SF History Days - SF Mint

SF History Days Schedules-March 3&4 SF Mint
Schedule Of Events
http://sfhistorydays.org

SATURDAY SCHEDULE

SUNDAY SCHEDULE

EXHIBITORS
Saturday Schedule of Events
Main Floor, Room 13 (Coiner’s Office)–Ohlone and Indigenous Peoples Room
Telling the Long History of This Place
Full Saturday schedule TBC

Ramaytush Ohlone Chairperson Jonathan Cordero and local indigenous people invite you to learn about the history and culture of the original inhabitants and more recent native presidents of the San Francisco Bay Area and California from native peoples themselves. In this room we will be honoring and promoting life and cultural continuance through ceremony, storytelling, published work, exhibition of creative work and crafts, and presentations by native leaders on topics such as shellmounds, education, language, food, relocation, and culture.


Theatre One
Main Floor, Room 7–Silver Melting Room

11:15 a.m.: Why Do We Call It the Mint? … and Everything Else You’d Like to Know About the Old Mint and Money

Speaker: Michael Levin

A brief but well-illustrated history of the United States Mint, with emphasis on its San Francisco facilities, and particularly the Old Mint.


Noon: The Old U.S. Mint, Built for Posterity and Poised for a Fresh Start

Organization: California Historical Society and San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development

Speakers: Anthea M. Hartig, Ph.D., California Historical Society; Jon Lau, San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development; and Stephen Tobriner, Professor Emeritus of Architectural History, Architecture Department, University of California, Berkeley



Professor Tobriner will discuss the factors leading to the design and construction of the 1874 Old U.S. Mint at a time when federal, state and city authorities were seeking to build seismic resistant structures in the aftermath of the 1868 earthquake and other significant seismic events. He will discuss the architectural performance of the Mint, unique in the architectural and engineering history of the City of San Francisco. He will be introduced by Anthea M. Hartig and Jon Lau, who will recap the status of the Old Mint Restoration Project, a project led by a partnership between the California Historical Society and the City.


1 p.m.: Panel Discussion: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age, 1.0

Sponsored by the Institute for Historical Study

Speakers: Chris Carlsson, founder of Shaping San Francisco and FoundSF.org, two contributor-driven historical websites; Katherine D. Harris, PhD, associate professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Jose State University, and co-editor of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities; Daniel Hartwig, university archivist, Stanford Libraries, Stanford University

Members of the panel will discuss how today’s technology tools are changing the way history is researched, written about, and made accessible to the general public and historians alike and will showcase their digital history and digital humanities projects.

Note: This panel will be repeated on Saturday, March 31, at 10 a.m. in the Koret Auditorium at the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library, Civic Center (co-sponsored by the Institute for Historical Study and the San Francisco History Center).


2 p.m.: The History of the Buffalo Soldiers: Life at the Presidio in San Francisco

Organization: 10th Cavalry, Company G, Buffalo Soldiers of Northern California

Speaker: Trooper William Terrell

The 10th Cavalry, Company G, Buffalo Soldiers of Northern California promotes and perpetuates the history, tradition, and outstanding contributions of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry regiments toward the development and defense of the United States of America. Trooper Terrell presents a short video of Buffalo Soldiers from the beginning, followed by a presentation of Buffalo Soldiers’ service at the Presidio of San Francisco.


3 p.m.: Dogs and Coyotes, Baseballs and Rabbits

Organization: German International School of Silicon Valley (Presidio campus)

Speaker: Theater Club

This one-act, historical fiction play by David Giesen portrays five San Francisco youths confronting the politics, sexism, and real estate puzzles of 1914 San Francisco. The plot: What revenge will a grandson wreak when “Sunny Jim” Rolph wrests away the grandma’s house for his mistress?


