Looking west on Monterey Boulevard from Edna Street (south leg). Move slider to compare photographs. View larger here. Look at other comparison photographs here.
Monterey near Edna: 1928 and Today
Category: Monterey Blvd
The Sunnyside Powerhouse: New Photographs
![Detail from: Untitled [Sunnyside Powerhouse, San Francisco] 1892c. San Mateo County Historical Association Collection (1990.48). Used with permission and subject to usage restrictions.](https://i0.wp.com/sunnysidehistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/1892c-Sunnyside-Powerhouse-condensing-pond_h_SMCHA_1990-040-048_2.jpg?fit=1088%2C471&ssl=1)
Read more about the Sunnyside Powerhouse and the San Francisco and San Mateo Electric Railway.
To add to the recently revealed photo of the Sunnyside Powerhouse, here are five more images from the same album at the San Mateo County Historical Association, including unseen interior shots from the engine room. They were taken by a photographer from the company that supplied the engines, Risdon Iron Works, on the occasion of the opening of the powerhouse and the new electric streetcar line in April 1892.
These new photos are unmatched by any other known ones of Sunnyside’s lost landmark, all of which date to after the powerhouse ceased to operate in 1901. These show a car house and power plant just constructed, ready to revolutionize San Francisco’s urban railways with the introduction of electricity for propulsion. For the first time, the machinery of the powerhouse engine room can be seen.
Continue reading “The Sunnyside Powerhouse: New Photographs”
The Detroit Steps: Some historical images, and a vignette
By Amy O’Hair
The public stairway in Sunnyside called the Detroit Steps is currently the focus of an art and landscaping project. The stairway runs along the route of a planned street that was never built due to the steep hillside. In other places in Sunnyside, such unbuildable “paper” streets—that is, streets that only existed on maps—were simply excised altogether. (More about that here.)
Stairway beauty spots, decorated with art and landscaping, free of cars, and perhaps with a view, are a longstanding San Francisco tradition, given the impracticality of building roadways on various blocks of the city’s steep hills. From the high-buzz tourist attraction at 16th Avenue—to the many undecorated and largely unknown stairways such as Mandalay Steps or the Detroit Steps—this is a city full of wonderful public stairways.
The Detroit Steps Through Time
The present-day concrete stairs were installed at the Lower Detroit Steps (south of Monterey) the 1930s, and the Upper Detroit Steps (north of Monterey) in the 1960s. Like many of the steeply sloped blocks on either side of Monterey Boulevard, the nearby lots went undeveloped for a long time, as the photos below well show. It took the apartment-building boom in the 1950s-1970s to fill out Monterey’s unbuilt hillsides (and thereby deprive the neighborhood kids of some adventures). The great increase in density along Monterey makes the preciousness of any public open space away from traffic all the more important now. Continue reading “The Detroit Steps: Some historical images, and a vignette”
Monterey Boulevard shops: Some midcentury photos
The covid-19 pandemic has put a temporary halt to my history walks, including the one that highlights Monterey Boulevard shops, restaurants, and businesses of decades past. But here are some photos, most never seen before, showing businesses from the 1950s to the 1970s. From the San Francisco Office of the Assessor-Recorder Photographs Collection, at the San Francisco History Center.
Many businesses on the boulevard came and went without ever being recorded visually in the public record, such as the old Safeway (1942-1972) that was located in the parking lot of the current Safeway. Or Bruno’s Creamery Restaurant, at Foerster Street, site of many happy hours for local kids.
The big push to plant street trees in the 1970s has changed the look of the street completely, as these photos well show. Photos are ordered from 400s to 700s, Edna Street to Ridgewood Avenue, with each followed by a present-day photo. Do you have a photo taken on Monterey to share? Write me.
Continue reading “Monterey Boulevard shops: Some midcentury photos”
Third Annual Sunnyside History Holiday Quiz
Here is this year’s local history quiz for the 2019 holidays: Continue reading “Third Annual Sunnyside History Holiday Quiz”
Dancer, Director, Dreamer: The Work and Life of Ann Marie Garvin
Sunnyside Resident Ann Marie Garvin passed away recently at the age of 82.
“Dance is all that’s left that’s real. It’s another world, all yours, and no one can take away the thrill of it.”
Ann Marie Garvin spoke those words to a reporter in 1976, shortly after she had founded her studio on Monterey Boulevard, Dancer’s Synectics Group. They were words she lived by over the course of her long working life–performing, teaching, directing, and choreographing, in San Francisco and beyond.
For 45 years, in the pink-striped building, she taught thousands of dancers, from near and far, her particular fast-paced jazz style and much else as well. Many Bay Area dancers studied with her, such as Ed Mock, Snowy Winter, Greg de Silva, and Craig Innes. Jazz dancer and instructor Ann Barrett noted in an artist’s bio how performing in Ann Marie Garvin’s ‘Dance Between the Lines’ had been invaluable to her understanding of choreography and theater, and for that she was “eternally grateful.”[1]
In assembling and choreographing her own companies of dancers, Ann Marie Garvin rode the crests of several trends, including the push for a greater diversity of body shapes and skin colors in dance that happened in the Bay Area the late 1970s.[2]
“The distinctive thing about Ann Marie is her disregard for height, or color of skin. She is unaware of anything except this: Can they dance? So [her] company has tall and short, plumpish, tan, black, white, but all marvelous dancers.”[3]
Continue reading “Dancer, Director, Dreamer: The Work and Life of Ann Marie Garvin”
Monterey East of Edna: 1940 and Today
Move slider to compare photographs. Street parking was a thing of the future. View larger here. Look at other comparison photographs here.
Monterey near Baden: 1937 and Today
Move slider to compare photographs. Note little gas station on left, site of 190 Monterey apartment building now. View larger here. Look at other comparison photographs here.Look at a similar view in 1925.
Monterey at Acadia: 1923 and Today
Move slider to compare photographs. View larger here. Look at other comparisons photographs here. The 1923 image definitively answers the question that many have asked: Was there ever a time when the house at 90 Monterey Boulevard did not have scaffolding?
‘Bulkley-Built’: Midcentury Modern on Monterey
On Monterey Boulevard in Sunnyside, there are two unique 3-unit buildings that were designed in 1963 by architect Jonathan Bulkley. Perhaps you have walked by and wondered about the history behind them. Today they stand somewhat altered from their original look. The San Francisco Examiner featured them shortly after their construction.[1] They have unusual triple barrel-vaulted tops and two levels of balconies on the front.
Continue reading “‘Bulkley-Built’: Midcentury Modern on Monterey”