Found Ektachrome slide. Fisherman's Wharf at night, November 1969. Peter Alioto's Italian Specialty House. Hof Brau. Sea Foods. The Sea Captain's Chest. And up top, in blue neon, the two words that sold a restaurant back then: AIR CONDITIONED. I've seen this scene during the day before, but historic slides of this block at night are more rare. Every tube lit. This is what the Wharf looked like when it was loud and red and unembarrassed about wanting your money. Neon on neon, and the hills behind it doing their own light show. Look at the cars. A Yellow Cab, 789, a white Falcon in the foreground. A block of Detroit iron at the curb, and not one of them new. In November 1969 the cars on the Wharf were already somebody's old cars. There were a couple of different Alioto's on the Wharf back then. This one was Peter's. The famous one, Alioto's at stall number 8, started in 1925 when Nunzio Alioto, a Sicilian immigrant, opened a fish stand. His widow Rose built it into the first building ever put up on the Wharf, and the family says she invented cioppino. San Franciscans have been arguing about that claim for 80 years. Alioto's closed in 2020 and never reopened. This past January the city took the famous sign down and tore the building down for a public plaza. A hundred years of family history, replaced by picnic tables. Peter's is gone too. And the Sea Captain's Chest, the nautical gift shop on the corner, did not survive the 70s. Everything lit here is dark now. I have photographed more than 30,000 neon signs in America myself, and I am still out there shooting them. But I do not own a time machine. I cannot go back and photograph the thousands we have already lost. So I find these slides. Somebody stood on Jefferson Street in November 1969 with a camera loaded with Ektachrome and figured an ordinary night was worth one frame. Finding their work is the next best thing. Did you eat at Peter Alioto's? Or drink at the Hof Brau? And when did Peter's close? I cannot find it written down anywhere.

This is San Francisco’s Tonga Room before it was the Tonga Room. I found this photograph while wandering around the Fairmont Hotel one day. That is the Terrace Plunge, the hotel's indoor swimming pool, sometime before 1945. Somebody caught a beautiful pair of legs up on one of the boards, top left. She has been up there ever since. In 1929, the Fairmont on Nob Hill built a 75-foot indoor pool, a first for San Francisco, and everybody came. Ronald Reagan swam here. Helen Hayes swam here. The Water Follies performed here. For sixteen years, this room was for swimming. Then the war ended, and in 1945 the Fairmont hired Mel Melvin, MGM's top set designer, to turn the pool into a bar. He did not fill it in. He kept the water, called it a lagoon, floated a stage in the middle of it for the band, and rigged the ceiling to rain. Within a year, Herb Caen was reporting in the Chronicle that a couple of drunk gents had stripped down to their shorts one night and jumped in. Earlier this year, I was at an event in that same room and watched a table of guys pass the hat and raise $1,300 in cash, right there at the table, to get one of their own to jump into that lagoon. Thirteen hundred dollars. He still would not do it. The pool never left. If you have ever sat in the Tonga Room with a Mai Tai while it thundered indoors and the band played out on the water, you were sitting around this swimming pool. The diving board is gone. The water is still there. Anthony Bourdain called the Tonga Room the greatest place in the history of the world. He never got to swim in it. Officially, nobody has since 1945.