The author’s hand and a playing card on top of a Sanborn map to show scale. Photo provided by the author.
Eleven tomes straddle the hip-high shelves of the sixth floor at the main San Francisco Public Library. These gargantuan books are the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, some of the first things to greet visitors to the library’s History Center.1 When I walked in, I traded my messenger bag for a laminated playing card. It’s the perfect reminder of the scale of these books. The three of spades and my hand are both puny, humbling me. Whether they come discrete and folded to fit in the glove compartment or large enough to dominate an entire shelf, maps are reminders of the routes we take and the areas we’ll leave in our wake.
The Sanborn maps are colorful and crowded with handwritten script; blush pink means the structure was built of bricks, while the pineapple whip yellow indicates a wooden frame. The minute abbreviations informed specialists how risky it was to insure a property, and they tell some of the most detailed and longest-surviving stories about what San Francisco looked like before the April 18, 1906 earthquake and calamity that devastated “The City by the Bay.”
From residents seeking historical background on their homes and businesses to scholars preparing pieces for publication, the sixth floor is a comfortable place to work. The library houses other maps, like the Merry-makers Map, a map of manhole covers, and one of sunken/ lost ships that have been built over. These sources transport us right back to the scene, which is exactly why I’m here. I’m the kind of scholar who needs to immerse myself in the world I’m studying, and I can’t do that without the maps found here in the main library.2
The real fun though starts when I ask the librarians about other maps they keep. The question triggers an almost-amusing Rube-Goldberg-esque process; a staff member rings an old doorbell and a kindly page appears like magic from the stacks. The librarians match my energy and enthusiasm for learning about old San Francisco; they write several items on a card. It reminds me of the way my aunties would write down ingredients like corn tortillas and Hatch chile on a scrap of paper before sending me and my sisters off to the store, half-based on knowledge and half determined by gut. Historians are well aware that a good old map invites curiosity and connection. I’m glad I asked for recommendations, because the light behind the page’s eyes tells me I’m not alone in my fandom of San Francisco.
A key reads “General Chinese Occupancy” and is marked with the color orange. Other parts include gambling houses, opium houses, and as well as areas known for white prostitution. Photo permission provided by the San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco History Center.
Soon after, a cart rolls in. The white butcher paper around the artifact is crinkly. The librarian, Tim, lays several maps out for me in quick succession, some flat on the lighted tables and others that come with special green cushions. The first I examine is a map of the oldest Chinatown in North America. The document is from 1885, and it’s color-coded. The legend explains what colors indicate special businesses that dealt with sex work and gambling; a blue one, for instance, means the street-level portion of the building specialized in “White Prostitution.” In my freelancing career, I’ve written about these streets as tourist destinations and points of interest.3 I always struggle to balance the dim, stylized insights that readers have come to expect with the gritty reality of place as a living, changing, not-always-picturesque subject that deserves a nuanced profile. Romanticizing Chinatown is forgetting how it came to be, and these maps are essential documents in spelling that out.
Chinatown as it exists today nearly didn’t happen; Chinese residents scrambled to build back their homes and businesses after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Amidst the rubble, the city plotted to destroy the neighborhood and force out residents,4 and law enforcement turned their backs while wealthy white women looted.5 Without this and the accompanying map titled, “Two Years After,” the story of this stunning resistance might be lost. Maps are significant bridges between the past and the present; the remarkable thing is that anyone with a library card can get them pulled and see this history first-hand.
I walk around the collection room, noting a small sign that says the last rainstorm brought a water leak. The folks who work here ardently want to protect their collection, which has already survived so much. Out the window, I see ghost signs and streetcars.6 A five-minute streetcar trip could take me from the main library to the city’s Financial District (FiDi). The many people who stomp around the FiDi have no idea their offices sit on top of landfills and abandoned ships that gathered in the bay after carrying passengers seeking gold in the mid-nineteenth century. If I ride the streetcar to the Ferry Building, I can see Treasure Island, man-made land shaped like an emerald-cut jewel. I’m not a San Francisco native, so I find it forgivable when others don’t know that Treasure Island was constructed in the 1930s with mud dredged from the San Francisco Bay.
