 Alright. I think maybe things have slowed a little bit so I'm going to go ahead and start with my welcome. So hi welcome everyone to Gold Mountain Big City, a talk with local map expert Jim Shine. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. For those of you unfamiliar with Mechanics, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, the oldest in fact, designed to serve the public in California. A cultural event center and a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. Right now, due to the shelter in place, almost all of our activities are virtual, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year and with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Our speaker today is Jim Shine, who along with his wife Marty owns and operates Shine and Shine Old Map store on Grant Street in North Beach, which is a delight to go and visit. But right now it's in the process of transitioning to an online presence. So there will be more to love online from the comfort of your living room. Jim is a regular speaker and a stalwart supporter of the Mechanics Institute. And if we are hosting this event in person right now, you would be enjoying a fabulous reception in his honor. I hope that we all get through this time safely and in good health so that we can see each other and break bread together again with Jim in our library. Gold Mountain Big City is Jim's first book and a wonderful examination of Ken Cathcart's illustrated map of Chinatown from 1947. It is one of the most beautiful books that I have ever seen, and it's available for sale at your local bookstore or Alexander Book Company on Third Street. And it will be added to our library collection shortly. Now let me explain briefly how this is going to work tonight. Jim has an enormous amount of content to share with you. So we want to get going. First of all, let me tell you that we are using the webinar version of Zoom. So it is normal for you to not see yourself and just see myself and Jim. This is so that all eyes can be on Jim's content and the gorgeous illustrations that he has to show you questions, however, will be taken. Please post them in the chat space and we will try to answer as many as we can at the end of the talk. All right, thank you all for coming tonight and thank you Jim. Let's go ahead and get started. I guess that's my cue. All right, it's nice to be here virtually or any other way. Thank you all for taking the time to come and sit down a bit and take a look at my first and latest creation, a book entitled Gold Mountain Big City. It's the culmination of years of collecting and finally getting things published. I want to thank from Carrick's Institute for hosting me, a marvelous entity who I've done work and things for in the past. I love speaking at their venue. You should consider joining. It is inexpensive and it is a great private facility, the first library in the Western US. It is the oldest and the great 1854 starting point, of course, a great historic reference. And I do enjoy their presence. In fact, their presence is half the reason this book got published. In fact, it was the administrative and librarian staff there who encouraged me greatly to pursue the publisher who did, in fact, publish our book, Cameron Press. And through that relationship, this came to fruition. So it's with great thanks and gratitude that I'm here today. The book itself is called Gold Mountain Big City, one of the Chinese names for San Francisco. I think I'll do a screen share and get us into PowerPoints. Everybody should see a character for Gold Mountain Big City coming off of the cartouche of the map. This is our title derived, excuse me, from colloquialism named for San Francisco applied from the beginning as the big city. Gold Mountain refers to some great stories that are referred to in the gold history period and gold rush. Since it's a book, some people might be here to see how a book is made and how one might get an idea and have something like that come to fruition. Others might be here because of their love of history. Others because of the love of the photography. The book does have an incredible archive. The story starts, I'm going to synopsis the introduction to Gold Mountain Big City in a bio, a collection and the discovery and a bit of the intro. The collection came to us in 2004 when Marty and I opened the store on Grant Avenue. And with that neighbors kind of came out of the woodwork and one in particular named Laura DiRenzo said, I have some maps and you should come and buy them. And indeed we went to her house and the basement was filled with a collection of maps that she had attained from a man who had lived a decade earlier and passed away and was a friend of hers. And she felt compelled to save all of that. And we bought that from her and with it came a collection of maps several hundred that were essentially two piles. One was a pile of reference material of a style of maps and the other pile was the creation of one individual and with it came a photographic collection that was big. It was a box of about 5000 negatives 40 millimeter and 35 millimeter negatives and something that was unexpected. In fact, we bought the maps and it was several months later that Laura came and handed off the photos and I said what's this and she said oh it's yours you bought it months ago. And it's something she'd found that she was divesting of things in her home. But as all of Ken's life work, Ken I mentioned, so we have a man we discover who's a map maker named Ken Cavcart and he creates hand colored maps and he sells them in the middle of the 20th century. And he uses other materials similar to his to illustrate, excuse me, to illustrate history through iconography. For us we took his maps and