Category Archives: Year of the Bay

Dan Rademacher of Bay Nature Magazine On Our Year of the Bay Photo Contest

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Historypin is teaming up with Bay Nature magazine on a photo contest for our Year of the Bay crowdsourcing project, and here editor Dan Rademacher tells us more about how you can help contribute. —

Fun in San Francisco Bay by Ian Ransley Design + Illustration

Get your images published in Bay Nature magazine, win $50, and help crowdsource the history of San Francisco Bay. All at once!

What’s your favorite place to have fun on San Francisco Bay? Is it Crissy Field? Crown Beach? China Camp? Candlestick Point? Coyote Point?

What’s your favorite way to have fun on San Francisco Bay? By boat, kayak, or kiteboard. On foot or by bike. With binoculars at dawn, or on a picnic blanket on a lazy afternoon.

I’m the editor of Bay Nature magazine and we’ve been telling stories of the San Francisco Bay since 2001. Sometimes, those stories are serious—decades-long wetlands restoration projects, worrisome sea-level rise projections, historic losses of habitat or influxes of Gold Rush sediments.

And sometimes those stories are seriously fun, and that’s what we’re after this time!

So we’ve teamed up with yearofthebay.org on a photo contest, and we want your photos of people having fun on the Bay. We want your recent photos, your old photos, your fine photos, your quirky photos, scans of those old snapshots your oddball uncle left you in his will. We want ‘em all!

Why? Because we ALL make history, and we want to see a whole range of folks having fun out on San Francisco Bay — kayaking, fishing, swimming, sailing, stand-up paddling, playing with their dogs, kite-boarding, wind-surfing, motor boating, and, yes, maybe even sitting on the dock of the Bay, killing time.

These photos will become part of the Year of the Bay’s communally produced Bay history, and they’ll also be a key part of Bay Nature’s July-September 2013 issue, along with a chronicle of the recent history of major Bay wetlands restoration and otherworldly portraits of a few of the millions of tiny creatures that flow under the Golden Gate Bridge every day.

Tiny larval crabs riding the tides, shorebirds nesting in South Bay marshes, families picnicking on the beach—it’s all part of the story of San Francisco Bay, that great wilderness at the heart of our region.

We’ll choose up to eight images to publish in our July-September 2013 issue. Winners get $50 per image, plus of course photo credit and complimentary copies of the magazine.

Only two rules: (1) The photo must be of people in, on, or right next to SF Bay, and (2) they should be having fun!

So help us tell the Bay’s story by submitting your photos at baynature.org/bay-photo-contest. Submissions are due bymidnight on May 12, 2013.

Visit our Year of the Bay page anytime to explore how we are helping to crowdsource the history of San Francisco Bay.

Guest Post: Year of the Bay contributor Michael Rettie on Stumbling Across a Treasure Trove of Photographs

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We love to hear fun stories about the ways users collect content for our projects, and this week we are pleased to introduce a guest post by Bay Area local Michael Rettie, a Year of the Bay contributor. Michael is from Alameda, right on the San Francisco Bay, and here shares the stories behind his wonderful photo finds.

The collective basements and attics of the Bay Area should be declared the Official Annex of the California Historical Society. What a great idea to smoke all these treasures out into public view with the recent Year of the Bay exhibit. In my case it doesn’t take too much smoke, as I’m always ready to corner a potential viewer.

Being cursed with an inability to pass up any garage sale or used book store, with a large basement and a very tolerant wife I now find myself in possession of thousands of old photographs and nearly as many stories to go with them.

Holmes Bookstore in Oakland was a favorite haunt and turned up some wonderful sepia maritime prints that were sold on separate sheets from someone’s scrapbook. Close examination of one of them shows a “1916” pennant at the masthead of one sailboat with a Corinthian Yacht Club burgee flying alongside, so there is our date.

Corinthian Burgee somewhere in San Francisco Bay, 1916.

Detail of the "1916" flag on the Corinthian burgee.

Another one portrays Italian fishing boats, feluccas, at Fisherman’s Wharf c1916. These boats predate the Montereys that appeared a few years later; you can clearly see the family resemblance.

