The Open City Starter Kit

how to trace a building in time

Alexis C. Madrigal

Published in

Open City

7 min readMay 21, 2014

So, you want to write a history of the city from your building’s perspective. This is how to get going.

Step 1: Explore and Notice

Walk around the building. Visit every nook and cranny, open every door. Invite yourself into people’s offices and ask them questions.

As you explore, take note of the details. What’s the ceiling look like? Are the materials the same on every floor? What’s on the roof? Who made the elevators? Does one elevator go to a secret basement that the others don’t? Are there adornments on the facade? What’s the HVAC system like, and where is it? Who leases the building? What’s the plumbing like the bathroom? Are there any plaques? If so, always read the plaque.

Pay special attention to the places where no one looks: utility areas, maintenance rooms, basements, stairwells, down near the floor, up over head. Basically: any spot that a good guy in a thriller could hide from the bad guys, you should go to there.

Take notes. Take pictures. Mark down any names of people or companies.

Step 2: Situate Yourself

Take a look at buildings on the immediate block. See how your building interacts with them. Where do they interface? Does your building fit in or standout? What are the adjacent buildings like? Where does your building sit relative to the street? How do services like water, electricity, and commercial deliveries enter? What’s it smell like? Are there industrial or transit facilities close by?

Now expand the search out a bit. Where in the city are you? Get familiar with all the streets in your immediate neighborhood. Check out the plan of the city in that spot. What is supposed to happen here? What does the infrastructure encourage or limit?

How about your spot in the Bay? What role does the topography play? What about the water and the hills? Which way would a stream run if one was running down the street outside? In San Francisco, it pays to pay close attention to one’s distance to Market and Embarcadero. The closer you get, the more likely the land you’re sitting on did not exist before humans intervened. Big chunks of the Mission were marshland, creek bed, or lagoon.

Play around on Google Maps or Google Earth. Zoom in and out. Look at it in 3D. Try out Street View’s Historical Rewind. See if there are streets that don’t seem to belong or cut at an unusual angle or have funky bends. These could be old creek beds or maybe rail lines or something else entirely. Breaks in the grid are usually interesting, though.

Pull up these 1938 aerial photos of San Francisco or use the Historical Imagery on Google Earth to see what was there before you got there.

Go to the United States Geological Survey and think about the literal earth—the rock and soil—at this one spot.

Head to HistoryPin and Findery. See if anyone has pinned images or left notes about the area.

Step 3: Find the Digital Traces

An address is not only how mail comes to a place.

It’s a unique search string, a tracer you can fire into history’s catacombs.

If you use it well, you’ll create a bridge between the physical place now and the traces of what it once was.

Obviously start with Google. Perhaps someone has already done a fair chunk of your research. Try searching both the address itself (760 Market Street) and the name of the building (Phelan Building) if it has one. To sort past all the new “content,” try setting a date restriction up until 2005.

Facebook and Twitter might help you find co-searchers.

You can try searching in the old SF city directories on the Internet Archive.

Next, though, it’s time to really dive into the book archives. That’d be Google Books, first. Pro-tip: If you want to get just old stuff, which we often do, restrict your search to “Free Google eBooks.”

Next try the Internet Archive, which has all kinds of stuff, especially because of the Prelinger Library, a local institution that has scanned many Bay Area documents.

As you make these searches, try to find the key information about the building:

When was it built?
Who built it?
Why?
Who was the architect?
Who were the tenants? What purpose did it serve?
If it’s really old, how’d it fare in the 1906 earthquake?

The answer to any one of these questions could lead to an adventure. Connect up what you saw inside and outside the building. Pull out your notebook of leads. Follow up on them with targeted searches: “building name” and “thing you noticed” or “name you found in the building.”

Search the intersection, too, not just the street address. Look for stories.

One other pro-tip. Make sure to search for your building Google Scholar. It’s just possible that some master’s student or enthusiast has pulled together the story of the building for whatever reason.

Step 4: Deeper, Broader, Weirder

As the building’s narrative starts to come together and you have a skeleton of facts assembled, it’s time to go to the digitized newspapers. Run a lot of the same searches that you did before. Remember that unique words and queries like names or specific companies tend to bring up the most interesting stuff.

California Digital Newspaper Collection has nice searchable database from late 1880s into 1920-30s. Specifically, you will probably have the most success looking through the pages of the Daily Alta and SF Call, two long ago publications. (Pro tip: Use Firefox for their right-click menu to save to PDF. For some reason it doesn’t work in Chrome.)

Google Newspapers Search is OK, and you might as well try.

The Chronicling America Collection is great for regional and national searches. It’s got 100,000 scanned newspaper pages from 1822-1922.

As you comb through the papers, you’ll find that you often find fragmentary, tantalizing information in them. But if you have some context, you might know how to interpret these little nuggets.

Step 5: It’s Library Time

By now, you should know your building pretty well. You should know, for example: the circumstances of its construction, its historical uses, famous events that happened there, and a whole lot of other little random stuff.

But you really need to see what it looked like. Now’s where you start digging in to find specific images or publications that contain images. Start with the online library collections. It’s easy and you might get lucky. (Oh, and don’t forget YouTube because there’s always weird stuff on YouTube.)

This page with online resources and research centers put together by California Historical Society was very useful. Here are some direct links:

But if you’re struggling—or even if you’re not, it’s time to hit the library. Take what you know and go ask a librarian at the SFPL.

In San Francisco History Center (6th floor of the public library’s main branch), you can check out Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. These are property-level maps of the city and they are amazing. They also take some work to work with and understand. The blog Burrito Justice uses them extensively and beautifully. One way to start is with Maptcha.org, a site that places the 1905 maps on a map of the city you can understand. And for maps of all kinds, the David Rumsey Map Collection is a national treasure.

Back at the library, you can also go through paper catalogues, searching for the building name, or people associated with the building. Look through the vertical file/ephemera and paw through the books on display.

The amazing Prelinger Library is worth visiting also (open Wednesday afternoons). Many of their materials are scanned, but the place itself is like a portal into a weirder, better universe you always knew existed. (Plus, the people who work there are super helpful.)

It’s worth calling libraries in advance and checking what their policies are on taking photos or making copies. Librarians like being helpful.

Step 6: Bring in the City

With all that you know, you can start to connect your building to the story of the city. Read some SF history books. Find out what was happening in the streets outside the building. Were the Wobblies organizing? What were race relations like? How many people had telephones? What were the main industries? Look up and out from your building now. Where would the people who worked there have gone out drinking or to church?

If you’re not obsessed by now, you should stop.

If you are, you should write up the story and tell us all the things you wish people knew about this one little spot in a city by a big bay.

This post is a combination of research methods used by the duo of Sarah Agudo, Marcin Wichary, and Alexis Madrigal. You can find even more links at Sarah and Marcin’s post about how they researched the Phelan Building.