Mission Mission

Go Climb a Rock is an expertly curated parade of vintage photographs of granola-eaters hiking around in the woods. Or it usually is. This week, they published this shot of a couple of very modern-looking girls hanging out atop Corona Heights Park.

At first I was like, “What is this thoroughly modern tableau doing cluttering up an otherwise–” And then I realized: no Transamerica Pyramid. They’re a couple of hippies, way back in the stone age, climbing a rock. But they look just like us!

The more things change, the more they stay exactly the same, right? I saw both those pairs of sunglasses at Buffalo Exchange the other day, I swear.

(original photo via Telstar Logistics)

In the comment section of the Cinema Latino / Crown Theater article, reader “like a fox” brings us this interesting tidbit in my response to my plaintive wail, “Could you imagine something like Oakland’s The Fox in the Mission?”

Your wish is granted. The *other* theater across the street – New Mission – is slated to become a music venue – with the Fox being the model. Unfortunately, the New Mission doesn’t have the architectural splendor of the Fox. Don’t know how the funding or permitting is going, sorry.

Gus Murad’s club and height limits are well known, but the idea of a Fox-like entity in the Mission is a new one to me.  Any readers with more information?

(More Mission Street theater history porn here, and more pictures inside of New Mission here.)

Even over a century ago, bikes were hot stuff in SF. Streetsblog tells us all about it:

The bike clubs organized century rides around the Bay Area and annual “Bike Meets” where the fastest cyclists would compete against each other before large audiences. One of the biggest ever was during the 4th of July weekend in 1893 when an estimated 20,000 spectators would jam a special track built at Central Park just south of City Hall to watch the scorchers as they hurtled around the loop.

Daaang! I guess cycling isn’t a newfangled hipster fad after all. I mean, look at that dude up there… one of the original cool dads.

Read on for even older pics, talk of “boneshakers” and more.

[Thanks, Joshua!]

Building upon the deluge of nostalgic Dolores Park photos that surfaced earlier this week, MM reader friscolex clued us in to the gold mine that is the San Francisco Public Library History Center Blog.  And what a gold mine it is!  Here we have a photo of Mission High School students eating lunch in Dolores Park in 1958.  Myriad interesting things here. 

First of all, these “high school” students look a lot older than most high school students I see around these days.  In fact, they look older than most undergrads!  Perhaps they’re not really high school students at all but are merely playing the part a la James Van Der Beek.

Furthermore, I’m not quite sure, but all of these students look pretty white.  Although this may just mean that they weren’t on the city champion soccer team, I’ve got a feeling that most of their fellow classmates were white as well.  50 years later, it seems that things are a little different.

But that’s not all from the SFPL HC!  Check out these amazing early (1965) designs for BART trains!  Supposedly, BART promised “trains automatically timed to arrive at stations every 90 seconds during rush hours, [and] BART is guaranteeing everyone of its passengers a seat[!!!]“  I wonder how that worked out.

Nevertheless, the SFPL History Center is a gold mine.  Be sure to check it out and support it however you can!

Previously:

Dolores Park 20 Years Ago

More Photos of Dolores Park 20 Years Ago

Mission Soccer: A San Francisco Dynasty

Yesterday’s post featuring pictures taken in Dolores Park 20 years ago was so nostalgic it inspired MM reader and cheese connoisseur Gordon Edgar to post some his old snapshots from the same era.

A week or two after Bush Sr. started the first Gulf War San Francisco had a huge protest. We watched the crowd grow outside our window (and let people in to use the bathroom since no one rented honey buckets for protests back then) and I finally took a picture when the crowd got huge. Then we rushed downstairs and joined the march.

Oh yeah, all the people in the park were there for the protest, not sunbathing. The park was empty by the time we got to City Hall.

Read on for more photos of the Park and to find out the name of the vegetarian Chinese restaurant that used to be in the Dolores Park Cafe spot.

It’s like, not that different, but completely different. You know what I mean? These pictures that Eric Fischer found someplace make my stomach churn, in a good way.

People hung out at Dolores Park 20 years ago! People took their dogs to Dolores Park 20 years ago! People all drove vintage cars back then! The trees were a little bit smaller back then! I was a little kid back then! Nobody’d quite heard of Nirvana back then!

But the park looks basically the same. And whatever renovations come and go, it’ll probably look basically the same  20 years from now. After we’ve all moved to Portland or New York.

Great find, Eric!

Marginally Yours brings us this titillating scrap of Mission history. What’s he thinking about? What’s he looking at? Does somebody have a box of those shirts collecting dust in a basement somewhere? Where they at?

I assume this place went the way of Valencia Street’s funky, secret bathhouse for women, which, so I’ve heard, was definitely for the discriminating female.

[link via nuitnuageuse]

Does it land on a hipster?

Burrito Justice has the answer.

This scene has something to do with a girlie show that took place decades ago in what is now the Great American Music Hall on Treasure Island. (Be sure to consider this while swaying and nodding at the Hope Sandoval show there tonight during the Belle and Sebastian set there next month.)

[Burrito Justice Historical Update: "Sally Rand's Nude Ranch" was part of the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition (aka World's Fair) on Treasure Island. Epic, totally NSFW photos here. Sally made a name for her nude dancing at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair (bringing in $6K a week, the equivalent of $100,000!)  She  followed up with the 1.0 of the Nude Ranch in Ft. Worth at the 1936 Frontier Expedition.

In 1936, Sally Rand bought "The Music Box" (today's GAMH) where she performed her world-famous feather dance and bubble dance.  She continued to dance into her 70s, and worked with the Mitchell Bros in the early 1970s.]

Spots Unknown has some of the sordid details in a new post entitled Photos of San Francisco in 1939, and just published a follow-up article on Sally Rand.

Photographer alvaro offers no further explanation regarding this epic scene. Well done, alvaro.

Previously:

Mission Hipster, 2010

Mission Hipster, 2003

Mission Hipster, 1998