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  more »

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  more »

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  more »

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,  more »

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  more »

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  more »

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  more »

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  more »

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  more »

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  more »