Those mysterious brick circles you see on streets? They are cisterns — a form of ancient technology adopted after the 1906 earthquake to aid firefighting. We all know about the fires that ravaged the city after the 1906 earthquake, made worse due to the rupture of water and sewage lines.

What I’m about to tell you isn’t a secret. I’m from the East Bay. I was born in Walnut Creek, lived in Oakland’s Laurel neighborhood until I was 12 and then moved around Contra Costa until we ended up finding a permanent spot in Martinez. I lived in Emerson Arms,

I’ve got some awesome news! We received a grant from the Civic Joy Fund to put out a literary magazine celebrating SF and acting to counter the stupid “Doom Loop” narrative. It’s a gift to the people of San Francisco. And after months of working on this project it’s now available

With the Stud closing in 2020 (though currently “alive” in a sort suspended animation) South of Market’s the Eagle becomes the oldest currently operating leather bar in San Francisco. But the Eagle has taken a beating over the last ten years too; the bar announced it would close in 2011,

The iconic San Francisco “space fork” known as Sutro Tower has become a recognized symbol for t-shirts and tattoos, but the 48-year-old radio and TV signal tower was the result of a hard-fought battle between local radio and TV stations. Some wanted it where it ended up being built near

Harry Denton’s Starlight Room atop the Sir Francis Drake Hotel has not been Harry Danton’s Starlight Room since 2019, when its name changed. But that very same Harry Denton once owned four nightclubs with his name on them across San Francisco, bringing glitz, glamor, and velvet ropes to the SF

It’s not everyday that our little peninsula gets a new piece of public land, but for the last four years the Parks Conservancy, the National Park Service, and a team of volunteers, have been restoring the gardens, walkways, stairs, and terraces of The Historic Black Point Gardens. The Black Point

Some people are history buffs, some people are transit nerds, and then there’s that rare kind of person who is strangely fascinated by both local history and public transportation. That is the kind of person who will spend hours clicking and scrolling through a just released set of more than

What’s better than a neighborhood drinking guide?  A neighborhood drinking guide that also gives you historical facts to drop while you’re drinking.  Bellow is a short history of Polk Gulch with links to source material, and bellow that is a list of great bars to visit there, by a veteran