 All right, it is 1202. 202. 202. Why don't we go ahead and get started? All right. So hi, welcome, everyone, to Gold Mountain Big City with Jim Shine, who is a local map expert. This talk is part of San Francisco History Days, which is an annual festival that highlights local history and connects the public with independent historians, local organizations, and the wider historical cultural community. History Days has a fun and informative slate of programs set for the entire weekend. If you go to sfhistorydays.org, you'll get to see the entire calendar. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians here 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. We're also a cultural event center and the oldest chess club in the United States. So we are thrilled to be a part of San Francisco History Days and to host Jim Shine. So Jim is, along with his wife, Marty, owns and operates the Shine and Shine Old Map Store on Grant Street in North Beach, which is in the process of transitioning to an online presence. Jim is a regular speaker at the Institute and a stalwart supporter of it. And if we were hosting this event in person, right now, you'd be enjoying a fabulous reception in his honor. So I hope that we all get through this time safely and in good health so that we can see each other and break bread at the Institute together again. Gold Mountain Big City is Jim's first book and a wonderful examination of Ken Kaffgaard's illustrated map of Chinatown from 1947. It truly is, here it is, one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen. And as a librarian, of course, I see a lot of books. It is for sale at your local bookstore. Mechanics Institute uses Alexander Book Company on Third Street, but it's also at Green Apple and Green Apple. And it's also for you. Yeah, go ahead, Jim. I'm going to say it's also at Shine and Shine. It's also at Shine and Shine. Online, Shine and Shine. What's your website? Oldmaps.org? ShineShine.com. ShineShine.com. I'll put it on at the end. OK, well, I'll put it in the chat. All right, so now let me briefly explain how this is going to work. Jim has a great deal of content to share with you, so we want to get going. We are using the webinar format of Zoom, so it's true. You can't see your faces or the other attendees. All you can see is myself and Jim and his gorgeous illustrations. So questions will be taken at the end of the talk, so please post them in the chat space, and we'll try and answer as many as we can. All right, thanks for coming today, Jim. Why don't we go ahead and get started? Sure, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Tara, and these virtual events have been a mainstay for me this summer, and I enjoy them a lot. I'm actually nervous for this one, because this is San Francisco History Days, and I know we have an incredible participating audience, people who know their stuff. So I got to bring my A game, otherwise I'm going to hear about it, I'm sure. I'm here today to shamelessly promote, indeed, my first book, which was with the great assistance of the Mechanics Institute, and members and participants and previous authors hosted at your events. I managed to get a book published, and this is it, I'll hold it up as well. You see it matches the map behind me, because it, in fact, is a book about San Francisco's Chinatown as seen through the map, created by Kenneth Cavcart. As usual, if you're stuck at home, it's a great time to support non-profits like the Mechanics Institute, your local church, or any food banks, and any other organizations that you see fit, because, ultimately, that's kind of a good place to put your time and money right now. I like doing stuff with EMI because I love their content and have done a great number of things. This book came about as a result of all kinds of, what's the word, serendipity. And with that serendipity came 10 years of labor, brought this book to fruition. So I'm gonna try to tell that story a little bit for those who have the book so that they can come along and for those who have not thought to buy it yet, to understand what the book might be about, and that it is about a greater broader picture with the emphasis and focus on the Chinese American community in Chinatown that also represents San Francisco at large. So I'm gonna do a screen share and get us into a PowerPoint, and we're going to see the title of the book done in Cantonese characters with a little bit of artistic license, we'll call it with little ears on Gold Mountain, Big City, the title of the book. So the book itself has a little bit of an introduction, and I'm gonna cover that a little bit just verbally with some reminder notes here because it was 10 years. Essentially the collection came to us as a result of a neighbor who when we opened the store came to us and said, I have a great collection of maps in my basement and you should buy them. And Lord Lorenzo was a marvelous neighbor and we did indeed buy them. And the original manuscript in the book contained it in a chapter just entirely about her, such an interesting North Beecher and Telegraph Hill resident. But Laura had saved a collection and her landlord had said, this man has passed away, we're taking all the stuff to the dump, and if you want, you should come take it. You guys were friends. And she saw fit to take the entire collection and put it in her basement for 20 years. And with that, she came to us in 2003 and said, we should buy it. And with it came a collection of photos which took me a couple of years to look through to figure out what they were and a collection of maps. There ultimately was two piles. One pile was animated maps. And the other pile, excuse me, animated maps I should define. There were both piles of illustrated maps. One was reference material of good-natured cartoon and animated maps of the 20th century as reference material done by others. And the other pile was stuff done by one man, a man by the name of Kenneth Cathcart. And Ken Cathcart apparently was who this gentleman was. And he wound up ending his years on Lower Alta Street on Telegraph Hill. So proximity brought him to us. With this came the color lithographic plates for photolithographically producing his maps, as well as the construct and materials that showed how it was made. These maps were unique and that they were also animated illustrated maps, but not anything we'd really seen before. We had some examples. And in fact, I had examples of each one in an artist's proof. And I had several of those hand-colored. In order to bring them to life, thinking that I would simply divest of these and that would be inventory for the store. But as time developed, developing is the prime word because what we did is we looked at photos and I started looking at these photos on a light box and realized that all the photos that had been handed to me almost as an afterthought by Laura DiRenzo were in fact the life work of Kenneth Cathcart. And they were his entire photographic record placed in a single box. So I started looking at them and seeing what they were. At the same time, I started collecting imagery and PDFs of old business history and local history and Chinatown history and North Beach history. And this kind of was just fun going along while researching and figuring it out. And one day led to another. There were no greater goals than to perhaps, as I did with Marty's support in 2016, produced a map printed from a sepia tone artist proof. We had it hand water colored and then we photoshopped it and we produced in fact this map. And this map wound up being the real