August 31, 2012 Even more excitement around as the iPhone apps we released in February become much simpler to buy, easier to buy, and cheaper to buy! Did we mention yoou can BUY them?

Announcing the launch of two Thinkwalks guides that you can purchase directly from iTunes.

See our full announcement here.

It used to be complicated, buying the Thinkwalks guides only as in-app purchases through the Know What Essentials guide. That cost $7.97 for both Thinkwalks guides. Now you can get both—Everything Explained and Local Nerd! for just $3.98 and don’t [...]

We tried to put the creek into our mural. Mona sketched it on paper. Seth painted it on the wall—three times before getting it the way he liked it, with the street names of the Wiggle bike route shimmering in the water. We carefully mocked reality with brown (Franciscan chert) rocks on the one side of the creek and green (serpentine) on the other side. We even allowed ourselves interpretive license when we colored it in crayon blues.

When we designed the mural (1996 & ’97) I [...]

My mom, Joan Straumanis, arrived home in DC just in time to feel the surprising 5.9 quake. It was the first earthquake she ever felt and she had this to say about it:

Where was I during the earthquake? In the bathroom at National Airport, just after returning from Boston. Many people around me were alarmed. But to be honest, I thought it was more exciting than frightening. It was actually sort of gentle, and different from what I had imagined: more rocking than shaking, and inspiring—to think of [...]

Looks like it’s the season for awards, and we’re knee-deep in them over here at Thinkwalks.

This week, the San Francisco Bay Guardian gave Thinkwalks its freshly minted “Best of the Bay: Best Cerebral Stroll” Editor’s Pick Award.

Joel Pomerantz has a lot of nerve asking people to think and walk at the same time. He also has a lot of nerd. In fact, he bills his ThinkWalks — designed especially for locals — as “nerdy tours for San Franciscans.”

And last week it was the Awesome Foundation for the [...]

As mentioned in my previous post, the access to old articles has increased amazingly. And that access helped me to break this story.

Or at least rediscovered…

A 25-acre Phelps’ Lake in San Francisco’s Panhandle?

I’ve just solved a mystery described in my previous research on the south area of Divisadero street. Back when it was a winding path through the dunes, Devisadero, as it was known, connected the Mission Dolores to the Presidio. The incorrect story had settled into this version over the years: San Souci Lake, located at Divisadero north [...]

There’s great news about researching the storm. The California Digital Newspaper Collection has been working on digitizing old news, just as Thinkwalks has been doing, only with more funding. I love calling 150-year-old articles “news”! Perhaps it should be “renews.”

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know about my effort to create a detailed historical survey of the record-setting storm of 1862, which began in December 1861, lasting so long it was called the Noachian Deluge by many alive at the time; it was more than forty days and forty [...]

New rumors about Mission Dolores history have hit the papers!

In addition to Hadley’s post at Mission Local, mentioned in my previous entry, which breaks the story with a perfect synopsis of the latest research, Carl Nolte has, over the weekend, published an article printed on real paper—front page above the fold and in color in Saturday’s Chronicle. It’s a little confusing, since the headline, along with the map Nolte presents and the article itself all incorrectly state that the Mission may have been founded north of Market Street near Duboce [...]

A reporter asked me yesterday why it’s even important to argue about evidence of a fresh water lake at Laguna Dolores, or to pinpoint the founding location of SF Mission Dolores. The sharp questioner, Hadley Robinson, is from Mission Local, the news outlet and laboratory for UC Berkeley Journalism graduate students.

Aside from my usual, “Let’s understand how the natural landscape affected our existence as a city,” I used the opportunity to proclaim the benefits of arguing and evaluating evidence. Public democracy and human planning for the future of our species [...]

Since the Big Summit last week, ARkStorm has been getting a lot of press. Most of the coverage has been simply warning the public that a Big One could happen in the form of a superstorm, rather than a quake. The public interest is generally portrayed as being strictly about natural hazard emergency response.

Official preparation is certainly important. Information about the science and history of storms also needs to be emphasized. In fact, it’s in some ways even more important for the public to understand the implications in context, than [...]

In my diggings concerning the bizarre month-long storm of 1861 and 1862, I’ve come across exciting tidbits. Some, such as the gold country rains of more than nine feet depth in one month (!) are shocking enough. However, nothing has been so exciting as reading words written in the midst of it, each more dire than the previous.

