Map of the City and County of San Francisco. c.1918-1920

details:
color lithograph, green, black and white, double sided map
dimensions: 20 1/8" x 24"
condition: good, professionally conserved, paper deacidified, original folds flattened,small loss at fold intersections filled
Description:
This decorated and doubled sided map of the City and County of San Francisco on the front presents a vignette of the Lurline Ocean Water Baths in San Francisco. The map also features an advertisement by George L. Suhr, of Suhr & Wieboldt Funeral Directors with the early telephone exchange Mission 1. The map is copyright but not dated. A date range of 1918 to 1920 is most likely, due to the presence on the map of the Twin Peaks Tunnel that opened to Muni service in 1918. Candrian was a San Francisco and vicinity tour operator and published maps and guide books to San Francisco, Oakland and surrounding cities with special reference to public transportation. Therefore, the presence of train, municipal and other transit lines such as ferry on his maps is an essential element and a dating reference for Candrian maps. The map is scarce.

On this map, the section surrounding the Twin Peaks Tunnel varies from the copyrighted 1916 edition in that the Twin Peaks themselves are not shown graphically. With a close viewing, the Eastern and Western entrance and exit to the Twin Peaks Tunnel are visible. In fact, examples of the dated 1916 edition of this Candrian map also show the Twin Peaks Tunnel, and therefore should be understood as published in 1918 or later. I have not identified an example of the copyright 1916 Candrian map without the Twin Peaks Tunnel.

This c.1918-1920 edition of the map shows the land use impact of the Twin Peaks Tunnel, which provided rapid transit from neighborhoods to jobs in the downtown, on the tracts of land at the exit to the tunnel. In this edition of the map, those tracts of land and the immediate vicinity show rapid real estate development. The entire area just below the 4 1/2 mile marker on the map and Laguna Honda and straddling Portola Drive is developed with an intricate road layout, including St. Francis Wood where a street layout is labeled "Westwood Park". On this map Glen Park shows road names just as the 1916 copyright dated map does, but no actual roads. The scale of the graphic art showing the newly developed areas of the map is smaller and the font different than those features in the main body of this edition of the Candrian San Francisco map, suggesting that the publisher dropped into the existing copyrighted 1916 version of his map new graphic art as a patch.

The reverse of this map is filled with mapping information for South San Francisco and Burlingame. A polo field is shown on the Burlingame map! The freight yards of the Southern Pacific Railroad are shown on the Map of South San Francisco San Mateo County California providing a view of the industrial area of the city. A short cut rail route is also shown in a small inset map titled Bay Shore Cut-Off. The area of South San Francisco called "Bay Shore" is filled marshland, filled by the Southern Pacific R.R. construction crews using debris from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and land from the cut of Visitacion Point to fill the marsh and provide solid footing for the new SPRR tracks. The Southern Pacific railroad itself designated this vicinity "Bay Shore".

In 1917 and 1921 Candrian published a road book guide with his novel, graphic municipal railway and auto routes in addition to maps. The map on offer has a black and white checkerboard alphanumeric border to be used for locating streets by name and top center the Candrian's map instructs its viewer "A Square drawn from letter to figure will locate street" with a small x-y axis next to the instruction. Therefore, this map at one time was accompanied by a street name index of some kind.

Notes:
Library of Congress Map Collection
SanFranciscoTrains.org OutsideLands.org Sunnysidehistory.org