Type Tuesday - Halloween Cuts from Empire Type Foundry

Happy Halloween!

featuring cuts from Empire Type Foundry

Jaime Henderson

Archivist/Digital Archivist

jhenderson@calhist.org

This Day in History: The End of the Pony Express

George M. Ottinger, The Last Ride of the Pony Express, 1874; courtesy of Denver Art Museum
In Ottinger’s painting, a Pony Express rider passes a work crew installing lines for the transcontinental telegraph, which initiated the demise of an icon of the Western frontier.

Like today, in 1860 communications mattered. California’s population had reached about 380,000, and with this growth came the demand for faster ways to get news and letters to and from the state. From April 3, 1860 to October 26, 1861, the Pony Express was the West’s fastest means of communication. And as with today’s advances in technology, it soon became obsolete.

Type Tuesday - Fonts for your Halloween Needs!

On the lookout for exceptionally spooky or strange type fonts for your Halloween party invitations or decorations? Look no further than these spectacular fonts showcased in Hazeltine Typesetting Inc.'s 1959 catalog, Library of Type. 

These ornate fonts, dating from the 8th to the 16th century, include German Arabesque and Old English Riband - along with just enough creep factor to suit your Halloween ghosts, goblins, ghouls and guests!

The Hazeltine Typesetting Inc. catalog, Library of Type, has just recently been cataloged.
Drop by the California Historical Society's research library to take a look for yourself. Library hours are Wednesday through Friday, 1:00 to 5:00. 

Jaime Henderson,
Archivist/Digital Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Anton Wagner's Images of Los Angeles

The California Historical Society is pleased to offer a sneak preview of images from our inaugural digitization project - the photographs of Anton Wagner, a PhD candidate at the University of Kiel, Germany, who came to Los Angeles to conduct research on the city’s growth from a dusty town into a metropolis. Wagner's photographs of Los Angeles between the years of 1932-1933 depict the Depression's impact on the rapidly growing urban landscape and demonstrate the socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural diversities of the Los Angeles region. 

We share only five of Wagner's images of Los Angeles, but stay tuned! The culmination of our pilot digitization project, scheduled in March 2016, will include all of Wagner's 438 photographs of Los Angeles' streets, neighborhoods, businesses, industries and landscapes and inhabitants. 

Looking west from Wall St. between 8th and 9th Sts., Los Angeles: 1932-1933 by Anton Wagner, PC17, California Historical Society. 

 Looking north on Wall St. from between 8th and 9th Sts., Los Angeles: 1932-1933 by Anton Wagner, PC17, California Historical Society.  

Drive-in market, northeast corner of Wilshire Blvd. and Hamilton Dr.,  Los Angeles: 1932-1933 by Anton Wagner, PC17, California Historical Society.  

Looking northwest from west of Mission Rd., pipe yard in foreground, Los Angeles: 1932-1933 by Anton Wagner, PC17, California Historical Society.  

Buddhist temple, Terminal Way, Terminal Island, Los Angeles: 1932-1933 by Anton Wagner, PC17, California Historical Society.  

N. Bunkerhill St. from Boston, looking north at rooming houses where Mexicans live, Los Angeles: 1932-1933 by Anton Wagner, PC17, California Historical Society.  

If you would like to know more about Anton Wagner and his photographs take a look at an earlier blog post written CHS' own, Shelly Kale.

Jaime Henderson,
Archivist/Digital Archivist
jhenderson@calhist.org

Moments in Time

[Jim Jones preaching before congregation], circa 1973-1977, Photographs from Peoples Temple records, California Historical Society, MSP 3800.01.0019

by Eugene Smith

Eugene Smith joined Peoples Temple in 1973 and lived in the Temple’s San Francisco commune before leaving for Jonestown in fall 1977. He was in Georgetown on November 18 clearing items from customs. Numerous members of his family – including his mother, wife, and infant son – died in Jonestown.

Learn more about People's Temple from and view items from CHS's Peoples Temple Records Collection on October 21, 2015 at 3:30 PM as we welcome David Talbot, author of Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love; Marshall Kilduff, San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Writer: Eugene Smith, author of a forthcoming book about Peoples Temple, Jonestown, and Jim Jones from a young Black man's point of view; and John Cobb, an author who was born into Peoples Temple and was a member until it's end on 11/18/78. This event is part of the 11th annual One City One Book event; this year's selection is David Talbot's Season of the Witch. 