Leland Stanford was apparently forced to take a boat through the streets of Sacramento just to attend his own inaguration as Governor of California. Here's the speech he gave, as reprinted in [...]

San Francisco is lucky to have a significant share of the remarkable art and architecture produced by the New Deal’s financial support programs. Beniamino Bufano, a sculptor who lived in San Francisco, produced a number of these pieces that are now displayed in San Francisco, where he lived for many years. But some of his most unusual sculpture was privately commissioned, such as the steel and stone statue of Sun Yat Sen in St. Mary’s Square Park at the corner of California Street & Grant Avenue.

Bufano usually used an easily-recognized [...]

Take a look at this luck!

As always, I held off on canceling the tour on Tuesday. I hoped there would be a gap in the rain. I was right, but more than right, I was using a weather prediction system for local San Francisco short-term planning that I’ve now tested enough to share around. Feel free to pass the link along.

The tour ended at 2pm. At 2:20, this is how the oncoming rain looked, sweeping in from the west. Good timing!

The tour only had six people, but they all [...]

This post is a confession—actually a whole confessional litany. I told untruths. Yes. Me. I know, I know: never trust me again! I’ll list them in a moment so you can adjust what you learned on one of my tours accordingly.

Friend and Thinkwalks volunteer Nancy Botkin told me the other day that it’s strangely easy to change my mind about an “objective fact.” All you need to do is give me careful evidence of something that contradicts what I used to adamantly believe. I flip from saying I’m sure the [...]

Maps are so unreliable. Even when they are well drawn—which hilly places never were before the advent of contour lines in the 1850s—they don’t necessarily have a key telling useful details. Sometimes a map shows what a place has or had, or what the mapmaker thought was once there. All too often, though not captioned as ‘fantasy’, they tell what someone wishes to encourage into existence in the future. (“Please invest!”)

On my tours I almost always refer to the Lower Haight neighborhood and Panhandle area of San Francisco as “San [...]

The recent (November 17) Shaping SF panel discussion at CounterPULSE was recorded and is posted here. If it’s been topped by more recent podcasts, search or scroll to “Watersheds Lost and Found: San Francisco, Guadalajara, Yuba.”

Me swimming at the South Yuba River

My part of it was the San Francisco part, of course, and I was joined by Derek Hitchcock of the South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL), and Sarah Kelly and Arthur Richards, co-directors of Adapting to Scarcity.

The Q&A was excellent and helped me to formulate my long-term concepts [...]

In the mid 1990s, I helped create two pieces of printed matter that I had no idea would hit it off one day. With each other.

Strange, but true: Stannous Flouride’s Star Map of the Haight and 409 House’s Directory of Local Services found one another, fourteen years later, and got hitched. The resulting Haight Ashbury Map & Guide is the latest incarnation of a long history of local resource guides and maps.

Stan approached me about producing his first handmade “Star Map” of the Haight, and I helped him get the [...]

Check out what interesting stuff I’ve sleuthed up for the “trek” I’m leading with Nature in the City on November 14th.

The tour will start in Golden Gate Park, because since the late 1800s, the Laguna Honda watershed has been a main source of water for irrigation of the Park.

The creation of the irrigation system happened at the time when the Park was being entirely re-configured. Development of Golden Gate Park had been firmly within the “rustic” aesthetic of William Hammond Hall. Then railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington gave funds to [...]

As you’ll be glad to see, dear reader, Thinkwalks is undergoing a small renovation. I’m taking this opportunity to thank you for your patience and let you know what’s in store.

An exciting meeting took place this week, as mentioned two posts ago. I hired Amy Conger to help systematize Thinkwalks projects. I’m so glad she agreed to help. I worked with her for years back in the 1990s at EpiCenter DeskTop, my two-storefronts-business in the Haight Ashbury and the Castro. I know and trust her, and she’s got a great [...]

A report spreads for decades but makes no sense. How intriguing and frustrating. In a newspaper column from (unconfirmed date) April, 1919, Edward Morphy says that the lake in my neighborhood was destroyed by the 1862 storms with which I am so intrigued. But the detail given makes absolutely no sense. Says Morphy:

…probably the best known landmark of Divisadero street in the pioneer days was the old San Souci roadhouse which stood on the east side of a pretty little lake that then filled the space from Fulton to about [...]