I had them hand water colored and with them came the Chinatown map, which was a sepia tone artist proof in vague content and almost illegible and very cryptic. One of the reasons that I decided to decipher that one first. And we had them cleaned up and hand colored and Photoshopped so that we then created a product and with that we started to develop photos and have them transferred from an analog format of commercial 40 millimeter negatives into digital format of very high resolution, very, very high resolution photos that could then be used and using a contemporary presentation. We in 2016, finally printed one of the maps we printed the Chinatown map as a promo lithographic chromolithographic representation, and very modern but also very archaic and in the style of which it was originally made. And then we started with the help of staff that shine and shine to research the contents of this map and try to decipher what it is. With it we discovered the support of the photographic record that we had in the creation of these maps. And so we started writing text about it and created a manuscript in 2016. So this process from 2004 to 2016 gets us through the process of managing the actual product and then at the end, getting a manuscript together for presentation. With the help of Lee Bruno, a published author with Cameron Press, who's a good author with several good books about San Francisco and San Francisco history, and the support of David Plants and Plant Construction and Plants Historic Library. The book was underwritten and produced by Cameron Press at Petaluma. Up there we had Chris Gruner and Jan Hughes and Ian Morris really doing the orchestration, the editing of my 450 page manuscript, 150 pages, and the taking of the 450 or 500 PDFs and photographs. I'd correlated with that manuscript and text to lay it out the way that it's been a lot of work and the incredible amount of endeavors that got us to the beginning of 2019. And then to the end of the year getting that work done and a release date of March 2020. So here we are. I think we've released date on the date that I went into shelter in Glen Ellen and I've been up here ever since. Ultimately the book itself starts and it winds up being about this map. The introduction gets us to a point where we have a final map which I have produced from a sepia tone artist proof from Cathcart's collection. And we start to research it with his own photographs and with the availability of libraries and academic collections of today to try to decipher the meaning of this map. It's titled San Francisco's Chinatown and Invirens, A Scrapbook Map. A scrapbooking being literally a larger drawing cut out and reduced photolithographically, hand laid, overlaid, re-photographed, and in the end done so in a monochrome black and white palette, and then hand watercolored in its time. Labor intensive and archaic to say the least. Our map maker starts us with chapter one in the book. And here's a self portrait of Ken Cathcart, a man with a Leica. And moving here, we see his first Christmas in San Francisco, 1937. Among other things, he received Leica camera with a visit from his father, a known musician, an underwritten and published musician. And Cathcart does some fairly typical art student layout composition, which is very telling both in his interest, but also we do have a newspaper that gives us December 27, 1937, an exact date of when this was transpiring. And if we notice the film vials in the middle of the image, those are the exact film vials that Laura DiRenzo handed me some 75 years later, filled with the negatives which were taken at best time. And this is what I did my research with. So it was a great privilege to have the original research and life's work of the map maker and artist. His residence his first day in New Camera New City, nice shot looking down California Street to the west around hide. Very quickly, Cathcart developed a relationship with BS Fong in a 1938 Fong asked him, not only to photograph his family and other members of the community, but also to act as a public representative and promoter photographically and with text. For the China war relief of America, a fundraising by the Chinese American community in response to the second Sino-Japanese war, war Manchuria with Japan invading Manchuria. He consolidated a benevolent association, the six companies who were essentially the hosts of this and Cathcart's hosts, and ultimately as such, he was granted great access to the Chinese American community, asked to document the important meetings. We see BS Fong in the middle of this in the background and other members of the community here in the China war relief efforts. We see street scenes of high school girls raising funds, walking around raising donations around China town and events like the YMC Harmonica Band performing here to again raise money, perhaps with Dr. Sun Yat Sen there in the background. We have the privilege of Cathcart with these hosts of being able to document life on the streets in a pre-war Chinatown as a invited guest, and the privilege was not wasted on him, and we see that through his photographic record. So everything from the local news community and the merchant community, the goods on the streets, local young businessmen, the Xiuxiang kids, but also more relevant, the newspaper men of China, here's a Chinua Li and Cameron Place, ultimately, that led to also more credible entities like Stiger and Stiger. Stiger and Stiger are the preeminent law firm in the Montgomery Block who represented Chinese Americans in the majority of civil rights and immigration litigation. They were paramount in the support of Sun Yat Sen and his stay in the United States in the writing of the Constitution for the Republic