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Plan for the city of San Francisco, 1905

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I wish I didn’t have to say this, but the Geography Department’s Map Library at SFSU is getting rid of a large portion of their map collection.  Tomorrow (8/4) will be the first day of a five day sale. There are a wide variety of maps: 7.5 minute topo maps, large wall maps, and historical prints.  The prices are very reasonable, ranging from $1-$30.  I really wish we could just keep all of them, but times have changed.  Please come and give these beautiful maps a loving home. 

SFSU Map Library

1500 Holloway Ave., HSS 289

San Francisco, CA 94132

Saturday (8/4) 10 am - 3 pm

Monday - Thursday (8/6-8/9) 10 am - 3 pm

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Historical Map: 1967 San Francisco Muni Rapid Transit Plan

I’m ever so slightly in love with this simple little map showing proposed rapid transit lines in San Francisco. There’s some lovely texture for the parkland, a nice vignetted effect for the coastline, and some great mid-century typography as well – all rather delightful! 

There’s a great information hierarchy as well, with buses being thin light blue lines, then trolley buses slightly thicker brown lines. Cable cars are shown by thin black lines that still appear visually stronger than trolley buses, and the proposed lines are unmissable thick black lines with stations clearly shown. 

There’s even a lovely little compass rose – it’s just a shame that this fold-out map wasn’t opened fully before being scanned, as a large section is hidden from view in the centre of the map.

Our rating: A great example of a map doing sterling work with a judicious use of just a few colours, combined with a good information hierarchy. Four stars!

Source: Eric Fischer/Twitter

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Historical Map: BART System Map and Planned Extensions, March 1, 1989

Here’s a rather charming illustrated map showing the Bay Area’s BART commuter rail system as it looked in early 1989, plus a glimpse into the future as it was envisioned at the time. I particularly like the little details in this map – drawn by Art Richardson of BART’s “Documentation Division” back in 1983, it would seem – all the bridges are drawn accurately, and the skylines of San Francisco and Oakland are also well rendered. Look at the cute little Ferry Building and Transamerica Pyramid!

Some of it is quite familiar – the line to SFO (though San Bruno was named “Tanforan”) and the Warm Springs/Milpitas extension, for example – but some of it is far less so. A line from Walnut Creek directly down to West Dublin/Pleasanton? An extension past Richmond all the way to Crockett? Or continuing from Concord past Pittsburg out to East Antioch? BART were definitely dreaming big back in the late 1980s.

Our rating: Looks gorgeous, and a fascinating historical document to boot. Four stars!

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Israel and its adjacent regions, viewed as the San Francisco Bay area

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Hello my only social media outlet!  There have been protests in Nicaragua concerning raised taxes and decreased pensions.  They started out peacefully, but the government is forcibly trying to put a stop to them.  The current government has been confiscating supplies (water, food, first aid, etc.) en route to the protesters. They have also been inflicting physical harm to the protesters, and there have been a number of injuries and deaths.  It’s been almost a week and the government is continuing to try and silence the people.  

If you’re in the city please come to our fundraiser at Rock Bar (80 29th St., San Francisco, CA) on Saturday, April 28th from 5:00-8:00 pm.  The fundraiser will raise money for supplies so that the government knows that they/we won’t give up. 

If you can’t make it, but still want to help please donate at this gofundme: 

https://www.gofundme.com/hgb6vv-help-nicaragua

Thank you. 

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An in-progress primer on gayborhoods, gentrification and radical queer resistance. 

“Housing is a Queer Issue” Queer to the Left poster.  

Queer to the Left is a Chicago-based multi-racial group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people committed to working in coalition with queers and non-queers to promote economic, gender, racial, and sexual justice. Our current work focuses on building affordable housing and promoting fair community development that does not undermine important community institutions

“A Map of Polk Street Gentrification” Gay Shame SF poster. 

GAY SHAME is a Virus in the System. We are committed to a queer extravaganza that brings direct action to astounding levels of theatricality. We will not be satisfied with a commercialized gay identity that denies the intrinsic links between queer struggle and challenging power. 

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The End of San Francisco

150: A few months earlier, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal had approached Gay Shame to do an interview. He had seen some of our wheatpastes about gentrification on Polk Street. Of course we were skeptical, but we made a consensus decision to go through with it – it’s not like anyone else was going to be talking critically about gentrification in the Wall Street Journal, make we could at least get in a good quote or two. I volunteered to do the interview, since I was living on Polk Street myself and knew the most about it. I put together a modified business outfit complete with a frosted asymmetrical mullet and smeared lipstick, and gave a detailed description of the gentrification and its effects.

