Adolph Sutro

Adolph Sutro was forever seeking challenges. Emigrating from Prussia to the U.S. at age 20, the California gold rush lured him west. At the Comstock Lode in Nevada, he conceived an idea for a tunnel to drain the hot water that made the mines perilous and inefficient. But he would have to overcome both physical obstacles and powerful opposition by the Bank of California to realize his vision. Back in San Francisco, Sutro bought one twelfth of the city, including the famous Cliff House perched over the Pacific Ocean. When it burned to cinders on Christmas Day, 1894, he built a massive, eight-story Victorian replacement. He used his expertise in tunneling and water solutions to create the world's largest enclosed swimming structure, the Sutro Baths--six glass-covered heated saltwater pools with capacity of 1,000 swimmers. Other challenges followed but Sutro was not invincible. After a two-year term as mayor of San Francisco, he succumbed to debilitating strokes which left him senile. His death in 1898 started disputes among his heirs--six children by his wife and two by his mistress--that lasted more than a decade.

Story of the pioneer San Francisco mining engineer, businessman, philanthropist, and bookman.

With long-forgotten stories and evocative photographs, San Francisco's Lost Landmarks showcases the once-familiar sites that have faded into dim memories and hazy legends. Not just a list of places, facts, and dates, this pictorial history shows why San Francisco has been a legendary travel destination and one of the world's premier places to live and work for more than one hundred and fifty years. It not only tells of the lost landmarks, but also dishes up the flavour of what it was like to experience these past treasures.

A history of the founding of California's Jewish community during the Gold Rush.

Some call it "Wall Street West," while some just call it "downtown," but San Francisco's financial district is a long-running business powerhouse, home to scores of corporate headquarters, prominent law firms, restaurants, hotels, banks, the Pacific Stock Exchange, and striking waterfront views radiating outward from the landmark 1898 Ferry Building. The district was among the first areas to be settled, and many of the original 19th-century buildings still stand, along with streets and businesses named for early California business leaders like Mills, Sharon, Fair, and Flood. The district holds examples of nearly every type of commercial architecture and is arguably the city's most popular, as its population swells by tens of thousands of office workers each day.

Aviation in Northern California 1910-1939: Vol. 1, San Francisco Bay Area is the only book to give a detailed account of early flying in the Bay Area. Historian Allen Herr recalls the aviation pioneers who flew weekly exhibitions promoting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition fifteen months prior to its San Francisco opening. These pioneers formed flying schools, built airports, manufactured aircraft, and competed against each other. Herr captures the energy behind the Bay Area aviation movement, tells who was involved, and describes the effects of their extraordinary determination and achievements. This edition is one of three in Herr's series of Aviation in Northern California 1910-1939.

Describes the rise of the steamship in the United States and its effect on the industrial revolution.

While San Francisco was thriving in the 1800s, the areas that are now the Richmond District, the Sunset District, and Golden Gate Park were primarily made up of sand dunes and considered uninhabitable. This book introduces readers to some of the advocates, educators, performers, builders, and others who contributed to the growth of these areas and to the city of San Francisco. Featured notables include William Hammond Hall and John McLaren, major forces in Golden Gate Park; well-known personalities like actress Barbara Eden, musician Vince Guaraldi, and photographer Ansel Adams; Amy Meyer and Philip Burton, who helped create the Golden Gate National Recreation Area; journalists Sarah Bacon and Paul Kozakiewicz, who write about neighborhoods in western San Francisco; William Gee, who founded On-Lok, a resource for the elderly; and many more famous and unsung heroes.

San Francisco is not known for detached houses with landscaped setbacks, lining picturesque, park-side streets. But between 1905 and 1924, thirty-six such neighborhoods, called residence parks, were proposed or built in the city. Hundreds like them were constructed across the country yet they are not well known or understood today. This book examines the city planning aspects of residence parks in a new way, with tracing how developers went about the business of building them, on different sites and for different markets, and how they kept out black and Asian residents.