4 p.m.: An Audacious Project: The Herbert Fleishhacker Pool

Speaker: Mike Phipps, Cable Car Museum

Fleishhacker Pool was built in 1924 with funding from noted San Francisco civic leader and philanthropist Herbert Fleishhacker, it was the world’s largest outdoor saltwater swimming pool, holding up to 10,000 patrons, with lifeguards who patrolled it in rowboats. For many years it was a famous attraction at Ocean Beach along with Sutro Baths, the Cliff House, and Playland-at-the-Beach. Mike Phipps will give a photographic presentation on the pool’s history, from its glory days in the 1920s through to the 1970s, when budgetary concerns and civic indifference led to its closure; now only a piece of the bathhouse remains as a silent reminder of a bygone era.


Theatre 2–Vault Level
Vault 1–Carpenter’s Shop
11:15 a.m.: PRESENT HISTORY: A Visual Documentation of Urban Environment

Speaker: Stacey Carter

Stacey Carter’s artwork serves as a visual document of the surrounding urban environment. Her multimedia compositions are based on photographs that are transformed by use of skilled printmaking technique combined with loose expressionistic hand painting. Layered and compositionally rich, her art is a study of how experiences define one’s environment, an acknowledgement of what has passed and its importance to the present. Her work tends to “freeze time,” making a platform for individual histories to be recalled and shared once more.




Noon: Chanteys: The Work Songs of Merchant Seamen

Organization: San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park

Speaker/singer: Park Ranger Peter Kasin



A participatory program, emphasizing shipboard work songs from the California Gold Rush as well as from Europe, the West Indies, and the southern United States. Ranger Kasin will give the historical background to each song, and you will be encouraged to sing along on the choruses, which are easy to learn.


1 p.m.: Drag Me Along Through History: The History of Drag in San Francisco

Organization: Time Machine Tours

Speaker: The Countess Lola Montez of Landsfeld, aka Rick (Gav) Shelton

Female impersonation and drag has changed throughout the course of not only San Francisco’s history, but throughout the world. In the 1860s the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a law criminalizing the wearing in public of “a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” From the Gold Rush, the civil rights movement, and entertainment industry, drag has played a role in shaping the city’s history. We will explore the stories from the colorful venues as the Black Cat Cafe to Finocchio’s.This will be an informative romp through the drag history of San Francisco with a twist.


2 p.m.: The History of SOMA Pilipinas

Organization: SOMA Pilipinas

Speakers: MC Canlas and Gene Alejo

This presentation will discuss the migration, activism, culture, and organizational spirit of the working class, artists, activists, youth, and families who contribute to the very spirit of SOMA Pilipinas today.


3 p.m.: History of the Community Through Newspapers

Organizations: Acción Latina, United Irish Cultural Center, and Neighborhood Newspapers of San Francisco

Speaker: Josué Rojas, Valerie McGrew, and LisaRuth Elliott

Neighborhood and community history can be saved and shared through archiving and digitizing decades of local newspapers. Hear from the publisher of the longest-running Spanish/English bilingual newspaper in California, El Tecolote; about the recent preservation of the Leader, a San Francisco Irish newspaper of the 1900s; and learn about the collaborative community effort Neighborhood Newspapers of San Francisco, a newly digitized collection of several neighborhood newspapers featuring almost 1,500 scanned issues.


4 p.m.: See You at the 7 – Stories From the Bay Area’s Last Original Mile House

Organization: 7 Mile House

Speaker: Vanessa Garcia

In this first-ever comprehensive narrative on “The 7,” as it came to be called in the 1950s, Vanessa traces its roots from 1858, when it began as a toll gate carved along the bayside of San Bruno mountain; to a saloon, hotel, and wheelman’s exchange in the early 1900s; to an illegal gambling den in the years leading up to Prohibition; to a melting pot of carefree workers from the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1940s and S.E. Rykoff in the 1980s; to the largest illegal sports gambling syndicate west of the Mississippi; to the family and dog-friendly restaurant, sports bar, and live music venue that it is today.


Theatre 3–Vault Level
The Roxie Theater Screening Room: Films in the Vault
Vault 5

11:15 a.m.: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (12)

Organization: Prelinger Library & Archives

Speaker: Rick Prelinger

This feature-length program (87% new material this year!) shows San Francisco’s neighborhoods, infrastructures, celebrations, and people from the early 20th century through the 1970s. As always, the audience makes the soundtrack! Come prepared to identify places, people, and events, to ask questions, and to engage in spirited real-time repartee with fellow audience members, and look for hints of San Francisco’s future in the shape of its lost past.