eye opener to how little we knew about what was actually on it. As with many of Cathcart's maps, they were iconographic. They had imagery that were basically shorthand for stories. So this one had imagery that was most unfamiliar and stories I didn't know well. And so I thought it would be fun to do. And that really precipitated that motivation. We researched it and I say we as a staff at the store and my wife, myself for a year and wrote a manuscript about what our research found about each of these icons, 177 icons within 89 spaces in the map that's talking about proximity as well as culture. So that research went on in 2016, 2017 and 2018. I spent the year shopping for a publisher in 2019. Cameron Press, Cameron Books out of Petaluma, opted to do the book with the underwriting of David Plant from Plant Construction. And they funded this book to be a legacy book as part of David Plant's library of historically relevant San Francisco books that he had produced over the last 20 years. It was a great honor and possibly the last book that he produced in that capacity as he's retiring although the company continues on, we'll see. Anyway, it was a great opportunity and we grasped it and spent 2019 editing and compiling the book with the help of Jan Hughes and Ian Morris. Jan is an editor and Ian is a layout and giving Jan a 450 page manuscript and Ian a hundreds of PDFs associated with commentary and imagery that ultimately we constructed into what you get today. So that's the backstory and I tell it because as I meet the author thing, I've been told that that's an interesting part of the story that people should know. And for me, it was a 10 year period of a love affair with just kind of familiarizing myself with the collection that came to us as a matter of serendipity and proximity. And so here we are to articulate it. Initially with chapter one, we see the map maker. This is a selfie. Selfie is a self portrait of something an artist might take three times in a life, not three times in a day. So it was nice that we had any self images of Cathcart in the photographic collection. There's a little later than the majority of his collection and a little earlier than the maps about 1942 in Sacramento. Indeed, in 1937, Kenneth Cathcart changed, moved to San Francisco, changing his name and set up residency at the 1200 block of Pine Street. His first Christmas was spent with his father visiting and his first Christmas gift that year was like a camera capable of accommodating either 40 millimeter commercial negatives or 35 millimeter self world role negatives. And this film, in fact, we see a film vial right here. These film vials as we see them are exactly what was handed to me by Lord Lorenzo 75 years after the taking of this photograph as part of the estate of some 3,500 photos in total, all still in their original vial. This image is telling in that it's a classic artist composition, the first day at art school with his new camera, with the accoutrements and accessories that ultimately take priority for manufacturing photographs. And he's done so on top of a newspaper which in fact is dated. And with that date lets us know that it's the second day after Christmas, 1937. And we have a name and a place and a time associated with this imagery. And so his first roll of film, shooting down California Street looking to the west with a cable car turning up Hyde Street is something familial. It was not soon here after that Cathcart and we do not know how attained an introduction to and relationship with BS Fong. And in doing so was asked to perform not only the intimate family portraiture of families but also to support the business of BS Fong in his relationship to Chinatown. BS Fong was in fact the director of the Louis Fong Kuang, the LFK Family Association 10 year point. He also was the head of the six companies at this time. And in that capacity had hired Cathcart to help promote war relief. And so during the second Sino-Japanese war in Manchuria Chinatown is promoting war relief and the War Relief Association of America through the six companies also known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolence Association. There's quite a bit of mouthful, but they were serious. And from 1938 to 1950 at a good 20 year period this organization worked endlessly and tirelessly to raise funds to remove displaced refugees of the invasion of Manchuria prior to the Second World War. At this time America's in a pacifist movement. And so ultimately there is not a great support and then of course anti-Chinese sentiments has been bred. This is a time of segregation and a time when we are living under a specific legislation excluding the Chinese from a great number, Chinese immigrants as well as Chinese American born from a great number of civil rights in act if not indeed. The process of war relief included a lot of meetings and a lot of events. And Cathcart through this association was able to identify and work with the community with which he was hired to promote. In this 1938 photo, we see B.S. Fong his host in the back and we see senior members in the family in the front. Well, we also see Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Shanghai Shek in the back as the members of the independent and democratically elected Republic of China. This is pre-communist China post-Chin dynasty, a very special little time and a time in which the relationship between the small town of Chinatown within San Francisco has a great dialogue with. We have the collecting of donations and the events such as the YMCA Harmonica Band playing to raise money for war relief. Again, an image of Dr. Shanghai Shek and a flag we recognize today as the flag of Taiwan but at this time would have in fact represented the entire democratically elected Republic of China which would have been mainly China. This event is one of many that Cathcart documented and one that provided his introduction to a community that then facilitated really his access to life on the streets. Having just moved here, he knew fairly few people and was probably fairly focused on his documentation. Here we have a commercial at Grant Ave. His inclusion and relationship with local merchants and their children is quite evident and well documented as well as the types of goods for sale, the people doing business perhaps on Grant Avenue and most importantly, people of merit to the community. In this case, we see a photograph of Chin Wali who's the director and owner of the Chinese Daily Digest, excuse me, Chinese Daily Digest on Cameron Place and shows the importance of freedom of speech and the importance of access to information in the 1930s to the Chinese American community in Chinatown. Also represented in his photographic imagery. If I've not mentioned it already, all the images I'm showing you, all the photos I'm showing you are his photos that I had digitized, all of the images in the book used to support and define the icons which we are articulating also are his images from either his direct creation or from his personal archive. And in this case, his personal archive documents the law offices of Steger and Steger which is significant in that who they are and what they represent and who they represented as a matter of history and an important part of it. They were the primary representation for Chinese immigration law. They were the great assistance in the writing of the Chinese Constitution for the Democratic Republic of China by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, their assistance to Dr. Sun when he lived here