HALF A DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO (Cheri)

Mark and I had half a day to kill in San Francisco over the weekend, so we decided to go to the de Young Museum.

Weren't the Depression-era painters masters at using color to focus the viewer's attention!

The photographic exhibit that we saw first focused on Northern California.  Coming at this photograph from across the room, you notice the tremendous tree, but not necessarily the tiny-by-comparison cottage, until the last moment.  (See the placard below for the dimensions of the tree.)

A couple of pictures of the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake:

If you haven't taken California History classes, you might not know that the majority of the damage was actually caused by post-quake fires.

When I was about 19, I spent a year or so taking classes on pattern-making and design in San Francisco, and had a job with a small clothing production company located out on the nearly-uninhabited edge of the South-of-Market area.   Here is a contemporary newspaper picture of the building:

The China Basin Building held many small businesses like the studio for which I cut samples.  At its back was a long dock along Mission Creek that I liked to eat my lunch on, sometimes watching a drawbridge rise to let boats through.  I usually rode a bus to work, but if I drove, I parked by fields of weeds and marshes and walked back to the building.

Here is Woody LaBounty's account of his similar experience, 10 years later:

I sorted mail and made copies at a communications company in the China Basin Building.  I ate my lunch on a bulkhead facing Mission Creek, which I thought of as a sewage canal.  It was 1992. 

South of the channel everything was scraped clean.  When I could afford to buy lunch, I’d cross the 4th Street bridge to eat at Carmen’s, a shack which stood on the edge of a dusty-beige landscape with angling asphalt streets and intermittent chain link fences.  To walk the open ground as far as the brick fire station on 3rd Street
to the southeast or the cluster of hippie houseboats* to the west meant using too much of my 30-minute lunch break.

("Walk on a Long Bridge," San Francisco Story.)

The China Basin Building is now much-enhanced, and located a block from Oracle Park, where the San Francisco Giants play.

This is all a very-long preface to the photographs below. 

Janet Delaney took a series of photographs in this area during this same general period that I worked there.  The series became the hard-to-locate book South of Market.  I would really like to have that book, but the day on which I want to spend $1,103.10 - not counting the $3.99 postage - to buy a used copy from Amazon hasn't happened yet.

Numbers one and three are Delaney's.

Photograph #2 above shows the same building that is features in Photograph #1.  That is the comparison of my memories to today's reality!

See the graffiti in the picture below?

It seems that the entire second floor of the Museum was devoted to exhibits related to the pharaohs.  That's not my jam, but I was taken with the stairway!

I asked, and found out that they had applied very heavy-duty stickers to the fronts of the stair treads to create this eye-catching entrance.

The de Young has a marvelous art book section in its gift store.  I picked up a copy of the book Empresses of Seventh Avenue, about how women created American high fashion while France was inaccessible during World War II.

At first I took this book to be an archive of historic listings by men in far-distant rural areas that were looking for wives.  (Kind of like FarmersOnly or Farmer Wants a Wife, today's online matching sites.)

Actually, no.  It is the second collection of sweetheart photos of men in love, taken between 1850 and 1950.  I was surprised that there were that many couples who felt safe having their pictures taken so long ago.

So this was the first half of our day.  I'll finish with another post in a couple of days, about the last half of our lovely day.