of China from 1912 to 1949 a independent and democratically elected Chinese Republic. So Stiger and Stiger and the newspaper men and Ben Fong got Cathcart a residence in the Montgomery Block and by 1938 Ken Cathcart was living among 75 other artists, writers, poets, painters, muralists like Robert Stackpole and Maynard Dixon. In this neighborhood, ultimately the bohem, the working artist and creative entrepreneur in many cases self promoting. Cathcart worked then for the Chinese benevolent side of the six companies for the next five to 10 years and at the end of that period became quite adept at the understanding of Chinatown. Incidentally, the Montgomery Block is the site of Transamerica Pyramid today. It was very important building first fireproof building in San Francisco. It remained there until 1959. It's also where Pisco Punch was invented and Duncan McNichol and until the last day of prohibition, where we see the last day of alcohol being served legally at the bankers exchange in the Montgomery Block and we see some pretty sad cops there. Anyway, Cathcart also was aware by being in the Montgomery Block that he wasn't just close to Chinatown. He was in Telegraph Hill and we see the documentation of this community at the same time in early colleges. This would be Montgomery Street on the 1300 block. We see Altar Street in the background right here. And if we go to the next image we see the same house and reference. We'll take note of the sand dunes and the seagrasses and ultimately the environment in 1935-37 is still at the beach, even though we're on the east side of San Francisco, the dunes and sands of the west are coming and settling here. And as we continue on, we see that Cathcart is cognizant of the fact that he's not the first person to document that which he has been asked to document. That is to say the community of Chinatown and the community of Telegraph Hill and the history of San Francisco. Here is a previous 1870s photograph by Curtis Watkins, an important photograph of the same neighborhood and the same houses on Altar Street and Montgomery, 50 years before his time. Cathcart also was aware of maps and the mapping of Chinatown. This map was seminal in the creation and reinforcement of legislation from 1882, which under critical hindsight we see is an act to exclude the Chinese from all activities from immigration, from ownership of land, from right to marry. But also to the limitations of the type of employment that one could attain. This map is the first map to document a ghetto and a color code. It is in fact showing us a white prostitution in blue, green prostitution is Chinese, yellow is opium resorts, red is Joss houses. The Tian is general Chinese occupancy and gambling houses are pink. This is none of these activities are illegal. All of these activities are immoral. This map is used to enact moralist legislation against the Chinese which remained fully until 1943 when it started to be repealed and then not until 1965 and in the end 1968. These laws finally removed from the American law books. Nonetheless, this map reinforced generalization that was in place already three years later. Other maps followed, which included more promotional maps by the Chinese American community, which really listed a business and its function and what they sold. We also see a land use map a little later in 1929 showing the growth of the Chinatown community expansion beyond Chinatown beyond the previous borders in which one was mandated one must live if you were of Chinese or in fact Asian ancestry. We see the boundaries of Chinatown expanded also to include the East Bay as well as to include representation on Angel Island. Angel Island is an immigration station and as such Angel Island does have some merits in that despite it being a horrific spot. It does provide representation for a group of people that by legislation have no legal representation and in fact legally do not exist. This is a dichotomy of the time. Excuse me. Other more celebratory maps also start to follow and here in 1939 with the Golden Gate International Exposition transpiring in the treasure Island in the middle of the bay. We see Ethel Chung's map of Chinatown celebrating the landmarks and in a bright and colorful fashion. We see the illustrated or animated map 20th century American style of mapping which is very much cartoon very much celebratory and very much a local thing. Just in that here's the actual map for the guidebook for the Golden Gate and it's done by Ruth Taylor White who is the most well paid illustrator in this style in the country. She has an office on the top floor of the call build on the corner of 3rd and Market. This is one of her more subtle and subdued pieces despite having dragons and water dragons and some other animated colorful aspects. This in fact is fairly subdued for her. Cathcart decided this is what he would do. He would become an illustrated map maker and following the Second World War he started producing maps historic maps and these are some of his first few maps before the Chinatown map. The 1946 map of Old downtown is a marvelous piece and it refers to the 1848 to 1870 San Francisco. We also then have a similar map for the Bay Area and one which I'm working on now for my second book is the sketch map of California where the western side of the map depicts the early Rancho history of California, the first colonialization. And then the western side of the map depicts the Gold Rush and the Americanization and colonization population of California from 1850 to 1870. An interesting story and one that Cathcart had done just the year before producing our Chinatown map. This map has a lot of material about the Chinese American community among others and probably helped