COOL OLD SHIT

The History of SF Bars Through Vintage Matchbooks

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) | March 5th, 2013 @ 12:56pm

We're big fans of aging bar memorabilia here at Uptown Almanac. And while we've explored many digital ways to look back, there are still a few resources that have slipped past us. One of those is this thorough and well-preserved archive of 500+ matchbooks from years past. Tuffy, Pop's bar manager, fills us in on the find:

Pop's 10 year anniversary is coming up and I was trying to find some old pics and I came across a Flickr set of old SF matchbooks. Pretty cool to go through. I don't know the exact dates of most of these, but they probably range from the 40's-60's. Here are some other interesting ones I found:

I found a matchbook for 2830 24th for a bar called “Dante's Inferno” — that was most recently the World Pioneer Video.
There used to be a bar at 2830 24th between Bryant and Florida called the Green Lantern - 26oz beer $0.10!

A little further up in Noe on 24th—The Dubliner used to be the Valley Cavern (Sidenote: the Google Map for that address is pretty good!)

Tuffy's finds sure are choice. Here are a few more:

A matchbook for the long-defunct San Francisco Baseball Club outside of Seals' Stadium and another for the almost equally long-defunct La Rondalla.

Art & Charlie's previously occupied what is now Latin American Club, and Blue Bird Cafe was either at the site of El Trebol or in the row of buildings that burned down in the 60's, making the US Bank Building's parking lot.

You should already be plenty aware of these two bars…

Bernal Club at the foot of Bernal's south slope advised patrons to “have fun while you're still in the pink” and a waffle house in SOMA would turn you into a starved horse, apparently.

Finally, a bunch of fancy (fancy!) places sprung to have art printed right on the matches themselves.

Anyway, take a look at the entire collection yourself. And should you want to celebrate Pop's 10 year anniversary, swing by 24th and York on March 23rd for “free beer and stuff” (including, we're sure, Pop's newest matchbooks).

(Thanks, Tuffy!) [All Scans by ussiwojima]

Google Maps Aerial View, 1938

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) | December 28th, 2011 @ 11:30am

One of my map-obsessed friends recently pointed me in the direction of David Rumsey's collection of aerial photography of San Francisco taken in 1938. As Rumsey's blog points out, most of the photography is of such quality that you can actually see stripping on basketball courts and rails embedded in the streets. In some instances, the resolution and quality of the imagery is better than what we're subjected to with modern Google Maps. What the photography shows is pretty incredible:

Not only is it Seals Stadium (which sat at the corner of 16th and Bryant until the late-50s; currently home to Safeway), where the Giants played their first two seasons prior to moving to Candlestick, but there's actually a game in play. If you zoom in real close, you can see the players on the field:

Crossing the Mission is the tracks of the long-since abandoned Southern Pacific Railway (which provides a fine name for the new brewery on the site of the old tracks).

There it is crossing 24th at Capp St (the ghost of those tracks can still be seen at the ZipCar parking lot on the northeast corner of the intersection). And, of course, BART was still decades away, so all four corners of 24th and Mission have reasonably tall buildings.

And here's the old rail bridge crossing Dolores (seen from the ground here and here).

Speaking of Dolores, Dolores Park pretty much looked the same as it does today, albeit with a bigger playground and a second bathroom building at the corner of 19th and Dolores. Also, there's only a few people hanging out.

But, for the best stuff, you have to leave the Mission and head out to the outskirts of the city. As seen here, the Sunset was still predominately sand dunes awaiting boring stucco housing.

And then there's Playland at the Beach, the old amusement park that sat between Ocean Beach and the Richmond. Should you zoom in far enough, you can feast your eyes on the old coaster:

It's good to know Toxic Beach was also a trash-filled shithole some 70 years ago.

Finally, should you care to really nerd out, David Rumsey took the time to overlay the 1938 maps over Google Earth so you can match up the maps up to their current aerial view.

With that, have fun squandering the rest of your vacation on this stuff.

Old Dude Reminisces About Mission Life in the 1940's

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) | March 12th, 2011 @ 7:32am

Don't get me wrong, this video isn't well edited and the guy is talking about one word a minute. But if you are into San Francisco history like I am, this man's tale of growing up the Mission of the 1940's is definitely worth a listen.

Also, if you listen to this and find yourself asking, “WTF is Seal's Stadium?,” Burrito Justice can fill you in.

Your Grandmother's Attic on Loko: The SF Antique Mall

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) | January 12th, 2011 @ 5:03pm

Have a spare $95 and a burning desire to freak out all future house guests? This disturbed chicken carcass could be yours!

A few weeks ago, I was hipped to the fact that there's an antique and design mall on Bayshore and Industrial in the Bayview. Admittedly, I don't venture south of Cesar Chavez too often, but the fact I've lived a 10 minute bike ride from such an giant treasure chest for the past three and a half years and never known about it blew me away.

I finally checked it out the other day and it's definitely a solid resource if you have to outfit a new apartment or squander an afternoon while your grandmother is in town. The place is full of pretty much everything: paintings, old pictures, beer taps, cheap furniture, A GIANT FUCKING HORSE, a mansion bird cage, cataloged magazines, old 1980s TRON toys, Giants and 49ers memorabilia, swords that cost $40 (yes, swords), Michael Jackson dolls, books, shelves dedicated to porcelain frogs and pigs, old photography equipment… basically anything remotely interesting that you could expect to find at an antique mall. However, what really stuck out to me was the quantity of old San Francisco photographs, paintings, and postcards in the place. Almost all of them priced below $30.

Anyway, I ended up spending two hours in this place and barely saw half of it. So if you're the type of person to get sucked into places like this, be warned. In the mean time, I snapped some pics of some of the more interesting SF-related stuff I found (plus a few other random items for good measure):

Apparently 1910 tour buses were not the gimmicky diesel-burning “cable cars” we see driving across the bridge today.

One booth has thousands of magazines and indexed advertisements, incase you have been in the market for matted 1950's cigarette advertisements.

I'm not sure what exactly this means, other than it is $15 well spent/

However much this costs, it can't be enough.

The Golden Gate Bridge, etched into a case. Undated.

It appears that coke breaks meant something entirely different in 1951.

Ah, problems of the past.

Photograph of the Bay Bridge, undated.

Sutro Baths and Cliff House, circa 1920.

Considering the sheer amount of Pabst, Hamm's and other various SF brewery memorabilia in this place, I cannot think of a better place to outfit a bar.

The SF-Oakland Ferry, circa 1880. There were a few more pictures in this set from this period, including troops in the Presidio and a street scene in Chinatown.