Tickets to the event can be purchased from: OneCityOneBookPeoplesTemple.eventbrite.com/.

The piece below is an excerpt from a book by Mr. Smith.

When we were not working, we were swimming, running, going to meetings, loading and unloading the buses, seeing to the Seniors, playing with the kids, and this all started at around 0600 hours and lasted to about 2300, depending on whether the meeting was in San Francisco, LA, or Redwood Valley.

Type Tuesday - Lanston Monotype Machine Company

Lanston Monotype Machine Company provides a little guidance for all those pesky punctuation problems. 

Jaime Henderson,
Archivist/Digital Archivist

Lawrence Halprin and the Plaza That Changed the World

Sproul Plaza, courtesy Alison Moore.

Is architecture capable of changing the course of history?

On October 1, 1964, in the midst of a growing protest, University of California, Berkeley student Mario Savio hopped onto the roof of a police car in Sproul Plaza, the open space in front of the University’s administration building.  Sitting in the car was former UC student Jack Weinberg who had been arrested for staffing an “illegal” table on Sproul on behalf of the civil rights organization, the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Their actions, and those of others, not only helped launch the Free Speech Movement, which would forever alter not only the UC campus, but also the fabric of American society.

City Rising for the 21st Century: San Francisco Public Transit 1915, now, tomorrow

Fageol auto train at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. California Historical Society, CHS2014.1807.

The 288-day Panama-Pacific International Exposition was more than a celebration of technological achievement and art.  It marked the rebirth of San Francisco after the 1906 calamity and its new global position as gateway to the U.S.’s newly acquired possessions in the Pacific after the completion of the Panama Canal.  Just rebuilt, San Francisco was also the “most modern city on Earth.” 

Q & A with artist Kerry Laitala

By Kerry Laitala

Kerry Laitala is an award-winning moving-image artist who uses analog, digital, and hybrid forms to investigate the ways in which media influences culture-at-large. Laitala's work involves science, history, technology, and her uncanny approach to evolving systems of belief through installation, photography, para-cinema, performance, kinetic sculpture, and single-channel forms. She is the current recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission's Individual Artist Commission to create and display a new series of electrophotographs. 

On October 1, 2015, Laitala will give a talk titled Historic Techniques—Aura and the Spectacle of Light at the California Historical Society's San Francisco Headquarters. Learn more about the event and purchase tickets here. 

I don't usually like to toot my own horn by writing about my own work, but I do enjoy talking about it, so I thought it would make the most sense to have my friend Brian Darr of the blog Hell On Frisco Bay ask me questions and transcribe the interview for this blog piece.   

Brian Darr: Can you give me a brief history of your contributions to the San Francisco art scene in the last twenty years?

Kerry Laitala: From 1995-1997 I went to the San Francisco Art institute for my MFA in filmmaking, and I studied with some amazing filmmakers and curators. People like George Kuchar and Ernie Gehr and Michael Wallin and Mary Tsongas and Steve Anker.

I didn't really start exhibiting until 1997, the year I graduated. Actually in 1996 I did have an installation at the Art Institute, of a kinetic sculpture called the Retrospectroscope. In 1997 I started showing film work out there in the world, and I was lucky to have a short called Secure the Shadow Ere the Substance Fade programmed at the San Francisco International Film Festival. That was my entree into more mainstream venues, being able to screen at an international film festival at the Kabuki Cinema, and to see my work on the big screen.

Beginning in the late 1990s I screened at Other Cinema, Craig Baldwin's Saturday screening series which is currently in its final season at A.T.A. I also started screening at the Exploratorium. I was invited to curate a show called “revealing bodies” where I was able to show Secure the Shadow in the context of other films that had to do with imaging the body. It was really exciting to screen works that had inspired me and were interesting to me, and be a part of that large series that Liz Keim had worked hard to program.

Yosemite—Protected Wilderness

Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View at Midday, 2013; photo by David Iliff, Creative Commons License

On October 1, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed legislation establishing the country’s third national park at Yosemite. Congress had recognized Yosemite as worthy of protection since 1864, when in the midst of the Civil War it granted the magnificent and awe-inspiring Yosemite Valley and “the Land embracing the Mariposa Big Tree Grove” to the State of California “inalienable for all time.”