his reinforcement for the creation of this map. So here we are. That's a mouthful. I'm not sure how I'm doing on time but I think we're moving pretty well. This is a marvelous piece. The map is filled with icons. It's in fact two distinct maps, the outer border and the inner map. And we're going to go with the outer border initially. The map itself has been broken down into a grid which is displayed on page 35 of the book and it's very helpful because you can always go back and reference and you can pick and choose both imagery or stories to get an idea. I called the book Chinatown 101 to some degree because I think these are very subtle. The icons Cathcart used as references to the historic stories which might have been a paragraph or three but through a single icon could in fact evoke the story and then prompt one to research its content. And so we've done that research and have kind of outlined that in a structure in the book. So it's very fun. The grid is linear and its approach goes A through Z around the outer border and then one through nine across the top and A through G along the XY axis. It does have a typo at the beginning of chapter two sadly what we have is 177 icons within 89 spaces and that's how chapter two should start. These icons as I mentioned each are a story and we're going to start with the outer border because it is a story in fact unto itself that is more historic than it is perceived in the moment. And this is the story of the Chinese American diaspora 1847 1947 and it poses the common history of the resident of Chinatown that is felt to be important by both the Chinese American community and the community of Chinatown but also to be recognized as should be taught to the visitor the San Franciscan who is not a resident of Chinatown. Starting with the creation of the Democratic Republic of China the fall of the Manchur Empire and its application and the creation of Sun Yat Sen Chinese Republic. Many people my age or older grew up celebrating 1010 parades. The 1010 aspect is the creation of that China which is pre communist China and post Chinese dynasty very select window but also a window which created some of the best Chinese American relations then and since. With it we have events that are transpiring that show the relationship between these cultures and ultimately we're here seeing flags of the American flag and what we'd see today as the Taiwanese flag. What is back to the Republic of China flag flying from a family building on Waverly Place. We also then see icons relating to the history historically of the Chinese contribution and experience with both construction of the railways and the lure of gold into the gold fields on the Chinese camps. In fact, as I mentioned cap cards previous 1946 map of gold country and great details showed the Chinese American experience in the Chinese camp. The number of tong houses tong wars family temples known as Joss houses Joss being incense and incense being burned in front the English wrongly called these Joss houses. The reason for them being on the Chinese exclusion map of 1885 was not because these were family buildings were perhaps something banking or money or tong wars or anything like this was was that temples were Buddhism and Buddhism was paganism. It was idol worship. So these were some of the viewpoints of the Christian viewpoint of the Chinese that's that's going on in the Chinese community in California 1847 to 1947. Cap cards awareness of distance shown in his maps. Also, with it we have the limitations of jobs that if you are Chinese ancestry that you may do in the United States, and they include a CDF and G, and he is taking pictures of these persons in portraiture in great quantity. And some of them are quite nice is one of my favorite this guy has a beautiful sweater and he's the owner of the California shrimp company down at Hunter's Point, which by 1938 all of these camps were removed for safety reasons for the war effort and they removed all businesses off the waterfront, all non white businesses. We also see the restaurant labor. We see the laundry labor. We see the farmer in the Delta in this case. And we see the teacher or scholar. And we have teachers of music. Very common and one of the most practiced and celebrated cat carts photographs that we have the record of our emulations of daily life, and that's really reflected so we have a photograph which shows then what is drawn as an illustration, and then what is presented on the map. And so we have a direct correlation from real life to historic reference in the creation and that's represented well in the book with the PDFs. Other examples of course would be his illustration of a telephone exchange, but he would also have a reference like a 1906 postcard of telephone exchange and want to go with certain traditions to promote that which was already vetted by the Chinese American community to promote Chinatown. An interesting side point. The Chinese telephone building is a phenomenal building which the original structure was hand hewn and Canton and brought over by a vessel and reconstructed. And the reason is that the telephone was not entirely excluded from the Chinese but use and the technologies had to be done by peace people of Chinese descent. And so all phone calls for Chinatown went to this exchange and there would be men prior to the earthquake and women after the earthquake who knew the spatial knowledge they knew every family. They knew everybody's name their relationship to other families they knew where they live they knew where the family building was they knew where their cousins live, and they knew the capacity well enough to pull it up in 10 seconds or less to be able to patch you through to that number and that home. An