New sequences include North Beach clubs and nightlife, colorful New Deal labor graphics, early BART footage, a scooters’ rights demonstration, unbuilt sand dunes in the Sunset, Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal shooting What’s Up Doc? on location in the Richmond District, more footage of the mysterious Running Man in Chinatown and on Nob Hill, Bay Area activism, birthdays and Thanksgiving in the Outer Mission in the late 1940s, Latino families dancing on Ocean Beach, and much, much more.


12:45 p.m.: Remembering Playland at the Beach

Organization: November Fire

Speaker: Strephon Taylor

Documentary about San Francisco’s famous 10-acre seaside amusement park, Playland at the Beach. Located next to Ocean Beach, it was torn down in 1972 to make way for a condominium development. Gone now for more than 3 decades, it remains one of the city’s lost treasures.


2:15 p.m.: Broncho Billy and the Bandit’s Secret/Window to the Past

Organization: Niles-Essanay Silent Film Museum

Speaker: David Kiehn

In 1912, film pioneer and co-owner of the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company Gilbert “Broncho Billy” Anderson arrived in the small town of Niles, California, searching for the ideal location to film westerns. There he set up shop and over 350 films later had cemented the west coast branch of Essanay in film history, with major players such as Charlie Chaplin, Wallace Beery, and Ben Turpin along for the ride before it all ended abruptly in 1916.


Sprague Anderson, Bruce Cates, Diana Serra Cary (aka silent film legend Baby Peggy), and David Kiehn. Courtesy Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum.
Using equipment and techniques from the silent era and locations that are much like they were over 100 years ago, Broncho Billy and the Bandit’s Secret presents a fictionalized account of Anderson’s arrival in Niles, and how the town sheriff joins forces with the movie gunslinger to bring a group of bandits to justice. The concept of the film started out as a 15-minute short and years in the making, it grew into a fully-realized feature two-reeler complete with cowboys on horseback, a horse & buggy, 1908 Cadillac, stagecoach, a gunfight and a robbery on an actual train and an appearance by Diana Serra Cary (former silent film star Baby Peggy), it’s a trip back in time unlike any other!

Window to the Past is an accompanying documentary detailing the history of the project.


3:45 p.m.: Nowsreal

Organization: The Diggers

Speaker: Judy Goldhaft

This loose network of San Francisco activists used guerrilla theater, direct action, and a good sense of humor to explore social alternatives. Poetry readings, arrests, free food, burning money, and tie-dyeing were all part of the fun.



Nowsreal (1968) is a documentary that looks at the Diggers scene in the Haight circa 1967. It was made by Kelly Hart and Diggers founder Peter Berg, with help from celebrated cinematographer Haskell Wexler. The movie will be followed by a Q&A.


All weekend in the Vaults
Main Hallway

FACADES: Central City Architecture

Artist: Patrícia Araujo


“Hibernia meets F&C,” oil on canvas by Patricia Araujo (2018)
V2 – Melting Room

Twenty Years Forward, and Twenty Years Back

Organization: San Francisco Black Film Festival

The SFBFF’s mission is to celebrate African American cinema and the African cultural Diaspora and to showcase a diverse collection of films from emerging and established filmmakers. As we celebrate our 20th year, we want to reflect on cinema going twenty years back and talk about what cinema will be like twenty years in the future

V3 – Store Keeper Room

100 Years of Clean Power for San Francisco: A History of Electricity from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

Organization: San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Power Enterprise


Hetch Hetchy Valley, June 1916. Image courtesy OpenSFHistory.org
On May 6, 1918, the City and County of San Francisco began generating its own hydropower from the City’s water supply at the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. This local source of clean energy is greenhouse gas-free and currently supplies one sixth of San Francisco’s total electricity, powering facilities like San Francisco International Airport, Treasure Island, the San Francisco Zoo and all public schools. Today, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is working to make the energy grid even greener with the City’s new Community Choice Aggregation program called CleanPowerSF. Come chat with staff about the past and future of clean energy in San Francisco, see old maps and transmission line blueprints, and enjoy dramatic historical films of the Hetch Hetchy Power system.

