San Francisco History Podcast – Sparkletack

Summer of 1875, and the Wells Fargo stagecoach is slowly rattling through a mountain pass in the Sierra Nevada gold country, bearing a cargo of passengers, U.S. mail, and gold. The driver pulls the horses to an abrupt halt at the sight of a man standing confidently on the side of the road. He wears […]

By the time I arrived, San Francisco was already a city — and had been one for the previous century and a half. But what went on before that time? What was San Francisco before it was San Francisco? I’ve decided to look into the story of the pre-city peninsula, and the birth of the […]

The cool evening of February 4th, 1974. Nineteen-year-old Patricia Hearst, heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was relaxing in a rented apartment on campus with her fiancee. The front door burst open and three armed people rushed into the house, dragging Patricia away in her nightgown and stuffing her violently into the trunk of their […]

As I was riding around town this weekend, I was suddenly struck by a thought: stopped at the intersection of Broadway and Battery Streets, I suddenly wondered to myself: “Broadway? Battery? Where did those names actually come from? Does anyone still remember?” These names must reveal something about the character, history, and essential nature of […]

Charles Cora must have been a happy man as he arrived in San Francisco in 1852 with Arabella Ryan on his arm. And why not? He was a professional gambler of the highest reputation, and would have been delighted by the wide open nature of the town in the gold rush years — a perfect […]

The very name gives one chills, doesn’t it? On a sunny day it seems almost unbelievable that such a lovely little island could have once been such an menacing symbol of power. It’s just over a mile from the San Francisco shore, and yet according to official records, none of the hundreds of men incarcerated […]

It’s one of San Francisco’s strange and secret treasures, hidden in plain sight at the edge of the Bay. As you stroll along the jetty you suddenly spy the… wait, what is that? A fragment of the ruins of a lost city? No, not this time… it’s a collision between nature and architecture, the fruits […]

I’ve just returned from a short vacation to a distinctly un-San Francisco like location… Hawaii! It took me a little while to come up with a San Francisco connection, but on the flight home I recalled that San Francisco was once home to the “China Clipper”, the first trans-Pacific airline service to those gorgeous islands. […]

We’ve had our fair share of peculiar citizens over the last 150 years, but in my judgement none compare to the “Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico”, his excellency Norton the First! Whether or not he was truly a secret descendent of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette or not is, to say […]

There’s a strange atmospheric phenomenon peculiar to our location halfway up the North-American coastline, something that has shaped the romantic atmosphere of San Francisco since the very moment that it truly became a city. poems have been written about it, as well as songs and stories, and I aim to celebrate it too. You’ve probably […]