Century-old painting is an ode to S.F. of past, future

Sunday is New Year’s Eve, the last day of the old year, a day to remember. Memory is one of those tricky things, complicated, dangerous, important. There are lots of things people want to put aside and forget. And others you want to remember forever. And this comes to mind on New Year’s Eve, especially at midnight, when the year turns.

I got an email the other day from Nina ShapiroPerl, a teacher and former filmmaker who lives in the Bay Area. She sent me a watercolor by Amos Engle, an underappreciated California artist who had a studio in San Francisco. Engle was her great-uncle.

The painting is of New Year’s Eve in San Francisco a century ago. It is a painting full of life, color and celebration. At the center is a man in a black hat and overcoat, caught in a paper streamer, his companion wearing a long coat with a touch of fur and a red hat. There is confetti in the air and on the streets, like snow.

Engle and his wife, Fanny, had gone out on the town that New Year’s Eve to celebrate. He went to his studio not long after to paint what they had seen.

So there it was: New Year’s Eve on a San Francisco street in the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, a time of airplanes, Model T Fords, bootleggers, gangsters, and a kind of wild optimism. Nothing would ever be the same, kid, and don’t you forget it.

I’ve seen a lot of pictures from the ’20s, but they were all in black and white and kind of somber. But Engle’s San Francisco was in color on an unforgettable night 100 years ago.

Shapiro-Perl, who sent me the painting, once wrote of “the power of objects to store the memory within them,” and how Engle’s other paintings drew her into California of another time — “I see the canneries, docks, hills, the bay before the bridge, Sausalito, Carmel that Amos saw 100 years ago.’’

San Francisco was booming in the new year of 1924: New buildings were going up, Sunny Jim Rolph was mayor, and nobody paid much attention to silly laws like Prohibition. It was the year Alma de Bretteville Spreckels and her husband, Adolph, built the Palace of the Legion of Honor museum and donated it to the city. San Francisco’s Municipal Railway opened new streetcar lines and made money. Anything seemed possible.

Yet there was a dark undercurrent: Congress passed a new immigration act in 1924, extending the ban on Asian immigration to the United States and adding new limits on southern and eastern European immigration as well.

The great economic boom of the ’20s turned out to be an illusion. The Roaring Twenties ended with the stock market crash in the fall of 1929. And in Germany, Adolf Hitler came to power not 10 years after that New Year’s Day. So the fond memory of that festive night a century ago did not last.

Engle did not live to see it. In February 1926, just when his painting career was taking off, he died from complications of surgery. His wife, Fanny, heartbroken, moved back to New York, where she lived the rest of her life.

When I saw the New Year’s Eve painting I thought of the power of memory, especially in San Francisco, especially now, when the past appears to be better than the present.

Whenever I write something about San Francisco I get emails praising the old San Francisco, mythical city that existed in a different place, a different time.

And none of us can live there. We can only live in the city we have now.

In with the new. To celebrate the new year and search for a 2024 memory I’d take a winter walk.

I’d go up to Noe Valley to see the shops, stop at an English tea shop, an Irish bar or a fish restaurant. On a windy day I’d go to Ocean Beach to see the waves rolling in from far away. I’d ride the expensive new subway to Chinatown to walk in the alleys. I’d wait for the first sunny day of the new year and sit in a parklet with a cup of coffee and watch the world go by. I’d have a drink at Gino and Carlo in North Beach and listen to the talk. I’d take the streetcar out to West Portal to see the quintessential San Francisco shopping street.

I’d take the ferry to Oakland just for the hell of it, sit outside and look back from the bay at San Francisco and wonder what I’ll remember of the new city in the new year.

Rendering courtesy of the Engle family San Francisco artist Amos Engle created this painting after reveling in the city on New Year’s Eve in 1924. He died two years later.

Photo courtesy of OpenSFHistory A busy street scene is shown at Market and 6th in San Francisco during the 1920s.