in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. And these inside shots are really rather intimate showing some relationship with them. In fact, enough that it precipitated his attaining a space in the same building they were in suite 204. He moves into suite 428 of 628 Montgomery Avenue known as the Montgomery Block. It's the first fireproof built building in San Francisco. It was actually completed in 1853. It's incorrect on the header here open for business in 54, originally known as the Washington Block. This at the time of its construction would have been singularly the most expensive piece of office real estate for rent in the country and close to the world. By the 1930s, it has become greatly competed against and ultimately the rate for offices is much, much less. These have become live work spaces, excuse me. And essentially, according to documentation including articles within the book, some 75 work progress administration as the federal works progress, artists, authors, poets, manufacturers and painters are all residing and working within this building from 1937 on with a subsidy from the federal government to pay their rent. So Cathcart has gotten a space here in this building among his peers. His subsidy is not federal. His family, his mother was an academic. His father was a songwriter. They did in fact have some means and he did pay the $14 a month rent on his live work studio from 1938 till 1958. And his subsidy of course was in this cost of living as well as where his income came from. But Cathcart was aware of where he moved and this building put him right next to Chinatown where he was working. But it also put him in an area that had a preexisting history. The Montgomery block is the site of the bank exchange, creation of Pisco punches, San Francisco favorite. Something we don't see as frequently now, but in fact, a Pisco rum, a Peruvian rum cocktail that was invented here by Duncan McNichol and remained here until prohibition closed it down 1919. In fact, we have a photo here of closing night at the bank exchange with some very sad train operators and some cops. And there's only one guy smiling, but this really is a great photo and shows the demise. And ultimately it would be the international settlements in the Barbary Coast in the 30s that would revive Pisco punch. But Cathcart was aware of this history as well as proximity to other locations such as Telegraph Hill. And in his early photographs within the first year of living within this neighborhood, he documented a part of town that has changed both greatly and not at all. Here we see Montgomery street on the 1300 block and we see a sidewalk made of wood, sand and seagrasses. And in the background, we see a building which we work as a reference in order to create continuity and understand this group of photos when they came to us. Of course, because they came unexplained and the images of these two buildings we see that don't exist anymore made it a little difficult to perhaps figure out where it was. We did in fact find that this is 1350 Montgomery, the site of the current deco building on the corner of Philbert and Montgomery. The background, this house, puts us onto Lower Alta Street, a street which by coincidence would be the residence of the photographer some 30 years after the taking of this photograph. So in 1959, Cathcart moved into number 27, Alta Street and remained here for the rest of his life until 1985. But we'd also document Lower Alta Street with no houses on the north side of the street with a sandy, archaic environment with sand coming down the wood covered steps and boardwalks. Something to remember that the east side of town, you couldn't get further east was pretty sandy all the way into the 20th century. But Cathcart was also aware that he was in places where people had been before. This photograph from his archive done by Carlton Watkins in 1870 shows, again, the same building a point of continuity going down Lower Alta and this being Montgomery Street going to upper to Union Street at the top. All of these houses have been modified but two of the four here still exist. And Cathcart was not lost on this and shared his exploration to find that which was pre-existing. And in the case of Chinatown, Cathcart as a writer used maps to make notations and shorthand of stories that he felt were relevant. In the case of Chinatown, there was in fact an infamous map, a map that was well documented and once you asked around it was known about. It's also rare and uncommon today and probably would have been rare in his time, although perhaps more common. The map is the 1885 Chinatown map. It's the official map of Chinatown and San Francisco as prepared by the special committee of the Board of Supervisors in July of 1885. The script on the head is a bit hard to read so I thought I'd mention it. With it comes a color code. In fact, this is the first color coded map to be color coded to document the inhabitants of a ghetto an inhabitants area that is limited to one race or ethnicity. Chinatown inferred that if you were Asian-American sent in not just Chinese-American, but specifically so, you were limited to live within the boundaries of this map. That meant that this was an incredibly dense neighborhood. It also meant that outside of that you may not have representation. This map is in two year after the fact follow up to the 1883 Chinese Exclusion Act created in both state and federal law, which limited both the available employment as well as land ownership, immigration, the basic civil rights that we would take for granted and fight for today. In fact, we're denied to those of Chinese descendency and ancestry, whether American born or first generation immigrant. This map is a moral map used as a follow up to these legislations. In fact, the color code is defined as general Chinese occupancy in tan. Chinese gambling houses in pink. Chinese prostitution in green. Chinese opium resorts in yellow. Chinese joss houses in red and white prostitution in blue. Again, I point out none of these activities that I just mentioned are illegal, but all of them are immoral. And this is a moral map to justify an exclusion of an ethnicity to basic law and basic rights and coverage under the law, exclusion therefrom. An infamous map, one that will take 70 years to begin its initial deconstruction and will not be fully repealed until the 1960s. 65 to 68, really. But in 1943, a significant chunk was taken out and we see this has great impact on the community at that time. Prior to that though, we see other maps in an effort to offset this notorious and infamous map. We see an 1892 map also showing land use and addresses, showing the business name and the function of the business in association with the calendar and essentially printed locally in Chinatown. It's a rare piece and it's a promotional piece to celebrate Chinatown. The same is to be said from J.P. Wong's 1929 map of Chinatown where it shows land use, but it also shows the expansion of Chinatown to beyond the boundaries of the previous map and in fact to include communities in both Oakland and the East Bay as well as Marin and Marin County as well as an immigration station at Angel Island. The immigration station at Angel Island merits mention because it's a horrific experience to have actually have to go there. There was no information provided and you could be interned there for months and months and months, up to years perhaps. The poetry and the graffiti in the encampment on Angel Island is well documented and an interesting story, but as sad and horrific as it was, it is in fact