Assessor’s photo trove provides window on past

Glen Park historian Evelyn Rose has always known that her home was moved from the Sunnyside district in 1960 to make way for Interstate 280. But she doesn’t know from exactly where, or what it looked like after it was dragged up the steep block of Mizpah Street to a hillside lot.

On Wednesday, Rose was finally able to access evidence to help clue her in when the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder’s Office released 94,000 historical property photographs. Rose was among the first to type her address into a newly established database. She went back to the San Francisco History Center at the Main Library on Thursday, put on a pair of white gloves, and held an original print image of her home.

With luck it will have the date on the back, or stamped into the border. With extra luck she

will also be able to sleuth out a picture from its original location.

“We have a history of buildings being moved in our district,” said Rose, chairwoman of the Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project. “It will be nice to know where my house came from.”

The assessor’s photo trove is citywide and covers both commercial and residential properties between the late 1940s and the early 2000s. A test of the database at a news conference Wednesday indicated that the collection is hit-or-miss, but the likelihood of finding a photo increases exponentially if the building changed ownership, appealed its tax assessment or had some other reason to be visited by the assessor’s office or an appraiser.

“These photos don’t deserve to be in a box,” said Assessor Carmen Chu, who had a selection of the images out, like family photos, on a sofa in her inner office. Most are in black and white, and they range from 8-by-10-inch prints with a professional stamp on back to snapshots and Polaroids.

“We have so many photos from years and years ago, and we thought it would be a lost opportunity to keep them filed away,” Chu said.

Each image was filed with a card containing address and confidential ownership details. That information has been digitized, but not the pictures themselves. Those inquiring can find out online if an image exists, but this is meant to be a tactile experience, so they have to go to the library and put on a pair of white gloves to actually see any pictures.

“These images are incredible,” said city librarian Michael Lambert. “Some of these buildings don’t exist anymore.”

Among the samples spread out in Chu’s office, many qualify as what a curator would call “vernacular photography.” The images are artistic, even if that was not the goal of the photographer. Passersby, old cars, street signs, corner stores and long-gone movie theaters, even proud homeowners and their pets, make it into the frame.

“They were intended for a utilitarian purpose, but over time it has become less utilitarian and more a mashup of art and history,” said Woody LaBounty of the Western Neighborhoods Project. “These are not just buildings. They are scenes of the past, with butchers smoking on the corners, kids playing and people going about their daily lives.”

At his office in the Richmond District, LaBounty gets walk-ins all the time. “The most common question we get is, ‘Do you have a picture of my house?’ ” he said. “We might. But there is a much better chance now that the library will.”

The library’s participation follows the San Francisco Scale Model, a miniature wooden city from 1940. Hidden away for decades, it was restored this year and distributed in sections to each neighborhood’s corresponding branch. The exhibit was so popular it had to be extended by a month and drew more than 1 million viewers.

The 94,000 images from the assessor are now part of the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection of 2 million images. They can only be searched through the database, which has a map for locating buildings and blocks and their corresponding pictures. Available images can then be requested for viewing. Searches can also be done by a librarian at any branch.

An exhibition may eventually be mounted, but until then pictures can only be viewed individually in the History Center on the sixth floor of the Main Library. By Thursday afternoon, the library had received more than 100 requests for photos. The center is open Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and all day Saturday. No staff has been added or rededicated for this task.

“We are mission-driven,” librarian Lambert said. “We love this stuff.”