incredible knowledge of community and an incredible knowledge of spatial memory and as a map person just phenomenal job skill. So something that I think about frequently because it was a result of exclusion that this was created, but what it created was an incredible contained knowledge of one's community, and it wasn't exclusive to the women and men working at the telephone directory it was a privileged knowledge of the resident of Chinatown to be so and is to some degree today still so one to be respected in that regard. We also have a calf cart representing the children of Chinatown. In many cases, these are the children of merchants and he's emulating Arnold Gentis photographs. Arnold Gentis is a phenomenal turn of the century photographer. He worked in North Beach in Chinatown his office and location was above Mr. Bings at the corner Pacific and Columbus approximately. And he was the first person to take the Chinese American community and represented to the Western American community European American community in a favorable light. We did so with photographs of children and the costumes and the celebration of youth and in doing so after a generation to a villainizing Chinese in the press and culture. We started to see a softer presentation calf cart is picking up on this and ultimately taking that into account in his documentation of the community. The kids, of course, built these shoe kits themselves and would work good hours and make decent money shining shoes. Also an interesting point that laundry, despite its Chinatown despite its segregated despite exclusion, laundry is an important business in the Chinese community and unions are important in San Francisco. So here we see the Chinese garment workers union local, the International Labor Union, unionizing people who in fact legally may not have full legal representation. So this is an important step and an important aspect to Chinatown in the reality of 1937. And now when the majority of this is happening, calf cart is aware of where he is and the documentation of what he's doing. He's got life on the street. And life on the street here at the corner of commercial and grants Avenue right across from hang far low as an intersection that's been documented before. This is a couple of years before in a book called Chinatown done by Saitam and Dobie Saitam the illustrator and Charles Dobie the author man who's raised within the Chinese community. One of the first really flattering books about Chinatown is written and in it is the documentation of this wall and we see Saitam's drawing of this same intersection. And we see the integrity of the photograph and Saitam's integrity and what he's presenting of Chinatown. And this is the wares and the name of the business and what they sell. And calf cart simplifies it takes some liberties, but does include him and in doing so is acknowledging that he is following in the footsteps of others. And in fact, he's presenting a Chinatown that is again partly vetted by the community to most Chinatown to those who don't live then established protocols, if you will. That gets into chapter three. Moving along pretty good. I declare my throat. Apple cider. And we look at the Chinatown and Barbara coast stories. We have about 156 icons left. And with that, we have an incredible array of history and geographically the majority of it is Chinatown. What we find is that calf cart is living in the Montgomery block. That's right here with the Montgomery block being central to both Chinatown over here. It's also part of the Barbary coast. The Barbary coast is an area that's notorious San Francisco history coming from about 1850 well up to about 1917, when prohibition pretty well shut it down. calf cart in 1937 is living there and has the privilege of documenting the success of Chinatown and the rebirth of the Barbary coast. And with that, we have a title, which again, the scrapbook mapping calf cart left us. And thanks to Laura Lorenzo, all of his process all of his little scrapbook drawings, all of the original, the cable car and the donkey up in the upper left corner is about a foot long and I still have it. And it was, you know, hand colored and all of these things were laid on top and photographed and super labor intensive. Made a very nice linear map and in the corners, we see the gaming of Chinatown, where we celebrate the lottery, Phantan chess and Mahjong chess, being a game of skill, I believe to have originated in early China. Phantan and Mahjong more regional games, Mahjong in particular, a game where the names of pieces are so regional that people from specific communities play together, because the names of the pieces vary so greatly between each town and have different functions. But the game is celebrated and played today and we hear it every day and the Chinese lottery would have been posted and was a genuine lottery that paid off. And what a time when gambling was illegal. This is the time where the Chinese community had his own source of gaming. And it's very important and something that was beyond the hand for the most part of the graft of white established government. With it, we see a lot of very graphic icons on the map, and one that grabbed my eye first was this moth, and with a little bit of time and putting my glasses on. I discovered that the moth is in fact a kite that is being held up by a person down in Portsmouth Square. And the kite is in fact, taken from an example of a tight kite that we have from Cathcart's photographic library, showing a young man down at the Marina Green, behind Marina Middle School at a competition, showing his kite off. And Cathcart using that as his model. Kites store on Grant Avenue was there until the mid 80s and when they moved to the