Oldest Historical Images of San Francisco Pre-1906 Earthquake, Bay Area, Ohlone, Architecture, Reset

Howdy y'all, thank you so much for joining me here today. Do I have any viewers out there from the golden state of California? Anyone looking to dive into some of the oldest known photographs of the great city of San Francisco? Today, I've compiled for you roughly 125 of the oldest and most unique photographs of San Francisco, California. If you've watched my most recent video with roughly an hour of photographs of New York City, then you're probably familiar with the format here. But I've tried to structure this video with much more information for you to have at your arsenal. San Francisco, officially known as the city and county of San Francisco, has a proper city population of 874,000 people within 46.9 square miles, making it the second most densely populated city in the United States, behind only New York City, and the fifth most densely populated county, only behind the four New York City boroughs. The larger San Francisco metropolitan area has a population of over 4.7 million, making it the twelfth largest in America, while the GDP of San Francisco ranks fourth largest in America at $592 billion annually. Founded on June 29, 1776, expanded vastly after the gold rush of 1849, and destroyed nearly completely in the earthquake and subsequent fire of 1906, the history of San Francisco is a long and convoluted one. This video, in particular, is to focus on the expansive architectural history of San Francisco, the feats and accomplishments that would go on to shape the greater California area. One thing that the current narrative page appears to brush over, but something if you're familiar with my other videos that I find important to discuss, is that San Francisco, just like nearly all other major American cities, was built quite literally on the fallen mounds of indigenous people. The Olan people occupied much of the coastline of California upon the arrival of Spanish colonists. These Olan people, amongst other things, created massive earth mounds. Unique from many other mounds that we see worldwide, yet holding similarities to the mounds found in Florida, we see that the Olan mounds were built out of shells. These mounds were bountiful, to say the least. We are told San Francisco alone was built upon hundreds of these shell mounds. At the time of the advent of photography in the mid-1800s, there was only a handful of these mounds remaining, and we only have photographs of one or two of the shell mounds found in San Francisco. Most of them had been steamrolled or destroyed by this time. Essentially, by the earliest days of the 1900s, there was only one shell mound remaining. We are led to believe, however, upon a deeper dive in this narrative, that these original shell mounds of San Francisco were interconnected by underground networks, by pathways that were created to allow the indigenous Olan people to flourish in pre-colonist California. It's absolutely tragic that these ancient mounds, probably full of history, enshrined with the relics of a forgotten people, have been destroyed and removed. The last remaining mound, the most famous in San Francisco, was destroyed in the early 1920s to make way for a paint factory. When that factory itself was demolished just a few years ago, remains of the ancient Olan shell mound were rediscovered, albeit much smaller than the original size, just a mere fraction of the massive shell mounds that once stood in San Francisco. From here, I'd like to focus on pre-earthquake architecture in San Francisco. I've tried to label as many of these photographs that I have with the relevant information that I have. What we do see here is absolutely massive structures. Notice all the archways, usually 15 to 20 feet tall, same as the floors or the stories on each building, each one being roughly 15 to 20 feet tall or more. It's both very impressive and uncomfortable to discuss, because as the population of San Francisco was at the time one of the most rapidly growing populations in all of the world, we must wonder, what was the reasoning for the designs behind these buildings before the earthquake? I'm not calling it wasted space, because to me it's absolutely beautiful. It's a design that I would love to see brought back into modern cities. But the question becomes, who built San Francisco in this way? We have all of these buildings with all of this empty open space, epic creations, but everything is oversized when compared to the size of the population, not oversized in the sense of being able to accommodate more, but oversized in the sense as it appears to be created for larger individuals, for people that were much larger than the humans that were occupying these buildings. Now, we are going to look through a wide assortment of the old city of San Francisco, and we can see a time when the trolley in the city was wireless, when it was supplied by a conduit. We can see a coastline that is replete with towers and castles. San Francisco appears to be an ingeniously designed superstructure, from top to bottom, even including the massive star fort that once lined the Golden Gate Bay. So for now, let us just look through these photographs of San Francisco before the