San Francisco Film Locations Then & Now
A Then and Now Tour and History of San Francisco Through Films and Photography
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The stairs they posed around nearly 120 years ago:
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Like Jaime, Adolph Sutro had a thing for mushrooms too!
A lower tide and less people for me today than for Fred Lyon in his 1950’s picture of Ocean Beach from Sutro Heights:
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Nob Hill got its name from the word “nabob” that originated from the country of India meaning a person of wealth, power, and influence. This was where the railroad tycoons of the Nineteenth Century built their mansions. Nabob is not a common word used in the New Millennium. We’ll start at California and Jones in 1950. The vintage pictures are from opensfhistory.org. I’m having more fun with their site! Seen in both pictures are the Huntington Hotel at right center, the Fairmont Hotel at left center, the Pacific Union Club Building in front of the Fairmont, and part of Grace Cathedral on the left, although the church was not completed by 1950.
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Watching the mucky-mucks come and go in the Mark Hopkins Hotel Courtyard: “Mucky muck” is outdated slang meaning a person who is high up in the corporate world. I always thought that it sounded like a children’s breakfast cereal; “Kellogg’s Mucky-Mucks”
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Cable cars don’t stop for dames at Powell and Pine Streets anymore, as they did in 1952, they zoom right past now. You have to get your picture quickly. A “dame”, when use as slang for a woman, is another expression that didn’t survive into the New Millennium; I kind of like it!
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A trolley and a motor bus at the Stockton Tunnel: The Stockton Tunnel is on the eastern slope of Nob Hill. “Trolleys” when referring to a streetcar like the one in the vintage 1950 picture, isn’t heard too often in San Francisco anymore. It’s usually used by out of town visitors when referring to the cable cars. THEY’RE NOT TROLLEYS, THEY ARE CABLE CARS!!! A “motor bus” like the one in my picture, is another expression, like “picture show” and “ink pen” that got cut in half over the years.
Chinatown, with Old St. Mary’s on the right, in 1943. (Life Magazine)
Boy, those sailor fellows sure do alright! Wow, her coat matches her hair! They’re sitting at the exact spot in 1943 where the San Francisco Main Library is today. Behind them is the Pioneer Monument which was moved farther north in 1993 when the new library was built. Behind the monument in the old photo is the intersection of Hyde and Grove. The building behind the Pioneer Monument in the 1943 picture is, actually, the Orpheum Theater. (Life Magazine)
The crew at the bridge of the World War ll submarine USS Pampanito, and the bridge today. The Pampanito saw a lot of action in the Pacific Ocean during the war.
A Gold Star Ceremony at Chestnut and Baker Streets awarded to Kenneth Campbell of the U.S. Navy who was killed in 1943. They did this a lot during the war. The arrow shows where the Gold Star was placed. The pole is still there, but the Gold Star is long gone and replaced by a No Left Turn sign. (Images of America)
Kids point to a Gold Star Marker placed at 18th and Sanchez in January, 1943 for marine Donald Gray, killed in action at Guadalcanal. (Images of America)
“When Johnny comes marching home again, Hurrah! Hurrah!” Victorious army soldiers on Grove Street in a victory march at the end of World War ll. The Owl Drug Store on the right was on the corner of Hyde and Grove Streets in the Orpheum Theater Building in the vintage picture. My photo is closer to Larkin Street because the San Francisco Main Library blocks the view of City Hall from Hyde at Grove today, (Images of America)
Pier 15 being deactivated when the war ended: “Alright babes, glad that’s over. Let’s go get a beer!” (Images of America)
Civvies line the Golden Gate Bridge to watch the arrival of Navy troop ships and war vessels coming home again at the end of World War ll. “Welcome home. Well done!”
This wonderful cover for the Saturday Evening Post ran twenty seven days after the official end of World War Two, and paints an image of a happy optimism among the returning sailors. The cable car is getting set to dip down Washington Street at Jones into Chinatown. Cable cars still take the plunge here seventy years later. I first learned of the Post Magazine cover when reading Gary Kamiya’s fine book about San Francisco ‘Cool Gray City of Love’.
This photo is of a little known and interesting incident. There had been many rumors during World War ll that a Japanese submarine had fired a torpedo at the Golden Gate Bridge in the early days after Pearl Harbor. In June of 1946, that rumor turned out to be true when an unexploded Japanese torpedo was found at Marshall’s Beach just west of the bridge. What damage it could have done if it struck the bridge or which submarine fired the torpedo has never been determined. This is not an easy spot to get down to; you can only reach this area at low tide. Sandstone steps lead down the cliff to the beach, and it’s a long and tiring climb back up! Trust me on this one! Because of its secluded and often inaccessible location, it’s also used as a nude beach. Do yourself a favor and trust me on this one too. I tried for as long as time would allow to find the exact rock in the old photo, but 70 years have passed, and much of the time many of the rocks are underwater, so it may not even look the same anymore.’. (Images of America) For more on San Francisco during World War Two, click on the link below for a series of pictures I posted in March of 2015 called ‘World War Two and the San Francisco Giants’.