Guards Station – Vault

St. Cecilia Parish Centennial Photo Archive

Organization: St. Cecilia Parish

St. Cecilia Parish in the Parkside District celebrated its centenary during the 2016-2017 school year. This photo exhibit, on public display for the first time, represents the “all 100 years” timeline that was produced for the final celebration of the centennial year.

V6 – Blacksmith Vault

Rope Walk Wearables

Organization: Museum of Craft and Design

We’re honoring the Tubb’s Rope Walk that existed right across from where the Museum of Craft and Design is today. We’ll explore knot techniques and create wearable rope accessories for visitors of all ages. A craft that is knot to be missed!

V8 – Coal Store Vault

San Francisco and the Concert-Poster Movement

Organization: The Rock Poster Society

Since 1965, San Francisco has been a world-renowned center for concert posters. This exhibition, jointly curated by members of The Rock Poster Society, will feature selected offset lithographs from the 1960s and recent screen prints, the medium of choice among contemporary concert-poster artists.

V9 – Vault

The Twin Peaks Tunnel and the K-Ingleside at 100: 1918 to 2018

Organization: SFMTA Photo Archives

Take a ride through San Francisco’s past on the K-Ingleside, and explore the creation of a portal to the west via the Twin Peaks Tunnel. This exhibit of images from the SFMTA Photo Archive will travel through history on one of Muni’s oldest lines.



ABOUT/DIRECTIONS

SATURDAY SCHEDULE

SUNDAY SCHEDULE

EXHIBITORS
Sunday Schedule of Events
Main Floor, Room 13 (Coiner’s Office)–Ohlone and Indigenous Peoples Room
Telling the Long History of This Place
Full Sunday schedule TBC

Ramaytush Ohlone Chairperson Jonathan Cordero and local indigenous people invite you to learn about the history and culture of the original inhabitants and more recent native residents of the San Francisco Bay Area and California from native peoples themselves. In this room we will be honoring and promoting life and cultural continuance through ceremony, storytelling, published work, exhibition of creative work and crafts, and presentations by native leaders on topics such as shellmounds, education, language, food, relocation, and culture.

Theatre One
Main Floor, Room 7–Silver Melting Room
11:15 a.m.: Find Your Family, Leave a Legacy

Speaker: Linda Harms Okazaki, California Genealogical Society, Past President

Every family has a history waiting to be discovered, documented, and shared. When tracing your ancestry, it’s important to look at the laws and the history of the time. Linda will present examples of San Francisco residents, showing how their lives intersected with moments in history, and will discuss the use of traditional research techniques, coupled with digital records, and the use of DNA. Attendees will come away with an understanding of how to begin researching their own roots, regardless of ethnic or geographic origins.


Noon: Raise Your Gladsome Voices: The Story of America’s First Suffrage March and the Glen Park Women at the Heart of It

Organization: Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project

Speaker: Presented by Evelyn Rose

Dramatic vignette written and directed by Amy O’Hair; performed by Valerie Fachman and Haley Roth-Brown



Establishing the roots of today’s local civic activism, neighborhood women in the new district of Glen Park in 1908 soon developed into impassioned suffragists, and dared to help organize America’s first march in support of women’s right to vote. We will present the history of suffrage activism in Glen Park and San Francisco, and how resident Johanna Pinther played a key role in this history-making event.


1 p.m.: A Virtual Tour: San Francisco’s 49 Mile Scenic Drive—in 35 Minutes!

Speakers: Kristine Poggioli and Carolyn Eidson, Walking San Francisco’s 49 Mile Scenic Drive

Created for the 1939 Golden Gate Expo, San Francisco’s loop trail around the city—and those seagull signs—have been a big hit for 80 years! Come explore its famous sites, quirky history, heroes, and villains; learn how the authors became the first people known to have WALKED the entire route (over one year); and maybe get inspired to walk it yourself!


