Old Shit!

Photos of the Mission's Gritty Past

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

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]

Previously on Uptown Almanac: 

"Instagram: The Beer" Coming to San Francisco!

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

Rarely do we here at Uptown Almanac get truly excited about a new product being sold in San Francisco, but rarely is such a product “the most hipster beer in the world.”

Oh yes.  Starting this month, Churchkey Can Co., the new beer from Entourage mega-hunk Adrian Grenier and “some dude who used to work at Nike,” will “rollout” to the Bay Area following a couple months of intense product incubation in the drunk and rainy cities of Portland and Seattle.

However, its appeal isn't coming from its association with actors, its army of Facebook and Zynga executive investors, nor its nice, instagrammy script title font on the side of every steal can.  Rather, it's gaining steam in the tech press because everyone is clamoring for its hot new vintage 1930s-era can design that requires you to open the lid with a primitive tool known as a “church key”.

“Church key?,” you ask?  Well, here's a promotional video teaching all you “dumb young fucks” how to open a real beer:

Of course, even to the most casual observer, this looks extremely similar to Miller Lite's latest gimmick, in which you “crack open your brew” with Very Manly Objects like wrenches, shark teeth, fishing lure, dice, and the reservoir tip of a filled condom:

Miller Lite's competing product aside, this new old product is going to fuck up the beer industry as we know it.  Just read this objective press release posted on TechCrunch about TechCrunch's investment in the product:

After a short beer tasting hosted by CrunchFund founder and former TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, the obvious first question asked by Siegler, who is also an investor in the company through CrunchFund, was about why there is a beer company at Disrupt and why tech investors are interested in investing in a beer company. Churchkey, Siegler noted, had one of the best pitch decks he had ever seen. Investing in Churchkey, he said, was an easy choice because it has the potential to disrupt the beer industry with its new design.

So get ready, San Francisco.  You best be freeing up some room on your carabiner for some church keys.