152…the end of San Francisco as a place where marginalized queers could try to figure out a way to cope. I was talking about Polk Street, one of the last remaining public spaces for homeless youth, hustlers, trans women, street queens, drug addicts, seniors on disability, and migrants of all types, but fast becoming a hot destination for fashionistas and office drones to sip green apple martinis. The Wall Street Journal didn’t exactly talk about this form of ethnic cleansing – they decided Gay Shame was fighting for the neighborhood’s “gritty ambience.” But the article did reveal that Larkin Street Youth Services hired out the kids in their shelter to plant palm trees in front of the architecture firm spearheading the gentrification, at the preposterous rate of six dollars a day. And it reprinted the WANTED poster we’d made for the head of that architecture firm.

Lower Polk Neighbors [Association] is allegedly an organization striving for neighborhood “beautification” and “cleanliness”, but is actually a pro-gentrification attack squad that works with the police to rid neighborhood streets and businesses of “undesirables,” i.e. hookers, hustlers, drug addicts, homeless people, trannies, needle exchange services, working class queers and other social deviants. Lower Polk Neighbors claims to be open to all, but primarily consists of wealthy property and business owners, slumlords, developers, bureaucrats, robber barons, police officers and vigilante social purists.

Christina B. Hanhardt’s 2004 Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence 

Since the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods. During the same time, policymakers and private developers declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for “safe space” have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines.

Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.

Flag Wars (2003) “is a poignant and very personal look at a community in Columbus, Ohio, undergoing gentrification. What happens when gay white homebuyers move into a working-class black neighborhood?”

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Sonoma County Vineyards.

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bravo

Making Diorama Map of San Francisco 2016 from sohei nishino on Vimeo.

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Love it

Remember back in August when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) asked for the public’s input on where future subways in the city might run by means of an interactive “draw a subway map” tool? 

Well, thy’ve just released the collated results of that survey – wich had some 2,600 respondents – as a heat map, and the results are certainly definitive. It would seem that almost everyone wants a subway line along the length of Geary Boulevard, with another major “crosstown” connection running south along 19th Avenue. An extension of the Central Subway to Fort Mason also seems popular, as is – if you combined all the disparate routes into one – a second Transbay Tube. 

Though these corridors have been identified, there’s still a lot more planning and funding work to be done before any concrete plans start to take shape. Still, an interesting conclusion to this little public outreach exercise! There’s also an online GIS-based version of this map showing all of the submitted ideas, but it takes forever to load all 2,600 of them!

Source: SFconnect website

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Happy Monday.

Not to scale with plenty of errors. 

It’s been too long...

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Alpha, TR. 1970. Central San Francisco Bay. Menlo Park, CA:United States Geological Survey.

I’m really glad I found this map, the detail is amazing.  It’s an absolutely wonderful hand drawn map by Tau Rho Alpha who worked for USGS.  The USGS on their website dubbed Alpha “marine geology’s illustrator extraordinaire.”  My favorite pieces of this map are the Golden Gate and the location and design of the north arrow. Beautiful. 

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This is the last set of plates from the Bart Engineering Report. There are a few station difference in this one.  For example, 77th Ave Station is now the Colesium,  Hesperian Blvd Station is now Bay View, and Alquire Rd. is now S. Hayward. 

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Central Contra Costa Line. I love this set.  Look at the elevation profiles in Plate 19 and 20!  This line now extends to North Concord/Martinez and Pittsburg Bay Point which opened in 1995 and 1996, respectively. 

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The Trans-Bay Line, Oakland Downtown, and the Berkeley-Richmond L  Plate 14, Trans-Bay Line, is my favorite out of this set.

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The Marin Line. This is probably one of my favorites.  Imagine hopping onto BART to get to Sausalito and as you go through The City you emerge underneath the Golden Gate Bridge with views of the Pacific to your left and The Bay to your right. These plans show that this section of BART would have ended in Santa Venetia, just after San Rafael.  Why Marin does not currently have BART, I’m not 100% certain.  I’ve heard the Bridge wouldn’t have been able to support the weight, the voters were just going to say “no”, and the tax base would have been too low because San Mateo county withdrew from voting which placed a burden on the remaining counties.  It could have very well been a combination of all three. More to come...

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San Francisco Downtown and The Peninsula Line.  The Plates show an amazing exaggerated elevation profile (especially Plate 3) paired with aerial photography and an overlay of the BART route.  The route is almost identical to the current BART lines that travels south, except that it would have traveled further south, and there are a few station changes.  There would have been a Van Ness Station, only one station in the Mission (22nd St.), Glen Park Station wasn’t on the map yet, and towards the end of the line the Stanford Cardinals would have been able to walk to class from the Palo Alto BART Station.  More to come…