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Your place to discover & shape San Francisco history
Have a San Francisco memory to share? Add to any of our unfinished articles — you can revise text, or add new images.
Comprised of over 1,500 pages, and 2,500 historical photos, the wiki-based archive FoundSF.org is the product of hundreds of contributors, regular people who were compelled by the chance to investigate some piece of this City's past.
Collection Highlights and Recent Additions:
Origins of San Francisco's Farmers' Markets
My little group of civic-minded citizens negotiated for a vacant lot owned by Gantner, Felder and Kenny, who happened to be morticians. With the help of some of our city officials and the generosity of the property owner, we were able to obtain the full use of the one-acre lot on Market and Duboce Streets in the heart of the city at no cost to us. The morticians even took out the necessary insurance coverage. The farmers came in on the first day. There were only six truckloads, but they sold out in less than two hours. A box or lug weighing 25 pounds sold for a dollar as most of the farmers had from 40 to 100 lugs on their trucks.
Bay Area Social Movements
A number of national and transnational, progressive social movements have had prominent and influential expression in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this grouping of articles we examine the emergence of these movements; the cultural, racial, ethnic, and political identities created within these movements; and how these legacies have shaped the geography, culture, ecology, and politics of the Bay Area as we live in it today.
Market Street Hub Neighborhood
For many decades beginning in the 1880s through the 1950s, the intersection of Market, Valencia, Haight and Gough Streets was popularly known as the “Hub,” because no fewer than four streetcar lines converged there either on their way downtown or outbound to outlying neighborhoods. The Municipal Railway and the Market Street Railway ran on four tracks on Market Street; the 9 Valencia ran on Valencia and the 7 Haight on Haight Street. The intersection was a busy transit hub, with streetcar lines radiating out from it along Market St., Valencia and Haight Streets. Over the course of decades, the intersection and surrounding neighborhood remained a transit hub even as streets were reconfigured and streetcar lines were replaced with buses.
The Party Pad, c. 1959, an underground club in the old Produce District, adjacent to the thriving scene in North Beach. This is the scene down on Davis Street at The Party Pad, inside an old produce warehouse.The Dangerous Beat
In the late spring of 1958, the San Francisco Examiner’s June Muller and the San Francisco Chronicle’s Allen Brown each responded to North Beach’s increased notoriety with an investigative series into the beat social world. Neither Muller, a socially active woman, nor Brown, a closeted gay man, was a teetotaler, but each characterized the North Beach scene as an embarrassing underworld of drugs, sex, and fake bohemianism. Their two series reflected and reinforced the narrative framework within which the city’s future beat policy discussions took place.
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