wharf. And I'm sure they were probably there until the beginning of the 21st century. A very big part of the community and something that we remember, but a big part of his map as a central icon to bring your eye down to the cartouche. Cathcart is documenting the community and with it come his artist friends, and the proximity, the statue of Dr. Sun Yat Sen in St. Mary's Park, done by Benjamin Bifano. Bifano befriended Sen when Sen was living in the United States. Bifano had a great love of large public art, and others were in this community as well. We have Don Kingman, who lived in the Montgomery Block, a famed Hong Kong based New York and San Francisco artist, well known and celebrated in the 50s. But we also have historical references to previous characters of the last century and last generation. We have Feng Chong or Little Pea, who is the Duke of Vice. San Francisco in her peninsula born, he was started as a houseboy and working for the six companies and over time got into other work outside of the six companies and became the Duke of criminal activity. He hired a white bodyguard when a bounty was placed on his head, a man who was called Lofan, a foreign devil. Or white devil is how we now say it, but in fact I'm a foreign devil and Lofan was hired because of the legislation and laws that felt that nobody would dare try to kill a white man who was defending the Duke of Vice. He did actually die in the barbershop below where he lived in 1892 or so. But he also references people like Joshua Norton, a commodities rice broker who lost his mind and became the emperor of the United States and protectorate of Mexico, self declared of course. But Cathcart does some very creative stuff where we see the emperor Norton and he's got kind of a house in his arms, and what he realizes that's the house that's physically located at 624 Commercial Street, which is where he lived. And so we have some very ingenious little devices to impart some history to us in a very subtle way. We also reference the historic contributors to the Chinese American migration into San Francisco and California with 49ers, slave trades of both the gold towns as well as San Francisco and St. Louis Alley. And also the merchants of the 1850s and the wealth that came in with this community with education and the first community to come in and be able to generate wealth with something more than just their labor with the sale of goods and the contribution and sale and purchase of further goods. With it also comes the celebration of everyday people, the Cathcart scene in his life. And the modern slit skirt is a very good example. Here's a woman on Waverly Place who is walking with a slit skirt and this is a fashion style which is discussed a bit, originating from a very modern movement in the Chinese American community in the mid 1930s pre-war. We also see references to the restaurant trades and the idea of delivery food and Tramann gets a lot of attention. There are a lot of photographs of men delivering food. When I say a lot, out of a thousand photographs of Chinatown, they're probably 40. That seems like a large percentage. But food delivery is novel. Food delivery is unique to Chinatown. Food delivery outside of Chinatown didn't exist until the 1960s in the United States and that came with pizza. Today, when we're at home quite a bit and we're probably getting some food delivery, we might consider that contribution. Ultimately, part of that was that people were working either too hard or had jobs were too vital to leave their station and they worked a full shift. This often exploitation was also the benefit of working long days and short pay. But at the end, this was life in Chinatown and the food and the transience of it being brought to you instead of you going to it was captivating to calf cart at the time. We also have good representation of the families of Chinatown and families of Chinatown have constructed buildings on Waverly Place. And this two block street also known as Pike Place is where all family buildings were and these often included private family temples, businesses owned by the family and banks and all nature of business in Chinatown that could originate and to these buildings along Waverly as well as Grant Avenue. Um, calf cart is aware of this through earlier documentation and earlier photographs. Here's 100 block of Waverly Place looking down at the Chan family building on Washington at the end. And here's a very comparable similar view. Looking at the Chan building at the end of Washington Street. Right here. Um, this by the way is where little Pete was killed. There's the barber pole. This was the barber shop. This is where little Pete lived. So calf carts, really a great documentarian. And he's showing a community community with schools. And here we not only have a photograph of the school, we have from the second story, which required some privilege to get into the second story of somebody's house. We also have Commodore Stockton school and the Chinese hospital. Uh, now newly reconstructed Chinese hospital is a great point of pride and celebration in the Chinatown community at a time of exclusion. If you were Chinese descent, you could not go to a regular hospital. You were not provided welfare and care there. Ultimately, the community of Chinatown very early on pooled their own resources and built a hospital. And this hospital built in the 1920s was a structure that just recently was removed for a building much larger in the growth of the community also is the growth of that hospital. And it's a great success story and a marvelous facility and many people and some who are watching me today were born there. We also have representation of the Catholic Church in Chinatown, the crossroads of