To me, the most historic Bay Area film location is in sleepy little Niles, California. This is where the world came to know of Charlie Chaplin’s “little tramp”. The top image is of the Essanay Studio where probably the greatest clown in cinema history was created. The old picture was taken shortly before the studio closed. Chaplin filmed a scene of a confrontation with a policeman in his film ‘The Champion’ on the corner where the two children are standing. Today a fire station is located here.
The Hotel Wesley, where Charlie Chaplin stayed while he was filming in Niles, when he wasn’t crashing at Edna Purviance’s house down the street: This building has changed very little in over a hundred years!
Edna Purviance, on the far left next to Chaplin, was his leading lady in most of the movies he filmed in Niles, and she stayed in the house behind them while she was in town. And yes, they were horsing around, but Chaplin got bored of the Niles night life, and left for Southern California. Well, after all, it was only a one-horse town! Edna’s little house has survived, as has the building next to it where Chaplin originally premiered his movies shot in Niles.
The best movie Chaplin made in Niles was his 1915 short ‘The Champion’ with Edna Purviance. This movie was shot entirely in downtown Niles, mainly on the corner of G Street and Niles Blvd. where the Essanay Studio stood.
Chaplin wanders down G Street past the fence of the Essanay Movie Studio back lot followed by a puppy he shared his lunch with earlier in his 1915 movie ‘The Champion’, and where Charlie and his little buddy were walking today.
Chaplin confronted by a police officer in ‘The Champion’ (Look at that uniform!) and the same corner today.
Chaplin, preparing for the big fight, works out in a scene filmed in the back lot of the studio. Notice the mountain above the fence in the upper left of the Chaplin scene. You can still see it from Niles Blvd. and G Street today. I learned about the mountain comparison from reading John Bengston’s fine book ‘Silent Traces’.
After winning the big fight, Charlie puts the moves on Edna, but when they become aware of the film audience, he kisses her behind his beer jug. (That’s a nice size beer!) Incorporating the audience into the film was a relatively new gag back then.
The spot where Charlie fought and got a kiss from Edna as it looks today:
It’s Orange Rocktober again, and the San Francisco Giants are in the Playoffs, although, as of this posting they’re down one game to nothing. So, I thought I’d put on my old Giants jersey and head to AT&T Park to do then and nows near the park courtesy of opensfhistory.org. No matter what happens tonight, The Giants will be back here on Monday, and this place will ROCK! (Look at the girl posing like the Willie Mays statue for the camera)
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You can drive to AT&T Park, take public transportation, or walk along the waterfront to the park, as I did today. Here is the old Seaboard Hotel at Howard and the Embarcadero in 1938. This old hotel, which was demolished at the end of the 1970’s, was featured in at least two films. The Seaboard would have been just behind where the first car is turning on to the Embarcadero from Howard Street.
The Embarcadero Freeway, which once ran past the Seaboard Hotel at this location, can be seen in the top picture from the chase scene at the end of the 1958 movie ‘The Lineup’. From Rainier Ale to Regal Pale, I don’t know if that was a step up or down! In the bottom picture, Steve McQueen hides a witness against organized crime here for his protection when it was called the Daniels Hotel in 1968’s ‘Bullitt’. (It didn’t work; the hit men got to the witness, and killed him)
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One block further south is the old Hills Brothers Coffee Factory, seen here in 1938. The Embarcadero has been reconfigured since 1938, and doesn’t turn at the same angle here as it once did. The old sign reads $6 TO LOS ANGELES. I just want the Giants to get past the Chicago Cubs, and get to Los Angeles to face the Dodgers next!
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Kitty-corner from AT&T Park at 3rd and King Street was once the old Southern Pacific Railroad Depot, seen on the left in 1938. This train station was demolished near the end of the 1970’s.
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Bob Hope and Jerry Colonna arrived at the Southern Pacific Depot in May of 1942 on a tour to raise money for the army and navy during World War Two. I don’t recognize who the girls were. The passenger trains still pull up behind the train depot today on the same tracks as in 1942, but now the station is one block southwest, and is the 4th and King Street Station.
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Slide! I’ve got baseball on the mind! A streetcar slides off the track at Stillman and 4th in 1947. That’s the old and new Highway 80 approach to the Bay Bridge in the back. It’s been completely redone since the vintage picture. This accident doesn’t look too serious, but wait until you see the next one.