The Thinkwalks blog is going into full swing today. At least for a time, likely many months, most content here will be related to the Storm Book I’ve begun researching.

My intent is to publish articles and a prospectus booklet, eventually extruding a book on the topic. I hope I can nudge The Great Storm and Flood from obscurity into public awareness with some serious research and writing. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled upon this incredible little-known topic. Of the professionals I recently consulted in related fields, few have [...]

In the recent past, a number of folks have generously volunteered their time to help with publicity, research, social networking, design and other aspects of Thinkwalks. If you have an idea of how you’d like to help, please let me know.

Some of the clear needs at the moment are for people to help compile information either from bibliographies or from very old news articles on the Great Storm and Flood. And to distribute (to cafés) the wonderful flyers Martina D’Alessandro designed in her volunteer gig. Also, there’s a volunteer design [...]

Have you ever thought out why it is that San Francisco has such a large population of homosexuals? Sure, it’s historically been a tolerant town (probably due to the gold-seekers and other adventurers and wayfarers). But why gay people in particular, rather than other oppressed populations in need of safe homes? Why not runaway children or middle America refugees? (Wait a second…hmmmm)

Turns out, though, that the sudden increase from a moderate to a high number of homos in this town happened in 1942. That was when the U.S. military services [...]

Here’s my report about San Francisco. I wrote it for my niece, Marina, who asked me to correct her report. Nerd that I am, I corrected it but required she read my report, too. Mind you, this is a challenge, since she lives in Germany and is just learning English.

As I explained to her: Everything in this report is true. Some is strange. Maybe you’ll be surprised.

For 4,500 years, the land that is today called San Francisco was home to a few small Ohlone Indian families. There were probably never [...]

For more than a decade, I’ve led occasional tours as a sort of hobby. In late 2009, I realized that in among all the cultural artifacts that are so important here, there is a natural dynamic most locals crave in their lives

People come to San Francisco for conventions and vacations, but have more fun if they know someone here. That’s because their host will probably force them to repeat these secret oaths:

1) I will only go to tourist trap Fisherman’s Wharf to see a specific cool thing, such as the Musée Mechanique. I will only go to tourist nightmare Pier 39 to see the wild sea lions. I will not spend all my time in tourist zones. Hardly any, really. Maybe six minutes. And only with these rules…

2) After I find [...]

Chris Carlsson, who leads the bike tours for Shaping SF, is one well-read guy. He understands so many of the specifics about work-related politics. His ideas were formed from reading books that were written back when labor organizer was a radical term. And it seems he’s read everything published since then.

On a Shaping SF tour, I’ve learned such dramatic little morsels as where the co-op food movement came from and disappeared to, where the dirt came from that filled in Mission Bay, and why the Marin Headlands weren’t developed into [...]

Liberty Hill is so steep, that at 22nd street, I feel as if I am going to bump my nose as I cross the intersection to walk up. Okay, so I have a big nose.

In the 1990s there was a “HILL” warning sign at the top of the block, before being replaced by a pictorial sign. If they bother to put a “HILL” sign on a San Francisco street, you know it’s steep!

But this block was even steeper than any normal sign could convey. Cars approaching from the level intersection [...]

Kimberly tweeted it and Bonnie both blogged it and tweeted it after taking a Thinkwalks Walk the Wiggle tour. Some folks even heard the tweeting and signed up for the next Walk the Wiggle.

Turns out Bonnie was writing for a blog owned by Discovery, called Treehugger. A few others have picked up on it as a result of the post, including some sites I’ve never heard of here and here and here and here and here and I’m outta breath.

Possibly the most popular activities of all time around Divisadero Street involved hunting.

Most famous people were made so by stories, more than by deeds—that’s what fame is. In addition to the popular stories, there’s the law. Guglielmo Marconi, son of an Italian nobleman in Bologna, knew this as well as anyone when he decided to claim invention of wireless communications (1895). His triumph was that he made the claim—and the English patent—stick.

A group called the Marconi Memorial Foundation incorporated in the 1930s for the purpose of enshrining this magical story in stone, on the slopes of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill and in [...]