A whirlwind tour of San Francisco, all in 42 pages

I finished reading a book titled ‘My San Francisco An Appreciation’, written in 1953 by Joseph Henry Jackson. At 42 pages, you can finish it in less than an hour. It’s a great travelogue and time capsule describing the San Francisco of 72 years ago. I’ll post some of the author’s passages, and add some update pictures I’ve done on a few of the locations Mr Jackson writes about. (Thumbnail images)

  

{Over on Kearny Street, the Hall of Justice process offenders day after day, facing Portsmouth Square where the Spanish customs-house used to stand.} The old Hall of Justice was torn down in 1967, and a Hilton Hotel is there now. (opensfhistory.org)

About Portsmouth Square, Jackson writes, {Across the way from the parked police cars a little galleon atop a granite shaft spreads its bronze sails over the chiseled lettering: “To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little, to spend a little less”} He’s referring to the Robert Louis Stevenson Monument in the Square.

  

{It was in the Presidential Suite at the new Palace Hotel, that President Harding died, seven stories above the Palm Court where General Grant had been received with wild enthusiasm half a century earlier.}

 

The above mentioned Palm Court is still there.

   

In reference to the Russ Building on Montgomery Street, Jackson writes, {On the Bush Street side, just where the tenants garage-entrance dives underground, there once stood the little tobacco shop of Mr. Thomas Ware.} The garage-entrance on Bush still dives underground. Jackson goes on to write that it’s only a short walk from here down to Montgomery Street where the stagecoach robber, Black Bart, was captured. (opensfhistory.org)

  

{Even The brassy International Settlement – milder successor to the city’s wild Barbary Coast, and, you would say, made to order for the tourist trap, is a haunt of San Franciscans.} Last time I was there, the posts that held the International Settlement sign up over Pacific Ave and Montgomery Street were sill there.

  

{On an evening when the winds are tempered and the air is clear, you may take a newcomer to the flattened top of Telegraph Hill where the broad parking space lies at the base of Coit Tower; he can see the sweeping curve of the Embarcadero with its jutting piers at this point better than from anywhere else} In a scene from the film ‘Woman on the Run’ with Ann Sheridan and made three years before Joseph Jackson’s book was published, that description of the Coit tower parking lot was accurate; the view through those telescopes have to be somebody’s joke now.

   

{Who are the people you find on a sunny Sunday if you make a run out to the Cliff House where the peninsula has rounded its turn into the Pacific?} Well, actually, nobody today, Mr. Jackson.