Time Surfing: San Francisco
180 Years Illustrated
Time Surfing is an experiment. Can we use the latest tools to see an area evolve from wilderness to the modern day? Appreciate comments and feedback.
Before the Gold Rush, this place was a quiet Mexican-era trading village called Yerba Buena, home to maybe 200 people. The man most linked to the city’s birth was William Richardson, a Brit sailor who settled here in 1835. He laid out the first street near the cove. In July 1846, U.S. military raised its flag over the village during the Mexican-American War. And the sleepy port was about to change forever…
📅 July 9, 1846 — Yerba Buena Cove, Alta California (future San Francisco)
A handful of wooden and adobe buildings dot the shoreline of a calm cove. Cattle graze on golden hills. A few small sailing ships sit at anchor. The American flag has just been raised over the customs house. Fewer than 500 people live here. The land is mostly open, windswept dune and grass.
📅 December 1849 — Yerba Buena Cove, San Francisco, California
When gold was discovered in 1848, the world rushed in. The man who lit the fuse was Sam Brannan, a merchant who ran through the streets shouting “Gold! Gold from the American River!” — after first quietly buying up every shovel and pan in town. Within a year the population exploded from hundreds to tens of thousands, and the cove filled with ships whose crews had deserted to dig for gold.
The cove is jammed with hundreds of abandoned sailing ships, masts standing like a dead forest. A chaotic boomtown of tents and quick-built wooden shacks sprawls along a muddy shore. Smoke rises from cookfires. The population has swelled past 25,000 in a single year.
📅 May 1869 — San Francisco waterfront, California
Twenty years after the gold, San Francisco was a real city of brick and stone. The transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, connected it to the rest of the nation. Among the powerful “Big Four” who built that railroad and shaped the city’s wealth was Leland Stanford, railroad baron and future university founder. The cove was now being filled in with land to make room for the booming port.
The cove is shrinking as crews fill it with dirt and debris to create new land. Solid brick warehouses and multi-story buildings now line the bustling waterfront. Tall-masted clipper ships and early steamships crowd the wharves. The city has spread up the hills with grid streets and gaslights.
📅 April 18, 1906, morning — San Francisco, California