celebrated in the time because in the act of exclusion, the exclusion of representation was the first and most defiant act which meant that once a fewer of Chinese ancestry one's opinion had no value and no merit could not testify in a court of law, could not own land and could not have an opinion in regards to anything at all. To have representation as horrific as it was on Angel Island meant that for the first time people were being counted and once you were counted, this is the beginning of representation and merited inclusion and celebration at the time. I pointed out because I think it's rather special and rather unusual in a snapshot in time prior to the repeal of the Exclusion Act. And this map is great for its content in regards to Chinatown information of a very transient community, but this is a small town at this time, limited and often known within itself with great numbers, but outside of these boundaries not very well. So it's fairly proprietary information. It's also written in Chinese so that the information is not really open to the general public, it is used to promote to the Chinese community and an interesting map in that regard as our previous one was. This map is more broad based and I think this one is of greater influence to Calfcart. It's a 1939 map of Chinatown done by Ethel Chung and as a Chinatown community member, she was hired to promote Chinatown for the Golden Gate International Exposition, a fair taking place in the middle of the bay on Treasure Island, an island that had just been built a year before as landfill. This fair went on for two years and it brought tons of people to the bay area and everybody came and it was important. So getting people to come into the city off of that island and come to Chinatown was important. Chung's map is both celebratory and good-natured and happy and cartoony and whimsical as well as simple. It has a three color palette without much infill ornamentation beyond its bright icons. It is an enticement but it is also in line with the School of Illustrated Maps at the time in the 20th century and that animated and illustrated maps are the rage and remain quite popular but this was the means for promotion. In fact, so much so that the map for the PPIE or excuse me for the GGIE, the Golden Gate International Exposition in the middle of the bay, its official map was a very similar illustrated map with animated whimsy like a sea monster over here and a whale over here and China clipper landing in clipper Cove or sitting there at the dock. These are the style of the day to entice one to come in a great school of promotion. And I think both these maps as well as Cathcart's experience in Chinatown and his support within the community promoted him to start creating illustrated and animated maps sometime around 1946 just after the war. And this would be his first downtown old San Francisco and this is a marvelous map. I won't dwell on it too much because it's a distraction, another great map. And we see a similarity. This actually would be his first attempt at creating a map and using icons to do a little storytelling about the history. The next year or later in the year he did a Bay Area map going a little broader and in fact he went all the way to do a California gold region with notes and memorabilia chiefly of the golden era. This map was much more in depth than its content and its research and its history was very broad based. And in fact, I'm working on this map now for my second book with Cameron Press which would be about this map to celebrate both the early 1770s to 1840s history as well as gold rush history into the 1900s. But his research in this cost would become a much more earnest researcher and a much more entailed illustrator and tactician. So by 1947 it only made sense that he created this map. This map is very similar but we see quite rigid graphically with a very strong pronounced border surrounding an internal map of proximity. And essentially this map provoked enough curiosity for me that I wrote a dang book about it. And it is a marvelous book and a marvelous map that essentially is Chinatown 101 with additions to proximity on the Barbary Coast and everyday life of the author and map maker himself living in the center of this map in the Montgomery block, also known as the Monkey block. So we start chapter two with a typo. Literally the first sentence of chapter two says the 177 spaces define the stories that in fact is the 177 icons within 89 spaces of the map define the stories articulated in this story of Kenneth Kathcart's map of Chinatown. We broke the map down into a grid one through nine and A through G and an outer boundary of A through Z to be able to identify and articulate each of the stories along the way. 177 icons is a 177 stories. I had as a ton of stuff. And I was frankly daunted by the sheer amount of things and one of the ways of approaching and really just taking it on in small bites and a little bit at a time and by doing the grid, literally we'd say, oh, I'm gonna do this B1 grid and research that today. And if that's all I do today, then I've gotten something done and that's enough. And that allowed us to get through the definition of all of this and the definition is not complete. My hope is that people reading the book, people using the map and enjoying it. By the way, there's a folding edition of the map in the back of the book available with every purchase. And that map will take one down to roads of familiarity and unfamiliarity and it's still a work in progress. So we would hope that you write out to us and write to us and let us know things you know, things you see, information. We're not shy about admitting what we don't know and there's enough on the map to enjoy still for a while because of what we don't know. The stories that are being told in a simple form as an introduction to a greater conversation without exaggeration, many of the research references and I'm gonna say 30 to 50% of my research references go back to the primary academic works of individuals who made their doctoral thesis or their masters about the subject matter represented in the specific icon. And I found that fantastic and amazing that there since the making of this map would be so much interest in research in specific subject and that such specific research would be so available and that the accessibility and accuracy of said researchers was enough to really feel confident about putting together the information represented in chapter two. So with that, we continue on the outer border which is really the story of Chinese American life in California, 1847 to 1947. It is the Chinese American diaspora which is represented in generic and generalist terms with some focus on specificity and I'll explain what I mean by that as we go along here. Initially we see in the upper left and upper right-hand corners of the map two flags. One represent the Chinese Republic and the other the Manchu Empire also known as the Qin Dynasty. Each have dates and their dates don't correspond. They seem to be at odds with each other. In fact, they are. The reason being the date of declaration of independence and the creation of the Chinese Republic is October 10th, 1911. But it was not until 1912 that the Qin Dynasty ceded power after evacuating the Imperial city and going to the Northwest. They then ceded power some six or eight months later. And so this is an example of Cathcart and his desire for accuracy that no, when one rose, the other didn't fall. It didn't happen simultaneously. These things take time. And that was actually initially confusing as to why those dates wouldn't be the same, but they make perfect sense. 