California and Grant Avenue. Prior to the Second World War, in a lot of regard Chinatown started at this point in the sing fat and sing Chong retail temples at the corner. And heading north where the gates to Chinatown more as the Japanese community occupied the four and 500 blocks of Grant Avenue was being south of California Street until the article 41 removal of Japanese to interming camps during the Second World War. Also prior to that from the 1906 period on Japanese American community moved out both to rural communities as well as out to what we call Japan Town today or Fillmore. So migration as well as enforcement of internment affected the Japanese there. We also have a celebration of theater and the documentation of same the Mandarin Theater on Grant Avenue, my forward gentlemen who wrote forward for the book Gordon chin fact a group and lived above the Mandarin Theater as a child on Grant Avenue. He mentioned to me the other day is kind of interesting to hear. So he would hear these operatic productions at home in the evening. We also have the celebration of restaurants and the community that created them. Cathcart is celebrating and documenting a community that has great depth and breadth and one in which he has been welcomed to take photographs and to celebrate it with them. And it's a rare privilege which when I found the collection, I was concerned about how the majority of them came about. But we find after the creation of this map, Cathcart continued his work in Chinatown, really just documenting the formalities and families and events as a documentary and more as a portraiture photographer. And this is the town and part of town that he chose to work. This part of town had a very important role in freedom of expression and freedom of speech and newspapers like the young China. Newspapers like China Digest. Newspapers. This is China Digest and we also have Dr. Poon Chu. These are the three most important newspapers in Chinatown at the time, promoting a repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, promoting better Sino-American relations, promoting Dr. Sun Yat-sen and his agenda and the Democratic Republic of China. And Dr. Poon Chu, starting in 1909, was relentless in this and ultimately was instrumental. And the celebration of that within the Chinatown community was obviously a very strong undercurrent from his host families and the people which he engaged. We also see some kind of just grabbing snapshot. The old bulletin board on Washington Street, which was where the Tongs would announce if there was a bounty on your head and what the cost was and also the lottery winners would be announced there. We have the site of the first Chinese laundry, 1851, being right next to that bulletin board. And we have the Peace Society mentioned up in the upper left-hand corner. The Peace Society being established around 1913 after a series of Tong wars were so violent that it mandated a group to try to quell things and everybody came to the table. These organizations were strong in the community. Cathcart lived in 37 and just 36 or 34, the most recent of violent occurrences in both New York and San Francisco, had really just quelled. And so it was fairly relevant to the world of the time and world in which he lived. But he's also recognizing the depth and breadth of a culture which he knows very little about and ultimately has a lot to teach him. And so he's made a great effort to try to present symbolism and images like double happiness or images of Jade to symbolize various stories that meant a great deal to the culture at large. He also included things like the Old Podai, which is actually from Sydom's book. And this is the actual Old Podai. And it's a building on the corner of clay and grants in which a transaction between the tenants and the landlord ended in a dispute unresolved and the tenant departed with a loss. And the landlord cannot functionally rent the building. No one will rent the building and the building is presumed cursed, if you will. And until that slight, until that bad business dealing is resolved, no one will rent the building. And it's a charming story and one that ultimately I was a bit dubious of because of its romanticism. But in fact, Cat Card documents the space being empty. It's being documented in Sydom's book in 1935 and it's documented as being empty till the mid 1950s when it is ultimately resolved. So these are things that explain sometimes why our space is empty. But also it explains some of the undercurrent of ethics of the community that is unique to his perspective and would be unique to us. With that comes his representation of the underworld and we have a lot of shadowy figures. And since they are shadowy figures, they're half figures. This is right at the entrance of Waverly Place coming off of Sacramento Street on the map. And it really is a representative representation of the hatchet wars of the 1880s where hired high binders, they were called were hired guns to fight it out on Waverly Place between the families for control of various industries or underworld activities. With it comes prostitution. Commercial Street was the center of not just Chinese but also white prostitution as we saw on the Chinatown map of 1885. I happen to have found a business card for the very famous mansion of Madame Lazarine and Ladies at 730 Commercial Street who operated here with impunity for almost 45 years. So that was kind of a rare find that's included in the book and kind of representative of the documentation that I collected over maybe 13, 15 years based on my interest in Chinatown businesses and San Francisco business. And with it comes a lot of PDFs, a lot of imagery that support our stories. Kathcart's also documenting the underground