Feluccas at Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, c1916.

Monterey boats, c1920.

And can anyone identify the Navy cruiser from the scrapbook?

A mystery cruiser. Can anyone help tell me more about it?

On another occasion, an interrupted grocery shopping excursion in the early ‘90s found me at a garage sale near my home in Alameda, where I left five dollars lighter in my wallet but gained thousands of small old prints and negatives. Here was a portion of a collection that should have ended up at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and will, but had somehow been overlooked. I discovered that the photographer was Lewis Clark, a noted mountaineer, electrical engineer at Pacific Telephone, and later President of the Sierra Club.

Lewis Clark on Kearsarge Pass, 1932.

Commuting to the city by ferry offered a regular opportunity for Clark to use his 6x9cm Voigtlander camera; his skill at composition and exposure left a wonderful record of a pace most of us envy today. My favorite commute shot has to be the NWP Ferry Santa Rosa at the Ferry Building with the undecorated Telegraph Hill in the background and Mt Tamalpais in the distance. Blow it up some more and the Delta King river steamer appears.

NWP Ferry Santa Rosa at the Ferry Building in San Francisco, c1927-1933.

Ebay too can be an evil influence. Just save a search like “NAS Alameda” and you will eventually turn up something as interesting as the group photo with the first plane to be rebuilt at the Naval Air Station in 1941. Then mention this photo to a local architect/historian like Dick Rutter and he will produce a shot of the last plane to be finished in 1996.

First Plane Rebuilt at NAS Alameda, 1941. (click for larger view)

Last plane rebuilt at NAS Alameda, 1996. (click for larger view)

My overall favorite remains the image of the Dipsea Trail hiker looking south to the Golden Gate in 1930. The notes in the margin of the negative revealed the coded date, the location, and also the name of the hiker, S. Estabrook.  Turns out my fishing buddy is an Estabrook so I printed a copy and stuck it in an envelope to Kent. Next evening the phone call comes. “That’s my Dad,” he says.  An amazing gift for the both of us.

The Golden Gate from the Dipsea Trail, 1930.

What a great opportunity to exhibit our treasures this project has become. And I don’t have to endure any in-person eye-rolling. Thank you California Historical Society, Historypin, and all the sponsors and contributors!

Michael Rettie, Alameda, CA.

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View Michael’s Channel with all these wonderful photos here.

Researchers seek stories about experiencing bay

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By Jon Christensen

How do you experience the bay?

I’ve been on the water in boats of all kinds, walked the shore, waded and swam, and I always have marveled at the views from airplane window seats taking off and, better yet, coming in for a landing.

But my most ecstatic moments of all, I confess, come when driving across the bridges of the bay — and none more so than the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. I felt it the very first time, and my soul still vibrates every time, finding myself in the middle of this marvelous metropolis in such an incomparable natural setting. And the bay is at the heart of it.

My question, though, is a serious one. How do you experience the bay?

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past year looking through the collections at the California Historical Society — which contain more than a million photographs, documents, art works and other items — to get at this question. As a guest curator, I’ve put together an exhibition featuring more than 250 items from the collections exploring how people have imagined the bay, made the bay, cared for the bay and explored the bay over time.

I found surprising, beautiful paintings, including a brooding, illuminated portrait of a hay scow, one of the shallow-draft sailboats that were the pickup trucks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hauling hay and also salt, oysters and even water to communities around the bay.

I found dozens of astonishing photographs by amateurs and professionals of the construction of the Bay Bridge, including some that rival any picture taken of the Golden Gate, along with hilarious shots of celebrations of the Bay Bridge’s opening in 1936. And I found tons of revealing evidence of how people and industry have shaped the bay, or better or worse, and also strived to understand and save it.

But I know there are still very big gaps in our understanding of how different people experience, think about, value, work and play on the bay. After working in the archives and seeing how the historical record itself has been shaped — by powerful people and institutions, by wealth and charity, by big events — I often think more about the holes in our history than I do about the stories that can be told with the evidence that has been left to us

So, working with researchers at Stanford and Historypin, an innovative global social technology partner, we’ve created a crowdsourcing platform to invite everyone in the Bay Area — and beyond — to share their knowledge, memories, stories, photographs and other historical sources about the bay.

