Amazing Historic San Francisco Aerials from 1937-1938
San Francisco Aerial Views
A well known cartographer, David Rumsey, has taken high resolution scans of very detailed aerials photographs of San Francisco taken from 1937-1938 and combined them into a large single aerial. It’s integrated in a interactive web interface that lets you pan and zoom (use your scrolly wheel).
Interesting things to note:
- The Presidio and Fort Miley are blacked out for national security purposes; these forts were still active at the time.
- The Sunset District was still mostly sand dunes since this was around the time it was being developed. Streets are already defined, but winds would blow sand over them.
- No Interstate freeways! National Highway act was in 1955, so this is nearly 20 years before we had interstate freeways. In addition, no California Route 480 (Embarcadero Freeway), which was removed in ~1990.
- Most of the Marina and near Piers 35-43 were all railroads. Blocks upon blocks of railroad tracks.
- Huge oil/gas tankers (large cylinders) scattered throughout the city. These took up as much as a quarter of a city block. The remnants of a foundation for these tanks can still be seen on Irish Hill in the Dog Patch.
- Sutro Tower was still not built.
- No really tall building in downtown. No Transamerica, no 555 California (B of A), etc.
- Playland at the Beach and The Sutro Baths are still visible!
- The Laurline Pier was visible on Ocean Beach.
- San Francisco Symphony Hall was a large vacant block.
- 4 by 4 block section east of USF was a cemetery. Everything from the City Center Shopping Mall and Kaiser Hospital was all once the large Calvary Cemetery.
- Most of present-day USF was still not built. It was formally the Masonic Cemetery, reserved for Freemasons. Masonic Street is named for it.
- What is now Laurel Village / Lauren Heights used to be the Laurel Hill Cemetery.
- Many corner developments used to be gas stations. There were gas stations on nearly every other block.
- Every major street still had street cars, most operated by the Market Street Railway Company.
- The Public Health Service Hospital in the Presidio looks as it does today, without the non-historic wings (added in the 70s).
- Fleishhacker Pool was still visible. What is now the parking lot of the Fleishhacker / SF Zoo, used to be a large public swimming pool.
- Everything surrounding the northern, eastern and southeast waterfront was heavily industrial.
- What is now a large shopping center at Potrero and 16th Street, used to be the San Francisco Seals Stadium. A stadium for the former San Francisco baseball team.
- The Southern Pacific Railroad snakes through the Potrero all through the Mission. Many blocks today still have buildings which conform to the right of way. Many streets had elevated bridges allowing the railroad to pass over street traffic. Large mounds would be built to bring the railroads to the appropriate height. (Dolores and 27th, Valley and Church, Dolores and 30th St)
- Tank Hill at Twin Peaks Blvd and Clayton St had a water tank on top. The circular foundation for this tank can still be seen at the top of the hill.
- The majority of large grocery stores used to be car barns for the Market Street Railway Company. Fresh & Easy on Clement and 32nd used to be a car barn. Andronico’s at Irving and Funston used to be a car barn. The Falletti development used to be Falletti foods, before that it was a car barn. The Petrini Place Development on Fulton and Masonic used to be Petrini’s grocery store, which was formally a car barn.
- What is now a bicycle path through the Panhandle used to be a two-way road for automotive traffic.
- The current UCSF Children’s Hospital development at 3rd and Mariposa Street used to be home to a railroad turnaround.
- Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard at the time had two dry docks without any main support buildings. The majority of it was barren land with a few scattered buildings.
- Islais Creek has just one building on the shore. The historic Copra Crane and adjacent buildings were not yet built.
- What is now Cesar Chavez Street was still labeled as “Army St.”
- Neither Monster Park (Candlestick) nor AT&T Stadium are built. Monster Park was a barren shoreline while AT&T Stadium was an industrial area for the railroads.
- The Spanish-inspired Southern Pacific Terminus at 3rd and Townsend are visible. It was replaced with the current Caltrain Station.
- Many of the piers in the upper 20s (even number piers) are no longer around and have been removed.
- CCSF (City College) was being built at the time. The foundation for the Cloud Hall can be clearly seen.
RoundCube Mail
Never thought I’d write about an open source webmail client, but here I am. I remember trying RoundCube when it was still an early beta version, and while it was clean, it didn’t really impress. So when looking for something to use for my mail server instead of just IMAP through Outlook (Outlook’s IMAP implementation sucks horribly, different article though), I decided to try RoundCube again.
I have to say, it rocks! Anyone that has used OS X will quickly see where lots of the design cues came from, so the interface will be familiar (even if you are mostly a Windows person, like me). The AJAX support is exceptional for a mail client; almost at the level of Gmail. It does everything you would expect in a modern web-app. Drag-and-drop to organize mail, right click support, AJAX pagination and no-reload functionality (back/forward buttons work due to URL hash anchors). Hell, it will even auto-save your drafts!
The best part? It’s open source (written in PHP) and free! This is the kind of application that makes me love the open source community. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any commercial solutions that offer similar features and performance.
Try it out, if you want. http://www.roundcube.net/
SSD Upgrade
For the past few years, the latest and greatest must-have in computers have been SSDs. Since hard drives have always been the biggest performance bottleneck, I’d generally jump at the opportunity to start using something new and fast. But with prices approaching $2/GB, it’s a bit difficult to justify such a purchase.
This all changed when I noticed how snappy and quick my Macbook Air with a 128GB SDD performs. For a machine that’s relatively underpowered, it was performing exceptionally well. Running a few HD Tune tests on my lowly 300GB IDE (that’s right, IDE) drive, resulted in an abysmal average of 40MB/sec. My Gbit network can easily outperform that! And it did, topping out at 80MB/sec at the best of times.
But, since I only use my Macbook on the go, and my workstation nearly the entire day, it was only logical that I had to upgrade. I went to Amazon I purchased a 64GB Corsair SSD; shipped with 2nd day with Prime and utilizing the recent $20 giftcard for $10 deal at LivingSocial, the price came out to $99 even.
Today was the day. The hard drive is installed, imaged and running. Initially I had trouble with cloning the drive (used dd on a Linux live USB distro), even though I was doing everything by the book. I ended up using Acronis to make an image of the current partition, then restoring that image onto the SSD. Initial boot up of Win7 failed, but it just needed me run the installation DVD to repair the boot record. I also had to switch from IDE to AHCI in the BIOS, which required a change in the registry (prior to changing over to AHCI).
HD Tune shows an average of 174MB/sec and a peek of 190MB/sec. Possibly a bottleneck of the SATA II bus, but potentially just a limit of the SSD itself.
So, what can I say? It’s not the 300MB/sec screamer that people are running with some Intel SSDs, but when Photoshop CS5 starts in 2 seconds flat, you can’t help but smile a little :)
Hello, World!
For someone who has been involved with the internet, programming and tech for as long as I have, never have I felt the need to have a blog. This blog will be a way for me to contribute to the internet in the form of short articles and discussions about programming and entrepreneurship (as well as anything else I think is interesting).
I will try to refrain from making this into my personal soapbox.
Enjoy!