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I’ve got a bad feeling about this one; a train collision with a truck at 7th and Irwin in February of 1945. Given the extent of the damage to the cabin of the big rig in the right center of the vintage photos, it’s unlikely that the driver survived. A Caltrain commuter liner zooms past homeless encampments at the site of the accident today.
It’s also Fleet Week in San Francisco. Look at that line of visitors waiting to board the USS San Diego! Two of the fellows off one of the ships were kind enough to oblige me with a photo in a pizza parlor across from AT&T Park.
Cable cars pause at the intersection of Grant and California to catch their breath before chugging the rest of the way up Nob Hill. They don’t do that really, but I’d like to be a writer someday, so I thought I’d try that line out.
Finding these locations is always fun for me, but it can also be challenging, especially if the location is misidentified. Above are three great pictures taken in San Francisco on December 8th 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. Although their site is a knockout, Shorpy identifies these historic photos as being taken at Montgomery and Market Streets, and that’s not the location. Nothing matched up, nor did any of the old pictures of that intersection that I could find. The key to finding this spot was in the tall building in the distance at the center of the first comparison picture. That looked to me like the old Sir Francis Drake Hotel. If it was, then I had to find out what angle the pictures were taken from. You can’t see the Sir Francis Drake from here anymore, but these pictures were shot on the northeast corner of Sutter and Kearny looking west. I had a weird feeling standing on this corner when I took these, thinking about the people here almost 75 years ago, and what was going on in their minds.
There’s three crossroads in this shot looking down Powell Street toward Market; Geary, O’Farrell, and Ellis Streets. No, that’s not a Stud Hotel sign on the left in the vintage picture; I did a double take too. It’s an Art Studio sign behind the Hotel Stratford sign.
“Patience is a virtue”, only it’s one of the many virtues that I don’t have. Still, when it comes to getting two cable cars in the picture at the only spot where the California Street and Powell Street cable car lines cross as in the vintage photo, I had to be patient. Cable cars don’t always get here at the same time. I got a reasonable facsimile. That little pagoda on the right isn’t a convenient place to go to the bathroom, (I wish!) it’s a control box that regulates which cable car has a green light to go into the intersection before stopping to pick up or unload passengers when they get there together. The old Crest Garage that goes back to the 1920’s is still there behind the cable cars, only now it’s a parking garage.
Tomorrow is the start of Fleet Week, 2016 in San Francisco. That’s the U.S.S. West Virginia coming into the Bay before the United States entered World War ll, and the U.S.S. Iowa going out in 2012. The West Virginia was sunk at Pearl Harbor; the Iowa will, probably, be the last battleship to sail under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Bingo! It’s always a pleasure for me to find a website with a few vintage San Francisco pictures that are new to me. It’s also a pleasure to find that some of them are large image photographs. However, to find a site with hundreds and hundreds of wonderful vintage and full size pictures that I’ve never seen before, well, it was great to find ‘Open SF History – Historical Images of San Francisco’ a few days ago. Their navigation map covers every corner of the City with pictures that can be downloaded for larger viewing. Here is the link to their site, and below that are a few comparison pictures I worked on today. The site is kind enough to let you share the images on your website for non commercial use. Below each image is a link to the page location from the site.
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The Stockton Tunnel from Sutter Street circa 1958: If this was the only picture on their website, I’d, probably still go to it over and over. The railing along the top of the tunnel was where Sam Spade from the Maltese Falcon “crossed the sidewalk between iron-railed hatchways that opened above bare ugly stairs, and resting his hands on the damp coping, looked down into Stockton Street. An automobile popped out of the tunnel beneath him with a roaring swish, as if it had been blown out, and ran away.”
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The Alcatraz launch next to the Van Ness Municipal Pier in 1938: A lot of people don’t realize how historical that abandoned little white building at the end of the pier is. Prisoners waited here under armed guard to be escorted by boat for their stay on “The Rock”. This building has seen the likes of Al Capone, “Machine Gun” Kelly, Robert “The Birdman of Alcatraz” Stroud, Alvin Karpis, and Frank Morris. The pier is closed off now for safety reasons, as is the edge of the Municipal Pier where I took my picture from.
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No hillside parking or steam trains today at the end of Beach Street in from of the old Maritime Museum like in this circa 1953 photo. A building where the hill on the right was throws a shadow across Beach Street today, but you can still see the old Del Monte Cannery Building in the background today. One of these days I’m going to have a deep dish talk with somebody about the historic Maritime Museum. The building used to be packed with nautical exhibits and films, and you could spend hours there. There’s little to see inside the museum anymore, and nobody working there seems to know if the exhibits will ever return!