1010 parades are represented here. They used to happen well into the 80s and may still a celebration of the creation of the Chinese Republic. And this was part of the heart of Chinatown in the mid 1930s. With that, we see flags in use. Here we see an event for the war relief with speakers at a family building on Waverly Place. And the flags we see hanging are that of the United States and that of the Chinese Republic. Although recognized today simply as the flag of Taiwan still in use as Taiwan. Also included within the map and the outer border in B&H we see both the lure of gold and the Chinese in the gold fields as well as the construction of the railway. These are interesting and well-known stories and often documented. And because of maps created by Cathcart the year prior or the years prior is knowledge of this information as well documented and subsequently is kind of blazed over a bit here. But I find it actually more interesting that the Delta is omitted and that it is the California Delta and pump and drain technology and brought by Chinese immigrants moving water from high to low land and low to high land using centrifuge and Archimedes screws on the something that ultimately helped create the Delta and is a fascinating story and one that was not alien to Cathcart because we have photographs of him going out there and doing documentation of farmers and things like that. Anyway, it's interesting what he chose to include and what he didn't. And this is a map that is vetted by the community in fact being produced in 1947 with the support of the six companies his hosts who he had been working for for the previous 10 years in the promotion of the war relief society. We also see from Cathcart's map the documentation of the Chinese experience in the gold fields and that story and that's part of the story that we'll be telling next year in this context in the gold region map and book to come out. Cathcart and C and D, F and G documents the four trades and or employment means by which people of Chinese ancestry may gain employment and they are limited and anything outside of these four are excluded specifically. And so to be a merchant, to be a salesperson for in this case an independent business this woman is on Grant's Avenue. This gentleman is down at Hunter's Point at the California shrimp company and the Chinese fish camps down at the edge of town. Those fish camps and all non-white non-military industries were removed from the port and waterfront in 1938. So it is likely that Cathcart has gotten these photos in the 30s and late 30s prior to their dismantlement. So it's a unique documentation of that time and the photographs specifically show exactly where we are. We also see the use of labor and labor is an allowable trade. And so restaurant work here we see a very well-appointed very fit man with a look at the camera. And we also see people working on the street where he's seen laundry, also the farmer here a Delta farmer or a teacher. These that's it. Here we have a private music school. Here we have a musician. We also have academics and scholars and study. This was of course very important in the Chinese culture and Chinese American culture, the aspirations of education to attain enough to get out of any situation to be able to provide. This is a great Chinese American value. And despite the limitations of these four they also are the backbone of a community that manages to excel in all of the aforementioned. In the case of Cathcart's images and the images for the border, we see that the majority of all of his imagery is the results of his photographs and the map icons are emulations thereof. It's exception in some cases would be something like this where this building has been illustrated enough and in his collection, we in fact find postcards from a previous time showing the building prior to its renovation and repairs. This was a post and beam structure brought from Canton for the use exclusively within Chinatown to facilitate the use of Chinese telephone exchange. With the Exclusion Act, all jobs within the telephone industry were either excluded or required segregation and Chinatown was a town of many families from different regions of China. Although Canton was predominant, there are many, many other dialects spoken within Chinatown. This building was essential for the communication of the outside world to access Chinatown and for Chinatown to access each other as well as the outside world. It's a central point for all telecommunications technology and the freedom of expression and in doing so is a very important part for the Chinese community in Chinatown. We also have the most amazing group of women who work to do this phone exchange. Now, prior to 1906, it was men. After 1906, it was women. A phone call would come in, they would ask for an individual and the exchange would be expected to know who that individual was, where they lived, what the relationship was to others, what the relationship was to the community they were from and emigrated from, what that town was, what their dialect was and how to reach them in a matter of moments. This was the recall of the individuals working here and it's really quite special. That type of spatial memory is not wasted on a map guy like me and the ability then to know your community and have a small community, a small town within a town that had its own communication system that in fact worked and worked due to the challenges and talents of the women doing so is really a testament worthy of its 1909 postcard to say the least. Cathcart is also following suits with historical reference. Prior to the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1943, the majority of all press regarding Chinese immigration and people of Chinese ancestry is derogatory. From 1878 on, we see predominantly derogatory statements and stereotypes proliferated both in written and in artistic form. The exception to this in the creation of the first humanization of Chinatown to the European American and to those outside of Chinatown, a community of judgment and moral code based on their mapping. We find Arnold Gente documented the children of Chinatown in their traditional costumes and their grandparents and parents at the turn of the 20th century and published two very important books, 1908 and 1910, which celebrated the community and humanized an otherwise previously villainized community. This is paramount and monumental in Sino-American relations and in the identity of Chinatown outside of San Francisco. Many of San Francisco's representatives or residents never fell for all of this. And so the rules of the Exclusion Act were often bypassed locally in many, many cases. But that's not the story we're telling here, staying on point. The story in general was one of dehumanization and Cathcart was endeavoring to in fact humanize the people for whom he was working. These would be the merchant children and there were images that initially concerned me that Cathcart was a usurper and interloper, somebody who in fact had come without permission. The documentation and the photographic record as well as the research prove otherwise. And so with that we're more comfortable. In the case of these three young women who would be in their mid 90s today, he documented their growth well through high school and we have photographs of them in the collection that go along for about 15 years. Also the young men on Grant Avenue, this is a marvelous image and one that just recently, the great