San Francisco of pre 1906, which were the connected passageways in a community where you don't have representation. Sometimes it's safer to stay underground and just going above ground as a reason to get hassled by the authorities by somebody who wants to take your money by whatever. And so in fact, not just nefarious activities transpire underground, and many of these buildings had sidewalk connections. And as many still do today, just because of the topography as we build into the hillsides often our sidewalks are hollow, as is the case with shine and shine on Grant Avenue on the 1500 block our basement used to connect to our neighbors basement with with the passageway until we bought it 20 years ago. So that's not that uncommon but its usage prior to 1906 was a pathway to gambling and prostitution enslavement. It was often really pretty nefarious and the stories that go with it are pretty horrific. Opium is a big business. It's not the Chinese who are necessarily smoking opium. It is the tourists who is making use of that 1885 exclusion map to see where the opium resorts are and go down and partake or watch. They're literally our tourist events of people taking tours of Chinatown to go and visit these opium dens. Kathcart had a good time making this map and with it he really almost was maybe making it for himself. And I say that because this icon the GE is something that it's a great reference and it meant something to him. But what would it mean to me was really debatable. So it took us a while and and it was our as Aubrey Mladanovich who was working on something and and realized that Mark Twain and Brett Hart and worked at a newspaper called the Golden Era. And it was located on the 700 block of Montgomery. And this is the building. And so here's his photograph of where the Golden Era was in 1937 38 which is really down in the Barbary Coast in the Washington Broome Company. And it's really kind of interesting because at the time it's Maynard Dixon studio and his wife Dorothea Lang famed American photographer work out of the second floor of this building as one of the most important Western muralists and photographers to come out of San Francisco. And this happens to be their studio but that's not why Kathcart is photographing. He's photographing it is because this is where in fact Brett Hart and Mark Twain great satirists and writers whom he admired. Kathcart his maps came about as a result of being a failed writer and his icons were better than his text. And so ultimately his reference to GE. It was enough that we could figure it out. And so with it we see his homage to some of the influences. Old Chinatown was Arnold Gentes 1903 reprinted in 1908 photographic book softening and humanizing the Chinese community in the United States and in San Francisco Chinatown. We have Dobies and Psydoms Chinatown of 1935 which we see the comparison of imagery shown earlier. And we have other things where Kathcart is placing himself in literary history as a historian and as a researcher. And as researchers we had a great time with this map because you have 177 icons to research. This one was in shorthand first book printed in California 1848 49. And it has an X and that X is on Clay Street approximately and and it says life in California on the book. Which is in fact incorrect so life in California was not published in California it was a 1946 book published in Brooklyn New York. The first book printed in California technically would have been the manifesto done by Juan Figueroa the Franciscan monk who was handing over California to the missionaries in 1835 and would have been in Spanish. So the first book printed in California in English turns out to be a book called life as it is and as it will be. It's done by a guy who wound up going down in history and as being almost forgotten. And the grab horn press did a reprint of the book in 1935 and I actually had that in my library. So I grabbed it and looked at it and it turns out that Kathcart was kind of right. The first book printed in California was printed at a play street where he has the X and in fact was California as it is and as it would would be. It is not this book but it was done there was published by Washington Bartlett. So my point long story but that kind of research was a ton of fun. But it also shows that despite being a very articulate and capable researcher. He got some things wrong and he also made some generalizations and also some things that on our contemporary vernacular would be oversteps racially either the serpent of culture or just racist. But the intention the vetted intention of the promotion. This is a celebratory map and ultimately he's trying to present a celebratory and presentation. The Barbary Coast was one of his last influences. It's a 1933 book that discusses all of the gangs of both Chinatown but also the Sydney ducks and all of the Barbary Coast history, which of course is his neighborhood. And so the map outside of Chinatown is documenting his daily life in his neighborhood and it's historical importance. And he lists all the great dance halls and all the great prostitution venues and all the great theaters. And he does so in a kind of even handed matter of fact way that is happy and illustrated but also just when we look at Pacific Avenue known as terrific street. We see a half figure clubbing another half figure. It's, you know, not without its honesty in regards to the violence that transpires. It also acknowledges some of the ironies in San Francisco down in the bottom. They said, if, as they say, God spanked the town for being over frisky, why'd he burn the churches down and spare hotlings whiskey. This is a great diddy done by field discussing in the great earthquake and fire of oh six how.