SFMOMA's blog has a cool weekly feature on historic exhibition mailers and this week takes a look at Wally Hedrick's SF 10th Anniversary show at New Mission Gallery on Valencia Street:

Wally, of course (“of course”), was a self-proclaimed part of the “real beat generation”, helped Jerry Garcia find himself and discover Kerouac, and had a real bummer gig in North Beach (according to liberal smear rag wikipedia, at least):

In fact, as “a genuine beatnik” Hedrick was employed at a 'beatnik' bohemian sitting at the bar at Vesuvio Cafe, a famous hangout in San Francisco’s North Beach. Vesuvio Cafe employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped ushered in the Beat lifestyle which ballooned in the later 1950s; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene.

Why aren't we still doing that shit today?  Seems to me that Pop's has an ample-sized front window that could employ a dude dressed in a full beard, flannel, and some sort of shoe-like doohickey and sign his name on stickers while closely monitoring his Instagram feed.

Anyway, New Mission Gallery is now that weird Lotus non-medical marijuana healing center between Boogaloo's and Valencia Cyclery.

(Oh, and if you haven't explored SFMOMA's feature yet, do check out a poster for a mechanical mini-golf-playing egg beater that was on display in Potrereo Hill.)

“A bicyclist rides towards the fallen Valencia St. Hotel and a huge sinkhole that has opened up in the street.”

Shawn Clover has stitched together a brutal set of photos that blends snaps of 1906's earthquake aftermath with corresponding scenes from today.  From the sounds of it, this was no easy process:

I first put together a good-sized library of historical photos that looked like they have potential to be blended. But unfortunately most of these photos end up on the digital cutting room floor because there’s simply no way to get the same photo today because either a building or a tree is in the way. Other potential photos have copyright claims with no way to get a release. Once I get a good location, I get everything lined up just right. My goal is to stand in the exact spot where the original photographer stood. Doing this needs to take into account equivalent focal length and how the lens was shifted. I take plenty of shots, each nudged around a bit at each location. Just moving one foot to the left changes everything.

He has 25 historical stitches completed so far, split between two parts (including a pretty grim photo of a pile of dead horses rotting in front of a Mercedes in part one), with a promise of more on the way.

Here's a couple more shots to get you started:

“People stroll by the original adobe Mission Dolores which survived, while the brick church next door was destroyed.”

“Cars travel down S. Van Ness [at 17th], which has buckled after the quake.”

“Cable car #455 rests halfway in the partially-destroyed cable car barn.”

[Shawn Clover | via Burrito Justice]

Reading Peter Hartlaub of the Chronicle's piece on Richard Nixon's September 1972 campaign stop on BART, I couldn't help but think of Hunter S. Thompson's reporting from the event, buried in the latter chapters of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

At the time of the trip, Thompson had just left the McGovern press corps and recently passed his Secret Service screening to join the Presidential Press Corps. So they tossed him on the dinky press plane headed towards Oakland to spectate—from a safe distance—as Nixon marveled at BART (all pictures from the Chronicle):

The few reporters who switched off the McGovern campaign to travel with Nixon on this last trip to California were shocked by what they found.  The difference between traveling with McGovern and traveling with Nixon is just about like the difference between going on tour with the Grateful Dead & going on tour with the Pope.

My first experience with it came shortly after Nixon's arrival in Oakland.  After nervously pressing the flesh with some of the several hundred well-drilled young “supporters” who'd been rounded up to greet him for the TV cameras, Nixon was hustled off in a huge black bulletproof Cadillac for a brief appearance at one of the Bay Area's new rapid-transit stations.  The three big press buses followed, taking a different route, and when we arrived at the BART station we were hauled down by freight elevator to a narrow hallway outside a glass-walled control room.

Moments later Nixon emerged from a nearby subway tunnel, waved briefly at the crowd, and was ushered into the control room with a dozen or so local Republican dignitaries.  Two certified harmless photographers were allowed inside to take pictures of The President shaking hands and making small talk with the engineers.  His pithy remarks were broadcast out to the press mob in the hallway by means of loudspeakers.

After watching for a moment, I turned to Bob Greene, a young Chicago Sun-Times reporter who had just dropped off the McGovern campaign.  “Jesus,” I said. “Is it always like this?”

He laughed.  “Hell, this is accessible!  We can actually see him.  I spent about twelve hours covering him in New York yesterday, and I never saw him once—except on closed-circuit TV when he made his speech last night.  They had us in a separate room, with speakers and TV monitors.”

From here, Thompson travels across the Bay to cover a $500-a-plate lunch at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel (which Thompson skips to get drunk at House of Shields), but that's for another time.

One of the things that really gets me about the book is looking at it with respect to the 2012 campaign.  The parallels between Nixon's re-elect campaign and Romney's second go for the office are striking—the limited access to the press, their lukewarm support, their incessant tantrums towards the “biased” and “liberal” media…  Romney may not be Nixon in either skill, cleverness, or personality, but it's hard to escape thinking about what a Romney presidency would look like considering their similarities.

Oh, and those “pithy remarks” Thompson was talking about?

Workers paving a dirt and gravel Mission Street (at 18th), Dec. 1910

As we mentioned in last week's post about what Bi-Rite looked like in 1947, the SF Public Library is right in the middle of scanning a bunch of ancient Mission District photography and posting it online for the benefit of late-night nerding out.  And lucky for us, library photo curator Christina Moretta dumped a fresh batch of previously unseen photos on Flickr on Tuesday.

Let's dig in:

Potereo and 25th, looking south towards a very-much under-developed Bernal Heights and future concrete nest of highway on and off-ramps.  To the right is the Potrero Ave. Saloon and Boarding House, advertising Hibernia Steam and Gibbons Whiskey in the windows. (You can catch another view of the bar here.)

Hashagans Cocktails on Mission at 25th, photographed in 1956…

…which you might recognize now as La Taqueria.

Carl's Pastry Shop at the corner of 18th and Guerrero in 1947, now home to Tartine.

A milk shake and sandwich joint at the corner of 18th and Dolores, also photographed in 1947…

…which is the current home to Dolores Park Cafe (from the looks of it, they still have the same tiles beneath their windows).

A whole bunch of the photos uploaded were of car crashes, which I guess were quite the social occasion back in the day.  Here we see some rust bucket flipped on 24th and Bryant, looking towards Potrero Hill.  “The Milk Shake King” is prominently placed on the corner, with the Roosevelt Tamale Parlor vying for attention mid-block.  But what's this?

Pop's, everyone's favorite urine-scented air hockey and dollar High Life dive, is smack-dab in the middle of the block.  Which means, at some point, someone thought it wise to toss that old neon sign in the trash and re-open the bar down the block.  Weird.

Anyway, here's another car that took a tumble.  The one at Folsom and Army in 1942, looking towards a still largely undeveloped Bernal Heights.

#MUNIfail, 1942-style (this one's at 23rd and Mission, with the present-day Walgreen's on the right).

And, of course, some things never change.

[Should you feel so inclined, you can check out the rest of the dump on the SF Public Library's Flickr]