niece or niece of the gentleman on the right looking at the camera told us who he is and what his name is. And these are the hopes for us is that it's not too late for us to see who we have here and identify who isn't identified and celebrate this history because it's an awful lot of fun. Shine Kids on Grant Avenue were very common and many kids made their own shoe shine boxes and in many cases these were the children of merchants who were set out to make their own spending money. We also see in Cathcart's outer border the icon for M for laundry. And it's interesting to point out because of the value and importance of Chinese laundry both in Chinatown to its wealth and support as an allowable job as well as family business. But also in his own time is 1938, 39 photograph we see the Chinese ladies garment workers union. This is prior to a repeal of the Exclusion Act. Technically, as a Chinese American you have no legal representation, but you do have a union. And it's the ILGW workers union local 341 in Chinatown. And this again also is a point of pride as it is representation. And it's the beginning of being counted in an otherwise uncounted status. With it, the summary of the outer border is life on the streets within this diaspora. And in the case of V, we found it interesting, his inclusion. Here we have his photograph of this same corner which I had earlier. And it's the corner of Commercial Street at Brantav where commercial dead ends into the hang far low. And he included it and he included it in a bunch of photos. And I wondered why, but eventually I figured out in fact, two years earlier in a book called Chinatown done by Doby and illustrated by Arthur Seidem. This book was another celebratory book with Chinese American community and Chinatown within San Francisco. And it tells a great story and great flattery and in great solicitous fanfare. And it's a pretty good book and it's very well illustrated and it greatly influenced Cathcart. And we see in Seidem's etching a great similarity to the fact photograph Cathcart has taken in 38 to the degree of integrity and honesty and homage to, and I wanna make a statement to Seidem's accuracy. Cathcart indeed wanted to be accurate but we found that he had certain liberties because when we look at his piece for that space the language has been simplified and the iconography is more phonetic than accurate and there's a lot less letters there. So if they're characters at the end of the day he's been giving liberties. And this is one of the first signs that the map is a promotional map directed at European Americans and European San Franciscans to promote Chinatown. And some of the nuance of such language is not really the point. The point is to create an environment and invite an invitation to come and explore. We've also have some predicated and privileged ideas. Things that are preexisting. And so here we see from 20, 25 years earlier the Pam Pacific exposition down in the marina is promoting Chinatown and the businesses and the restaurants and the grocery stores as Cathcart is and celebrating within this map. So there are established protocols which he is following and historical reference and his research in 1938 through 1946 would have ultimately reinforced this and been vetted by the Chinese American community at the time. So it's a good introduction and it essentially sums up chapter two and what it means. In chapter three, we still have a lot of stories and I've hardly gotten through this. I'm gonna take a drink of water here. This book has been so much fun to create, to read, the aesthetics, all of the material that I've been able to collect. Cathcart was very difficult. He did not see great success in his own life and we only find the academic institutions like the Mechanics Institute or the California Historical Society had actual maps of his. In fact, in Mechanics Institute on the second floor, I think on the South wall is one of Cathcart's maps which he gave to them probably as a result of researching this said map. The map itself we see, I've broken down into grid one through nine and the book goes through it fairly linearly. It was the way that I approached it and it was the way that I felt it could be laid out best and be deciphered. One should jump around if there's an image that interests you, locate where it is in the grid and go and look at that story. It's a book that references so many individual stories in shorthand that to read it through cover to cover is fine but to jump around as point of reference to the context of another story might be more frequent use of the book. Remembering that all of these images were hand drawn by Cathcart about 12 inches tall and then reduced photo lithographically and then scrapbook cut out and lay it out on top of the map and then photo and then lithographically reproduced until a final plate is made. Incredibly archaic, incredibly labor intensive and unreplicatable today. This map was of course digitized to create the map that we have and all subsequent reproductions thereafter but in his time it was a very, very archaic process. So with that, we see our header and with the header we see a little horse drawn card in the upper left and some men walking in the lower right. The horse drawn card is the first track-based cable car in San Francisco running down Montgomery Avenue in the 1850s and a nice little reference. There's some historic reference and he had a good photographic record of these types of cars. In the corners of the inner map we see a gaming in Chinatown and this would have been things that he would have recognized in everyday life and seen transpiring. The billboard on Washington Street is a bulletin board for posting news by the tongs as well as a place to post the lottery winners. A lottery was not run by government prior to the 1970s lotteries. Most lotteries were illegal but the Chinese lottery and some churches managed to get a bypass on that. If you don't have representation it's very difficult to enforce the law and ultimately grafting of the lottery was fairly common. So there were payoffs going off in order to allow it to transpire but it did often have winners and always paid off, it had credibility. The other games represented are chess and Phantan, two games that have a long-term association anciently with China going back a couple of thousand years. And then Majang, which we still hear today in the streets and the alleys of Chinatown when we walk around, it's a regional game where the game pieces and their definition and names are very characteristic of the town from which you've come. And so we find that Majang is a game that sub separates out Chinese and Chinese-Americans within Chinatown to the specific town from which their parents are they emigrated from because of the dialectic use of these game pieces. And that's an interesting little story that really is subtle and is just the backstory to gaming in Chinatown and you still hear it in the sound of a chess game and the sound of Majang being played in the neighborhood is a sound that if you grew up in Chinatown or close by, you're still here today and did quite a bit at these times. Also, the strong iconographs or icons were really evident and Kafka left us a record. I should say Laura Lorenzo through her stewardship and handing everything off left us a record of Kafka's process by which he made such things. And with it came the graphics and the sketches and the big cutouts and using white paint as white out prior to the invention of such a thing, things like that. But we also see his photographic record