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A parade welcoming the New York Giants to San Francisco on Montgomery Street at Bush in 1958: As of this posting, the Giants have a chance to make the Playoffs tomorrow on the last day of the season. It will either be an even year believin’, like 2010, 2012, and 2014, or a day of grievin’ for Giants fans like me.
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The view from the St. Francis Hotel Tower in 1977: Some of the things you can’t see any more from here are the Bay Bridge and the old Hills Brothers Coffee Factory on the right, the Russ Building to the left of Equitable Building sign, and most of the Wells Fargo Building in the right center. You can still see the Hobart Building peeking out to the right, and the Hunter-Doolin Building in the shadow to the left of the tall chocolate colored building in the right center of the view today. This building looks like a big brother protecting them.
Incidentally, did you know that the old Cliff House, like a chameleon, would change colors during different times of the year and periods of the day? On evenings with a blazing sunset on the horizon, it would appear red like the top left picture. During the months of autumn, it would take on a brown, rustic hue, as at the top right. As the darkness of the night approached, it would turn black, like the picture in the lower left. On sunny spring mornings, the reflection from the Pacific Ocean often turned the building blue, as seen in the picture at lower right. Okay, you’ve already caught on that I’m teasing; this was how the Cliff House was painted during different periods from the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s. For more on the Cliff House click on the link below for a series of posting I did in September of 2015 about the western side of San Francisco.
New York City has Broadway, Paris has Champs-Élysées, London has Oxford Street, and San Francisco has Market Street. I’ve seen all four, but Market Street is home. It starts at the Ferry Building where reminders of the nautical and transportation center this area once was still exist, The Embarcadero, the Southern Pacific Building, the Matson Line Shipping Building, now the PG&E Building, and, of course, the Ferry Building. Moving up to Montgomery Street, this is the “Wall Street of the West” area, and where the money is. Next stop is the shopping district, where Stockton and Powell meet Market. On “Black Friday” the day after Thanksgiving, this area is more like a combination of Disneyland in the summer, Times Square on New Year’s Eve., and Mexico City during the Soccer World Cup Championships; PACKED!!! Farther up from here, you’re on your own, this is the Tenderloin. It’s often crazy, and not pretty! This spot was also once known as the Theater District with only two reminders left of San Francisco’s version of the “Great White Way”, the Golden Gate Theater and the Orpheum. Our tour ends at Civic Center. This is the hub of city government and its officials; where the really crazy people are!
Our tour starts at the Ferry Building. After World War l, cable cars stopped running on Market Street. They were replaced by streetcars and what were known as “Dinkeys”; a combination, of sorts, of a cable car and a streetcar. Here’s a Hinky-Dinkey at the Ferry Building in 1947 along with what the caption reads is a “Super Twin Motor Coach”.
A great bustling shot of Lotta’s Fountain at Geary, Market, and Kearny in 1930. In 1999, Lotta’s Fountain was restored to its original size and moved back to the original spot it was at before it was extended in 1916.
Across Market Street is the old Call Building at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and today after its 1938 remodeling. Notice Lotta’s Fountain in its original size and location.
4th and Market Street in 1945; no John Payne and Alice Faye movie, but many of the buildings across Market can still be seen today; the Phelan Building at the far left, the old First Nationwide and Chronicle Building, the two reddish buildings in the center, and the Hobart Building, just behind them.
6th and Market Streets in 1947: You can see the Flood Building through the haze of both pictures on the left across Market Street.
Two angles of a crash in front of the old, and long gone, Paramount Theater at 1066 Market in 1940: Let’s hope that the accident wasn’t serious, and that none of the cream doughnuts were damaged!
Another photo in front of the Paramount from 1939: The girl at the bus stop looks, kind of, cute! From here on out this is, not particularly, my favorite stretch of Market Street.
Jones and Market, looking toward Twin Peaks in 1939: I have no idea what that coat is that’s attacking that lady, but I hope she made it home okay!
More trouble at Jones and Market Streets! Looks like some type of accident, but it doesn’t look too serious.
A military parade at 7th and Market Streets in 1947: Dr M. O. Garten, offering free consultation, Dr. V Libkits, Dentist, Rosenberg’s Health Food Store, but I don’t see the law firm of Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe. All of the buildings they’re parading past have been demolished, but the dark building in the background can still be seen on theright.
The Golden Gate Theater opened in 1922. Just about every performer in the business has been on the stage here from Judy Garland to Diana Ross. (dsoderblog.com)
Hyde at Market Street with the Orpheum Theater on the left in 1957: That looks like a hole in the left rear end of the bus. Air conditioning!
We end the tour at the Orpheum Theater at Hyde and Market Streets. This Grand Lady opened up in 1926 as a vaudeville house, and still packs them in today.
San Francisco Film Locations Then & Now 
