This ran in the SF Bay Guardian last summer. I still don’t like those Arcadia books, but I got to talk about some cool lost history in this piece…

Amid the pages of San Francisco’s Chinatown, a 2006 entry in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, is a 1968 photo from what we are told is “Chinatown’s first demonstration.” Well-dressed Chinese youths are marching onto Grant Avenue, and a young man in front holds a sign that reads, “Keep Grant Avenue narrow, dirty and quaint for tourists!” In the heavily sentimental series, it is a rare photo of political unrest. Ironically, the same questions the young man raises about the pseudohistory of Chinatown, with its faux-Oriental architecture and overcrowded conditions, could be raised regarding the Arcadia series itself. Who is a neighborhood ultimately for? Who decides its identity? And who gets to tell its history?

San Francisco’s Chinatown is virtually identical in format to its many companions in the wildly successful series of slim paperback volumes of black-and-white photographs. Meant to represent the individual histories of neighborhoods and other civic entities in cities all across the nation, the books are each 128 pages long and rich with sepia-toned, silent-movie ambience.

They’re also a marketing triumph: the 40-plus titles on San Francisco alone, representing 20 neighborhoods (the most recent arrival is the no-doubt-long-awaited San Francisco’s Portola District) and certain general subjects (San Francisco in World War II; The San Francisco Fire Department), are now instantly recognizable and popping up all over town, rather like those brown historic-district signs that have materialized in recent years in various precincts to inform passersby that, say, the intersection of 21st Street and San Carlos in the flatlands of the Mission is now part of the Liberty Hill Historic District. Like the signs, the Arcadia series tends to impose on richly diverse neighborhoods an official — and quaint — version of history that glosses over conflict and inequities while imparting little actual historical information.

Relying mostly on old family photos, these books paint on the nostalgia with a broad brush. Typical is San Francisco’s Excelsior District, an ode to the Outer Mission of the 1940s, in which “every corner in the neighborhood bore the name of the family that ran it and the owners didn’t commute to work but lived behind the stores.” This and other titles offer pages of local boxing heroes, cigar-smoking men in fedoras, women behind drugstore counters, and children on the steps of churches. The photos are largely informal and, when viewed in a long sequence, produce the pleasant, hypnotic effect of going through junk shop collections from a stranger’s family albums, but you have to wonder: how much of this should really be called history?

Much of San Francisco’s neighborhood history is a story of waves of immigrants pitted against each other for control of resources or cultural identity. Indeed, San Francisco’s Fillmore District presents haunting photos that vividly depict displacement — devoid of people, they instead show the houses of the African American community relocated on wheels from Webster to Fillmore Street or from Sutter to Ellis. Mostly, however, the Images series avoids conflict by simply excluding entire communities from the narrative. San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point features only three named African American subjects in its 128 pages of photos! There is no mention of African American workers at the Hunters Point Shipyard and, amazingly, no mention of the 1966 Hunters Point riot, during which the National Guard cordoned off the neighborhood for several days. Nonwhite immigrants tend to make their first appearances near the end of each book — African Americans at a Geneva Towers tenants’ rights rally in San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley; Latinos marching in Dolores Park in San Francisco’s Mission District — as if to suggest that with the people of color came modern-day problems and the end of the good old days.

That’s one problem with photographic history, of course: the history depends on who writes the caption. Consider two versions of the aftermath of Dan White’s 1978 assassination of Mayor George Moscone and supervisor and gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk. In San Francisco’s Castro, we see the famous photos of cop cars burning in front of City Hall during the riots after White’s conviction for manslaughter rather than murder.

The caption reads, “The scene didn’t settle down until after midnight when angry cops drove to the Castro, where everyone in sight was beaten.” In San Francisco Police Department, the seismic events are represented instead by a photo of the grinning, shirtless, ex-cop White flexing a bulging biceps with a tiny shamrock tattooed on it. The caption laments that after White served his short time in prison, “life was never the same and he committed suicide. One of his favorite songs, ‘The Town I Loved So Well,’ was playing in the car at the time of his death.” (Author John Garvey informs us in the dedication that his great-great-uncle Edward Maloney was an SFPD officer killed in the line of duty whose tombstone has 24 shamrocks on it. Garvey’s rabidly right-wing interpretation of SF history makes this title one of the most entertaining by far.)

Despite all this, the series does offer many interesting empirical facts about local history, particularly titles such as San Francisco: A Natural History and San Francisco’s Richmond District. Natural History reminds us that supplies for Mission Dolores were originally brought to the currently landlocked location by boat on now-filled-in Mission Creek. There’s also an 1858 photo of Sans Souci Valley, “the easiest access between Mission Dolores and The Presidio,” which today’s San Francisco bicyclists might recognize as “the Wiggle,” the easiest route from the Mission to the Haight and beyond. In Richmond District we learn that today’s quiet, residential grid of “Richmond Special” condos was once known as the Outside Lands, a tranquil and alluring recreation area at the young city’s edge, where eerie, hilltop graveyards and occasional strips of roadhouses emerged from the miles of sand dunes that stretched out to Playland-at-the-Beach and the Bay District Race Track. There were likely more dead people than living ones in the Richmond until 1901, when San Francisco outlawed burials within the city limits. By 1950 all the Richmond cemeteries had been closed and the bodies dug up and shipped to Colma.

Perhaps the secret of Images of America’s success lies in readers’ longing for the Outside Lands — the old, … strange, authentic city of fish drying on Chinatown rooftops and cows grazing on Twin Peaks, lost to us now that the rigid grid has conquered the wild sand dunes. Or perhaps its success lies in a simultaneous impulse, our culture’s Disneyland desire to destroy the rough edges of history and engineer new, smoother, false ones. These warring impulses can perhaps best be seen in Fillmore District, where aerial photos from the 1960s show how redevelopment reduced block after block to rubble that oddly resembled the wild dunes of the Outside Lands, only to begin again, rebuilding a simulacrum of Japantown echoing tourist trap Chinatown.

Then again, maybe in a city where you can still be evicted even after you’re dead, people just look to the Images series for reassurance that not everything changes. “The neighborhood has gone through many changes in the last 50 years,” Bernadette C. Hooper writes in San Francisco’s Mission District. “But Whizz [sic] Burger has maintained its character and appearance.” *