A photo of a page from the 1905 Sanborn map, includes a pink drawing of the Tivoli Opera House and other San Francisco landmarks such as the B’nai Brith Hall. Photo permission provided by the San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco History Center.
More recently, maps have served as evidence of structural racism, like redlining, as well as activism, like the Chinatown response to the 1906 earthquake. Sources like these are key to making history accessible to the public. Admittedly, opening up these pieces of history can be intimidating. To prepare for a viewing, don’t worry about gloves, kid or otherwise. Tim, the librarian I spoke to, suggests working with clean hands because your dexterity is better for fragile paper. With photos, you may need to don gloves to protect the emulsions from the oils on your skin. With maps, though, it’s more important to be mindful of the frayed and even burned edges. Some of the collection has survived earthquakes, fires, and the hands of countless library visitors.
From Volume 1 of the 1905 Sanborn map. A “Corrected” stamp with several entries from 1900-1905 in pencil including initials. Photo permission provided by the San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco History Center.
When you encounter an older map with paper attached in a layer or scrap, check for two things. First, run your finger over it. You’ll feel the glue underneath, which tells you it was attached sometime between 1912 and the 1990s. It’s a wide range, so the second thing to check for is the spot in the front of each book that accounts for when material was corrected. In the maps that stay displayed on top of shelves, there’s a detailed correction log. You’ll notice a lag time of two or three months between when an update is found and when it’s added. Most of these updates were made when a building went up or came down; fire insurance is the basis of the information, so they’re interested in the structures.
You can find many of these maps online thanks to philanthropist and historian David Rumsey, but not all of them.7 The ones not digitized come up from the stacks with charred edges and an air of the sacred about them. Their plates are from 1899, but the pages go a few years beyond. When these were corrected, it was noted in pencil and accompanied by initials; the last correction was September 1905, a few months ahead of the great earthquake. There is no note about when information is received versus when it’s added, demonstrating how working with archival materials has changed over time to be more robust. Although many of these maps are created by and for insurance companies, utilities, and other bureaucratic entities, they tell a rich story that lends context to how we understand places and cultures of the past.
The Sanborn maps, in all their wrinkled and warped glory.
From the moment the elevator doors open to the sixth floor, maps anchor visitors in the past. Map-reading is a skill introduced to Californians beginning in kindergarten; students begin with cardinal directions and eventually learn about identifying social friction. These types of records remain invaluable tools for understanding our past. I feel as though I’m in a cathedral, some sacred space that guarantees me an adventure as long as I have the right call-slip.
Contingent Magazine is grateful for the assistance and guidance of the San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco History Center in the development of this field trip.
- “About this Collection: Sanborn Maps,” The Library of Congress, accessed March 8, 2023, https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/about-this-collection/.
- I was in the map room to conduct research for a freelance travel piece.
- Bunny McFadden, “10 Meet-Cute Destinations to Live Out Your Rom Com Fantasies,” Fodors Travel Guide, October 1, 2022. https://www.fodors.com/news/author/bunny-mcfadden.
- Chuo Li, “The Politics and Heritage of Race and Space in San Francisco’s Chinatown,” On Location: Heritage Cities and Sites, (November 2011): 37-59 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-1108-6_3.
- John Baranski, Housing the City by the Bay: Tenant Activism, Civil Rights, and Class Politics in San Francisco. (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2020.
- Frequently when a neighboring building comes down in a built environment, it reveals older placemaking signs known as ghost signs.
- San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco History Center, “Geotagging & Crowdsourcing,” What’s on the 6th floor? Book Arts and Special Collections Blog, August 25, 2011, http://sfhcbasc.blogspot.com/2011/08/geotagging-crowdsourcing.html.