where the exact image for which that icon came from and its reference of a kite competition down at the Marina Middle School in about 1939. And it's pretty fun little piece with it and reinforces the importance of kites in Chinatown and well into the 80s, there was always at least one kite store, if not more, this family, the 700 block of Grant operated here until the mid-1980s and kites were incredibly popular. Kites were so popular that during the Second World War and when the Marina Green was an airfield, kites were banned from the Marina Green because of a security risk because there were so many kites in general. So kites were a big part, it's a windy city and a big part of the culture and a big part of the town that he lived in. We also see his use and acknowledgments of the community and who is important. And in the case of Benjamin Bofano and Dr. Sanyat Sen, Bofano created this statue in St. Mary's Park dedicated to the public. Bofano apparently and Sanyat Sen were friends or were befriended each other and their visits in the early 20th century and Cathcart knew Bofano. And so Cathcart included Don Kingman, not just because he was an important Hong Kong-born Chinese-American artist who would have in fact lived with him in the Montgomery block somewhere but also because of proximity and the reality of him seeing him every day and the influence these individuals had on his daily life. But the true testament to his interest of history was the inclusion of characters like Little Pete and historic both good and bad figures in Chinese-American history and the emigration through San Francisco. Here in the case of Little Pete, he documents Fong Tong who came up through the ranks and it's a marvelous story of becoming at the age of 30 something in control of all the prostitution and all the gaming and gambling coming very wealthy but also having a price on his head and hiring a white man who they called Lofan, a foreign devil and he was hired because it was felt that nobody would dare kill Lofan, a white man for risk of retribution and so he would be indemnified. Little Pete was killed in 1892 in the barbershop below where he lived on the corner of Waverly and Washington some four or five years into his reign. There's some good excerpts on it and a lot of has been studied about him since but there's still a lot of vagary and crypticism about Little Pete and his actual life. The best information we could find was from a pulp magazine from 1947, 48 from around the time of this map that would have perhaps been an influence for Cath Cards. We found that rather ironic. We also see people like Joshua Norton failed race commodities broker and providing information here to for unknown. People thought Norton lived on Sacramento Street at this time and he says no, Norton lived on Commercial Street. In fact, he lived right where he's standing and the building he has in his left arm is planted at its location at 624 Commercial Street. This is his home. That's a couple doors up from the fantastic San Francisco Historical Society location in the old old mint right on Commercial and Kearney. You should check it out as well. He's also paying homage to the 49ers and this is the Chinese immigrant, the first Chinese immigrant, the first to come in 1848. They were novel. They were accepted and received fairly well. The Celestial, the Oriental, this was the language of the time, the exotic and this remains the favor for about two or three years. But the 49ers of Chinese ancestry were summarily thrown off their claims as were most people of color in documentation once the 49ers showed up. People who were lucky enough to be here during the years of Placer Gold had a chance and there were in fact Chinese immigrants at that time. And so he pays homage to that. Yasuo acknowledges a rather glossy and romanticized image of the sex slave industry. St. Louis Alley in Chinatown was a slave pen. It was a place of sale of young women. His is referenced to the image done, I believe by, it looks like Bodhi, but I believe it may be. It may be a reference to the Chinatown in Bodhi, a ghost town that had its own Chinatown and many women going out to there. But in general, when we look at the image, it is in fact almost an exact emulation of that drawn by Psydom for the Chinatown book from a couple years earlier. I look at it and it's interesting, but I don't like the blazing over of it myself. It's one that I really think is interesting, one that's pretty horrific historically, but also not just in Chinatown. This is still a problem in the world. And so ultimately acknowledging the sex slave industry is something that this map is doing in its own way. It's also acknowledging the merchant of the 1850s, an important contributor to the Chinese-American immigrant community, the first generation of Chinese immigrants who come with something other than just a job skill, with some means, the ability to trade, the ability to do business and generate capital, and such become the backbone of Chinatown within San Francisco. And the majority of the 26 to 30 families that occupied and populated Chinatown from 1850 to 1943 show their ancestry, in many cases, to merchant communities and merchants' immigrants. So Cathcart recognizes this while still making some odd generalizations regarding the costuming here, the shoes and the hat and the queue. I think he's trying to be historic and reference a time by gone. It's a little out of skew and it's not quite right, but again, it's vetted by the community and deemed acceptable. And so I accept it for what it is, but the costuming did raise our eyebrows a little bit in the research and people that we referenced had to explain some things to us about why it's not quite right. But the things that he could get right were the things that he would see every day and with solid reinforcement, something like the modern skirt coming out of the fashion industry and such women walked around here's waverly place with the Chan family building in the background in such outfits all the time and were part of his daily vernacular. And so that's an important inclusion and rather fun to the current reference as well as life on the streets, fresh food, Trayman. Trayman is a name I have only heard on the Cathcart map, Trayman. I've never heard anybody else call a delivery guy Trayman. I've never heard it in a book. Maybe I should reread Chinatown by Dobie and see if it's in there somehow because there's so much reference, but the daily life shows us Trayman. Cathcart has 40 or 50 photographs of people walking around Jackson Street and Grant Avenue and it shows that still at this time are a great number of people who are working too hard to take time off to go and eat and food is brought to them so that they may continue to eat or eat in the location of their employment so that they don't go off site. So that they may complete their 12 to 15 hour day without falling down exhausted. It is commonplace and regular and it goes through the work ethic of the community and that we work hard, we study, we eat and if we have to, we do what we have to to make sure those things happen. Cathcart is aware of this and understands this and documents it well but he's also I think probably struck by what is in fact a novelty. Until probably 1960s when a round table or little Caesars decided that they would deliver pizzas food delivery was not an American thing. Only within Chinatown and the Chinese community was food delivered. It was Chinatown in New York that created food delivery in New York. It was Chinatown in San Francisco that