San Francisco History Podcast – Sparkletack

Though the rest of the country thinks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens as a southerner, it was a spell in San Francisco and the wilds of California which turned young Sam into "Mark Twain". This week’s podcast tells the story of how a misfired duel, a bungled gold-mining claim, a suit for libel — and yes, […]

By now just about every San Franciscophile has been alerted to the fact that April 18th of this year will mark the centennial of the 1906 earthquake — the Big One which destroyed the city that once was, and gave rise to the one which we inhabit today. But the “Great Quake” of 1906 was […]

San Francisco has a long-standing reputation as a literature-loving town, as evidenced by government statistics ranking us as having the highest per-capita spending on books in the country. Over the decades this city has nurtured a number of notable writers from Mark Twain to Dashiell Hammett. However, there’s one literary memorial in town that has […]

On a tour of the alleyways of Chinatown last week I learned something that I hadn’t heard before — namely, that the world-famous Chinese fortune cookie was invented right here in San Francisco. That’s right — the fortune cookie is just about as Chinese as french toast is French. Which is to say, not at […]

Downtown San Francisco on a Tuesday afternoon, and every businessman’s face looks the same. Whatever happened to eccentric and iconic characters like Emperor Norton and Oofty Goofty? You search the streets, hoping desperately for a flicker of life or a flash of the eccentricity that once shaped our city. Then you spot something out of […]

There are only three cemeteries left within the city limits of San Francisco. Note the phrase carefully: “left” in San Francisco. There were once far more than just three, which makes perfect sense — after all, thousands upon thousands of San Franciscans have passed away since the establishment of Yerba Buena 170 years ago, and […]

Established at the dawn of the century, the San Francisco Motorcycle Club has thrived for over a hundred years.There are plenty of fossils in this town, relics of another age, but the SFMC represents living history, from the days when motorcycles were little more than heavyweight bicycles with engines squeezed into their frames — suspension […]

It was 1841, and like so many of those who have washed up on these shores, then or since, William Alexander Leidesdorff was a man on the run from his past — a man trying desperately to reinvent himself on the blank canvas of the western coast. Though hardly anyone remembers his name these days, […]

“So what do you think of that beautiful bridge?” I started to say, but she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, an odd, wistful look in her eyes. “what is it?” I asked. She turned to me with a grave expression and said — “at the risk of sounding crazy, is there a reason that […]

“I will sing in San Francisco if I have to sing in the streets, for I know that the streets of San Francisco are free.” It was 1910. San Francisco was still in a bad way following the great earthquake and conflagration of 1906, and in fact, the whole decade had been kind of rough. […]