1899 San Francisco, California Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and Atlas

This is a complete color facsimile of Volume One of Insurance Maps of San Francisco, California, published by the Sanborn-Perris Map Co., Limited, of 115 Broadway, New York, in 1899. All 112 sheets are reproduced in full color from the original survey, together with the engraved title plate, both index sheets, the two-part index map, and the contour map.

The copy surveyed carries its age. Damp staining runs through the volume and deepens toward the back: a brown tidemark crosses the upper and outer portions of many sheets, and across the last third — roughly sheets 90 to 106 — it covers a substantial part of the page. The mapping underneath stays legible, but on those sheets it is read through the stain. Nothing has been retouched out.

Each sheet shows individual buildings block by block, color-coded by construction — fireproof, iron, brick with brick or metal cornice, frame cornice, stone front, frame side, brick specials, frame and iron clad — with story heights, fire walls, division-wall iron doors, iron shutters, window openings by story, stables, open and encased elevators, hoistways with self-closing traps, brick, iron, steam-pipe and terra-cotta chimneys, steam boilers, water pipes, single and double hydrants, and elevations quoted above city base at street intersections.

Three finding aids come with it: a full index of streets, an index of specials, and a block index running block number to sheet number. The street index also carries a concordance of streets on the old map appearing under their new official names — Brady to Rockland, Church Place to Eddie, Oak to Osgood, Polk Lane to Starr — which is what makes an older address findable at all.

The specials read as a roll call of the vanished city: the Baldwin Hotel and Theatre, listed as ruins after the fire of 1898, with its annex; the Phelan Building, the Parrott Estate buildings, the Press Club, the Royal Insurance Building and the Telephone Building; the Bank of California and the Anglo California Bank; the Supreme Court Building; the Union Depot and Ferry House and Piers 1 through 51 along the seawall; the Tivoli Opera House, the Alcazar and the Alhambra; the Pacific Union Club and the Poodle Dog restaurant; Shreve & Co.'s jewelry house, W. J. Sloane & Co., Tillmann & Bendel's and S. H. Tyler's coffee and spice mills, Steiger's terra cotta works, the American sugar refineries and the Armour packing house; the Presentation Convent, Sacred Heart College, the Russian Church, the Bethel African M.E. Church, the Third Baptist Church, and the synagogue at 600 Taylor. The index map itself labels the Palace Hotel, City Hall and the U.S. Mint.

The volume also includes a separate color contour map of the whole city showing the distributing reservoirs of the Spring Valley Water Works and the district each supplied, with a table of all ten reservoirs and tanks by elevation and capacity and notes on the Crystal Springs, San Andreas, Pilarcitos, Lake Merced and Alameda Creek sources feeding some 570 miles of main.

The index sheet carries the miscellaneous report for 1899: a population of 335,000; a fire department of 597 fully and partly paid men and 274 horses across 43 stations, with thirty-four steamers, seven chemical engines, seven hook and ladder trucks, a Hale water tower and two fire boats at the foot of Mission Street; 3,653 hydrants, 273 alarm boxes and twenty-six fire cisterns. And it records the city's fatal weakness in one line: the business district principally brick, and practically the entire dwelling district, including many business houses, built of frame — principally redwood and fir.

120 pages. 8.5" x 11.25". Full color. Hardcover.

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