were taken behind is of Robert Emmet, an Irish patriot executed in Dublin in 1803.

Here’s another picture from the Shorpy Archives on Broadway near Fillmore Street. What intrigues me about the vintage picture most is how would the two cars in the middle have gotten out if the cars behind them didn’t leave first?

On a more solemn note, at Lands End near the Cliff House is the shell blasted part of bridge of the cruiser the USS San Francisco. In November of 1942 during a naval battle at Guadalcanal, Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan and 76 other officers and sailors were killed aboard the San Francisco by shelling from ships of the Japanese naval force. The USS San Francisco made it back to port for repairs and the wings of the damaged bridge are now part of the memorial at Lands End. They point directly toward Guadalcanal. The vintage picture from the San Francisco Chronicle is of a ceremony at the memorial in 1956. You can see holes from shell damage to the bridge to the left of the flagpole in my photo.

Here’s the story about the USS San Francisco on a marker at the site.