2 p.m.: Nature in the City Map — History Meets Future

Organization: Nature in the City

Speaker: Amber Hasselbring

This talk dives into the making of our new map — listen in to celebrate the abundance of nature and unique ecosystems found right at our doorstep and orient to a sense of time and place.


3 p.m.: San Francisco’s Rich Agricultural Heritage and its Last Farm Vestige at 770 Woolsey Street: Preserve the Agricultural Use of San Francisco’s Last Commercial Nursery!

Organization: The Greenhouse Project

Speakers: Public historian Stacy Farr and Portola District community members

Stacy Farr will join the Greenhouse Project and Portola community members to discuss the city’s unique and only remaining parcel of historically agricultural land – an entire block of abandoned greenhouses located in SF’s official Garden District. Join to learn more about this exciting project, the city’s floricultural legacy, and how 770 Woolsey is setting a precedent for the preservation of cultural use and legacy activity.


The greenhouses at 770 Wolsey. Photo by Christopher Michel via The Greenhouse Project
SF has one remaining historic nursery. Located in the City’s Garden District, the University Mound Nursery has galvanized the Portola community to cherish its rich agricultural past and to advance a vision for the property as an educational urban farm. Join us for a deep dive into this site’s heritage and future promise!


Theater Two — Vault Level
Vault 1–Carpenter’s Shop

11:15 a.m.: Fortune to the Bold: How the French Found Their Dream in Gold Rush California

Organization: French Mutual Benevolent Society

Speaker: Claudine Chalmers

The French Mutual Benevolent Society began in 1851 when sailing ships were the fastest way to travel and the streets of San Francisco were still unpaved. The founders of La Societe built California’s foremost medical institution of the early 20th century, the French Hospital, which was the most advanced private hospital in the West. The French Hospital offered a health plan that was the first private , pre-paid health plan in the country, and the first HMO when these were established under Nixon. Dr. Claudine Chalmers will present a slideshow on the French rush to California and the subsequent founding of French Mutual Benevolent Society, the French Hospital, and first HMO in the country and the development of mutual aid in San Francisco.


Noon: The Irish Fair of 1898 and the Efforts of the Irish Societies to Build an Irish Center

Organization: United Irish Cultural Center

Speaker: Valerie McGrew

This presentation describes the efforts of the Celtic Union to construct an Irish Center in the early 20th century. It gives a glimpse into the life of the working-class Irish community in San Francisco during this period.


1 p.m.: How San Francisco Lost its Railroad and Other Fables

Organization: Alameda Sun/Alameda Museum

Speakers: Dennis Evanosky and Eric J. Kos

Why is it that San Francisco missed out on having the Transcontinental Railroad terminus within its borders? How is it that in 1869 upstarts like Oakland and the tiny hamlet of Alameda earned this distinction instead? Enter Alameda’s mini-railroad baron, Alfred A. Cohen. Learn how a little-known entrepreneur ended up helping the “Big Four” cover the last 90 miles from Sacramento to San Francisco Bay – months after the golden spike ceremony.


2 p.m.: 100 Years of the Twin Peaks Tunnel

Organization: Western Neighborhoods Project

Speakers: Woody LaBounty and David Gallagher


Twin Peaks Tunnel circa 1970. Image courtesy OpenSFHistory
On February 3, 1918, San Francisco Mayor James Rolph drove the first streetcar through the Twin Peaks Tunnel. Market Street connected with West Portal, and the southwestern corner of the city boomed with new development over the next decade. Woody LaBounty from the Western Neighborhoods Project will show historical images and video of the tunnel’s construction and opening, and explain why a hole in the ground meant so much to the city in 1918, and perhaps even more in 2018.