earthquake. Notice all the symmetrical buildings here, all the buildings that appear to be one larger superstructure. They are divided only by the label on the building, but the actual structure itself, every single block appears to be manufactured at the same time. It is absolutely fascinating. Every single entrance could hold three or four people on each other's shoulders walking through the doorway. These are fascinating buildings that we are looking at. So we are going to dive in for the next 15 minutes or so into these photographs before the earthquake, and then we will follow that up with some unique photographs of the devastation of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. But for now, let us enjoy these pre-earthquake photographs, because there is a lot to digest here. As we get deeper into the video, we will now look through the devastation of the Great Earthquake of April 18, 1906. The earthquake, which leveled an estimated three-fourths of the city of San Francisco, also caused a subsequent fire, which ravaged the remaining buildings. I have tried to provide you with unique and unseen photographs that I have not seen any other people present before. If you are familiar with the earthquake and the information about it, you will know that amongst other things, when San Francisco was rebuilt, it was rebuilt for us, for regular-sized humans, with a population density in mind. Everything was finely tuned and reshaped to accommodate this growing population. As most likely the fastest growing city in California throughout the mid to late 1800s, it seems convenient, for the powers that be especially, that something would occur which would level the playing field, so to speak, to give a clean slate to the architects to rebuild the great city to accommodate all of the growing population. But either way, I digress. The earthquake itself left behind damage which is seldom seen in other photographs of the old world. We have looked at disasters in other cities, but the amount of destruction that was caused overall in San Francisco in 1906 truly appears to be something we could consider apocalyptic or once-in-a-lifetime. We see smoldering ruins, fallen walls of masonry and brick, melted stone, trolleys and their entire tracks razed, the coastline destroyed. It truly appears like something atomic had happened here. But instead, these are just naturally occurring events. A naturally occurring earthquake and a fire which destroyed nearly entirely the old world city of San Francisco. Finally, we will look at the progressively fast rebuild of San Francisco. From the new city hall, to the new trolley system, to the Golden Gate Bridge, we will view photographs of San Francisco after 1906 through World War II. This collection, which has been selected by me as my favorite and the most unique and the most rare photographs of San Francisco, has not been shared anywhere else before. It's exclusively from me and from private collections that I've dabbled in to you. So I will leave links to these images down below so hopefully you can help expand your mind and give you more research tools so you can view these images in higher detail. San Francisco, the Golden Gate, the Golden State, this is some of my favorite research to do because this is a place that I dream to visit one day. I know I've been saving as much money as possible and I've been visiting areas around the tri-state, but to get to the west coast to actually be able to visit there one day, that would be absolutely fascinating. So I'm just trying to familiarize myself with all of this old world content of California, especially of San Francisco, because it appears to me to be one of the most convoluted histories of all the major cities that we have in America. But I'm just going to leave the video there. I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments down below. If any of these photographs stood out to you at all, please leave a time stamp down below or just let me know at what point in the video that image occurs and we can discuss it in the comments together. I always look forward to hearing what you have to say. If you want to support the channel at all, you can do so at this link right here. I would greatly appreciate that. But in the end, I'm just happy to be able to share these images with you, to be able to show you architecture from a world that we may have forgotten or at least the history books may have forgotten. I'm trying to wake everyone up to all of the things we had in our past that we could possibly rekindle if we just put some effort into it. So these photographs really speak to that nature of man and how good things could have been back then. California and the Golden State and San Francisco really was the Mecca of American travel to get to the West Coast even in the 1800s was what everyone was trying to do. So I really believe these images paint the best picture of San Francisco that I have not seen painted anywhere else before. So if you enjoyed this video, please hit the thumbs up. Please share this video with as many people as possible. I always love to hear comments from new viewers and in the end, I just wanted to say thank you for being here and I will talk to you very soon on that next video. Cheers!