We call it “Year of the Bay” — and it’s at yearofthebay.org — to recognize that 2013 is a big year here. The new span of the Bay Bridge is opening — I can’t wait to drive across that one. The America’s Cup races are coming to the bay. The Port of San Francisco is celebrating its 150th anniversary. The Exploratorium is moving beside the bay. The Oakland Museum of California is mounting an exhibition on the bay’s natural and human history.

And we’re opening up the observances and celebrations to everyone. We want to hear the untold stories, harvest the photographs and learn from people and communities around the bay. So how do you experience the bay and its history

They say that history is written by the winners. Using new technologies to open up the
process of curating history, we can all be winners.

Though his heart is still in the Bay Area, where he lived until recently, Jon Christensen is
now an adjunct assistant professor in the history department and the Institute of the
Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. He is guest curator of “Curating the Bay:
Crowdsourcing a New Environmental History,” an exhibition at the California Historical
Society that opens Sunday (April 7) and runs through Aug. 25.

This essay originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Images: “Girl on a Pier, Alviso, July, 1948,” by Challils Gore; “Hay Scow,” by Julian Rix, c. 1880; Opening day ceremony at Bay Bridge toll station in 1936. Courtesy of the California Historical Society.

 

Historypin at the Opening of Curating the Bay in San Francisco

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Visitors learning about Historypin at our California Historical Society pinning station.

We are pleased to report that this week, our joint crowdsourcing project with Stanford University, Year of the Bay, became a part of an exciting new museum exhibition in San Francisco. The exhibit, called Curating the Bay: Crowdsourcing a New Environmental History, is a collaboration with the California Historical Society (CHS) to open their collections to the public in a new and interactive way.

Museums and archives alike always aspire to having a completed history of a certain topic, and in Curating the Bay the CHS takes a leap into uncharted territory by asking visitors to fill in the blanks rather than presenting them with a finished narrative. Many of the photographs, paintings, and documents in their collections still contain historical mysteries, and the exhibition invites the public to help solve them as well as to contribute their own stories and materials.

This is where Historypin comes in.  Excitingly, we have set up a pinning station within the CHS’s exhibition, so visitors can scan and add their materials into the Year of the Bay project while they are there. And since the project is at yearofthebay.org, visitors not only from the Bay Area but from all over the world can contribute to the history of San Francisco Bay.

California Historical Society docents learning about Historypin at our pinning station

Up close at our pinning station.

A huge number of people came out in support of the exhibit during its opening this past Sunday, April 7. With music, food, drinks, and good conversation, many visitors expressed excitement at the prospect of contributing to history.

Lots of visitors arriving to the evening opening

One of my favorite parts of the exhibition is a touchscreen display of the Year of the Bay website that we created just for exhibits (pictured below).

A close-up of the custom-made interface of our Year of the Bay touchscreen.

And with great visual flair, the CHS has surrounded the touchscreen display with an analog version of the map of the Bay Area directly behind the touchscreen, complete with pins! As the exhibition continues, they will add visitor contributions to the wall along with their own “pins.” Fantastic!

The wall of San Francisco Bay pins that will be added with visitor contributions during the course of the exhibition.

Visitors exploring the wall and touchscreen during the opening.

With this exhibition and the outreach activities surrounding it, we hope to help create a richer and more diverse history of the San Francisco Bay. Since the opening, we have already received many wonderful contributions to yearofthebay.org from all over the world. If you are in the Bay Area from now until August 25th, come on down to the exhibition and try your hand at solving some historical mysteries, or follow along online as we tweet about them weekly.

One of the many mystery items in our Curating the Bay exhibit. Can you help us learn more about it?

And finally, videos and pictures are sometimes worth more than words, so here is a short video Historypin has made to explain our exciting new Year of the Bay project. Take a look!