3 p.m.: Created in San Francisco: The Golden Gate City’s Gifts to Gastronomy

Organization: Time Machine Tours

Speaker: Joseph Amster

San Francisco’s food scene is world famous, but did you know many classic dishes and drinks were created here? Learn the stories behind the martini, the fortune cookie, the It’s-It, Green Goddess dressing, Chicken Tetrazzini, and many more.


In the Vaults

Theatre 3
The Roxie Theater Screening Room: Films in the Vault
Lower Level–Vault 5

11:15 a.m.: San Francisco Cinema Rarities: A Tribute to Stephen Parr

Organization: Oddball Films

Speaker: Adam Dziesinski

An archival 16mm tribute to the late Oddball Films and SFMA founder Stephen Parr featuring a selection of rare, historic films drawn directly from the Oddball Films archive and Stephen’s past SF History Days screenings. Come for eye-popping documentaries, zany amateur films, vintage news outtakes, campy local commercials, and much more!


12:45 p.m.: Labor in the Bay Area and Beyond: Selections from the California Light and Sound collection

Organization: California Revealed

Speaker: Erin Hurley

From the collections of partner institutions such as the Pacific Film Archive, the Bancroft Library, and UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Library, this program includes archival moving image and audio recordings that highlight workers of all kinds, employment benefits, and the Central Valley’s rich history of labor activism. Presented by California Revealed, a State Library program that helps libraries, archives and historical societies digitize, preserve and provide online access to their collections related to state history.


2:15 p.m.: Dogpatch Ranch – Origins of a Chinese American Family

Speaker: Glenn Lym

Documentary film telling the story of Glenn’s Chinese great-grandfather Lim Lip Hong, his great-grandmother Chan Shee, and the family they raised in the late 19th century on a ranch in Dogpatch in the Potrero District of San Francisco on the then Bay shoreline.


All weekend in the Vaults
Main Hallway

FACADES: Central City Architecture

Artist: Patrícia Araujo


“Hibernia meets F&C,” oil on canvas by Patricia Araujo (2018)
V3 – Store Keeper Room

100 Years of Clean Power for San Francisco: A History of Electricity from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

Organization: San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Power Enterprise


Hetch Hetchy Valley, June 1916. Image courtesy OpenSFHistory.org
On May 6, 1918, the City and County of San Francisco began generating its own hydropower from the City’s water supply at the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. This local source of clean energy is greenhouse gas-free and currently supplies one sixth of San Francisco’s total electricity, powering facilities like San Francisco International Airport, Treasure Island, the San Francisco Zoo and all public schools. Today, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is working to make the energy grid even greener with the City’s new Community Choice Aggregation program called CleanPowerSF. Come chat with staff about the past and future of clean energy in San Francisco, see old maps and transmission line blueprints, and enjoy dramatic historical films of the Hetch Hetchy Power system.

V7 – Vault

St. Cecilia Parish Centennial Photo Archive

Organization: St. Cecilia Parish

St. Cecilia Parish in the Parkside District celebrated its centenary during the 2016-2017 school year. This photo exhibit, on public display for the first time, represents the “all 100 years” timeline that was produced for the final celebration of the centennial year.

V6 – Blacksmith Vault

Rope Walk Wearables

Organization: Museum of Craft and Design

We’re honoring the Tubb’s Rope Walk that existed right across from where the Museum of Craft and Design is today. We’ll explore knot techniques and create wearable rope accessories for visitors of all ages. A craft that is knot to be missed!

V8 – Coal Store Vault

San Francisco and the Concert-Poster Movement

Organization: The Rock Poster Society

Since 1965, San Francisco has been a world-renowned center for concert posters. This exhibition, jointly curated by members of The Rock Poster Society, will feature selected offset lithographs from the 1960s and recent screen prints, the medium of choice among contemporary concert-poster artists.

V9 – Vault

The Twin Peaks Tunnel and the K-Ingleside at 100: 1918 to 2018

Organization: SFMTA Photo Archives

Take a ride through San Francisco’s past on the K-Ingleside, and explore the creation of a portal to the west via the Twin Peaks Tunnel. This exhibit of images from the SFMTA Photo Archive will travel through history on one of Muni’s oldest lines.