Curating the Bay at the California Historical Society

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We  hope you can join us Sunday, April 7, from 4 to 6pm to celebrate the opening of an exhibition at the California Historical Society that features centrally our Year of the Bay project. Visit the California Historical Society’s web site to RSVP: http://californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/curating_the_bay.html

We’ll be there offering live demos and lessons on how to use the Historypin site to add your memories and photos about the Bay, to create collections and slideshows, and tell stories or guide tours through the historical sources we’re gathering together online to tell new stories about the environmental history of the Bay.

And stay tuned. Throughout the exhibition, which runs through August 25, we’ll be offering other walk-in workshops, as well as working with different groups interested in gathering together new historical sources online to tell their stories around the Bay. If you’re interested in attending one of these sessions — or having us organize one for your group — email Jon Christensen at jonchristensen@stanford.edu.

Let’s make history!

 

 

 

Happy New Year — The Year of the Bay

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Dear friends,

Happy new year! 2013 is going to be an exciting year in the San Francisco Bay Area with the America’s Cup races, the opening of the new span of the Bay Bridge, the 150th anniversary of the Port of San Francisco, and Year of the Bay — our project to open up the celebrations to everyone who has a connection to the bay.

To get the party started, we invite you to explore the Year of the Bay here through our growing collection of photographs and stories contributed by libraries, museums, archives, and individuals like you. And we’d like to ask you to help us by doing two things:

1) Share a link to http://yearofthebay.org with your friends and colleagues right now via email, Twitter, Facebook, word of mouth, and other channels.

2) Contribute to the project. How have you or your family or your organization related to the bay we all share? Do you have photographs or stories you can share with us?

Together we hope to gather the materials to tell an epic, rich, diverse new history of the San Francisco Bay this year. And through this project help connect people to the bay around the Bay Area.

Over the course of the Year of the Bay we will continue to add materials to this site — in the weeks to come we’ll add maps and challenges and new ways for you to interact with the history of the bay. We’ll also participate in exhibitions on the bay. And we’ll venture out to communities around the bay for events aboard the Alma, like we did on a sail to Hunters Point in the fall.

We hope you’ll join us! As inspiration for our voyages together in the coming year, here are a few photos from that sail.

Yours truly,

Jon Christensen

 Photos by Sarah Thompson

RSVP for Year of the Bay Event

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Alma on San Francisco Bay, ca. 1900, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

You are cordially invited to join with friends to celebrate San Francisco Bay, launch Year of the Bay, and welcome Alma back to her birthplace at Hunters Point

On November 1, Alma will sail back to her birthplace at Hunters Point, bringing this historic scow schooner from San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park back to one of the Bay Area’s most dramatically changed historic waterfronts and communities, and closing a circle of history. We hope you will join us to welcome Alma and open the Year of the Bay — a year which brings the America’s Cup and the opening of a new span of the Bay Bridge — to all of the diverse communities of the Bay through voyages of the Alma, exhibitions, and an innovative humanities crowdsourcing project that will go live online November 1 at www.YearOfTheBay.org.

The Year of the Bay crowdsourcing project is sponsored by Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project is directed by Jon Christensen, former director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford, in collaboration with Historypin.

Here is a quick run down of the day’s events:

10:30 AM:  Welcome the Alma and celebrate the opening of a new segment of the Bay Trail at the

EcoCenter at Heron’s Head Park in San Francisco.

Noon:  Lunch at the EcoCenter.

1-2 PM: Demonstration of the Year of the Bay crowdsourcing website to collect stories, photographs, and recollections about San Francisco Bay.

2-4:30 PM:  Natural history walks at Heron’s Head Park and along the surrounding bayshore.

4:30-6:00 PM:  Reception and toast to Year of the Bay at the EcoCenter at Heron’s Heads Park.

Please RSVP:  alma@beautifulcommunities.org or 415-822-8410 as space is limited.

Your humble crew from the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, Stanford University, Historypin, the California Historical Society, Heyday Books, Literacy for Environmental Justice, and the EcoCenter at Heron’s Head Park eagerly await your reply.