brought food to you and this regularity then brought other businesses in the 60s and 70s to do the same thing but we're looking at the 1930s here. So it's culturally a very different time. Cathcart has included all the family associations along Waverly Place known as Pike Street. We call it Waverly Place or Grant Ave an acknowledgement of both his hosts and the people with whom he is seeing daily and the associations that ultimately are doing business and operating Chinatown. With that he's also aware that this has been historically so. Here's an 1892 photo from his archive not taken by him but as a historic reference of the east side of Waverly Place looking at the Chan building in the background looking from Sacto or thereabouts really a great, great photo. And he has many of his own. Again, the Chan building same side of the street looking opposite. Point out the Barber Pole and the apartment where Little Pete lived and where he was assassinated. Barber Pole's still there 40 years later because the business is still there. It's a very stable community with schools like Nam Q. Nam Q is a school that if you're, I heard recently and was told by someone who attended there whose father was from the region which this school comes from within China that if you're from that region then your education here to learn the Chinese ways is free. And if you're from other parts of China then there is a tuition cost. But aside from that, I look at the photo and I see it's from the second story, a position of privilege. Cath Carter's on the second story and somebody's place on Sacramento Street to look at this school. But it shows the importance of schools. He's got Commodore Stockton School, place of many graduates called Gordon Lau School today named after the first Chinese American board of supervisors member. But in fact, for people my age or older, a place where he went to school and Commodore Stockton, of course just down the street or just around the corner, excuse me, from the Chinese hospital. The Chinese hospital is shown on the map with its construction date of 1924 and it is an incredibly important structure and incredibly important history and an important inclusion. Many people, many, many people of Chinese American ancestry are born in this hospital. Many people my age or older, I've had their kids here. If you were of Chinese descent prior to 1943, you could only be treated at this hospital. This was the only facility available to you. Its existence is only because of the independent investments and expenditures of the residents of Chinatown to create their own hospital, fund it and construct it and endow it so that in 1924 it opened and remains so. This interesting structure, which I loved and grew up with myself, has been replaced by a building 10-fold larger that services Chinatown still, still doing the same good work and still highly relevant to the community, but not wasted on Cathcart and that its existence is based on exclusion and that there was no alternative and so it was created by the community to serve those who were otherwise getting no service and a beautiful building was created. With it we also have churches like Old St. Mary's. St. Mary's would be the Catholics, something like Cameron Mission would be the Presbyterians. This also would be the retail gate. Sing Fat and Sing Chong, in fact, were perceived at this time as the gateway to Chinatown and that the majority or many, many of the businesses south of California Street on Grant Avenue were Japanese owned. Also limited to live in Chinatown. Japanese American and the Japanese immigrants were slowly making their way into the Western addition to only eventually be removed in 1941. Another story, but a story that touches on this one because we're looking at the time frames where the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the precipitation of the Second World War is all what is impacting the political dialogue and the moment in Chinatown, which is only available to us visually. And so we see placards in the windows and silk for bombs, no Japanese goods and this type of anti-propaganda, propaganda, evident. When the majority of the culture really wants to focus on that of the retail. And so Sing Fat and Sing Chong will always represent that. Also the theater, a big part, the Mandarin Theater on Grant Avenue among others, of which we have a good number of photos. Gentlemen who wrote my forward for me friend, Gordon Chin. In fact, grew up and lived in the apartments above this theater and was very happy to see its inclusion. Hang Far Low as a restaurant. I think this is how Cathcart in fact facilitated access to his friends and to celebrate the community as well as pump people for information. I think he would meet people here and ask them lots of questions and take lots of notes. We found a lot of documentation that showed him doing a fair number of interviews and keeping those as reference with the photographs. We also have a really good documentation within the map of freedom of the press and freedom of expression. And I think it's highly relevant at the time. This is a time of segregation. If you're African-American, you live in the Barbary Coast. If you're Chinese-American, you live within Chinatown to make a generalization. As San Franciscans, I think it merits pointing out that we all know people whose families lived outside of those boundaries and although they also lived with limitations, they did not live in the prescribed areas assigned to their ethnicity in a segregated San Francisco. And as such, their experiences within the city were very different than those growing up within the proximity of this map. Freedom of expression would be highly celebrated at a time because of the goal to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act and living under segregation and living under civil rights limitations. And that would have been evident to Kathcart not only in the everyday life of being able to see the newspaper and people out front reading it, but also to get to know the people inside and their goals and politics and ultimately who was important. Here's a gentleman, Dr. Poon Chu, who was seniorly the most staunch advocate for the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, for the creation of the Independent Republic of China and his support of Dr. Sun Yat-sen through his paper, The Chung Sai Yat Po, published out of LA, started in 1900, and continuing through to the end of the 1940s, an influential and mentor for the community at large, despite not being a local resident, claiming a large icon in the middle of the map, with it surrounding such great icons and such specificity are thousands of little generalizations. I think I chose a random square inch here to see the old bulletin board I mentioned where the Tongs post their information, if you have a price on your head, how much that price is, how to collect. On the other end of the spectrum would be the peace society. The peace society was created, I think, around 1913 as a result of the Tong Wars of the 1880s and 1890s as a result of trying to resolve the tensions between these family associations delving into vice prostitution, gaming and gambling. We also see the first Chinese laundry listed 1851, 51, a point of pride and a point of reference. This is Washington Street, I believe we're looking, but just as a general point, he's using symbolism to convey bigger pictures, jade, which is infinite in its content and meaning and placement and value and then the symbolisms of things like double happiness or wealth and prosperity and the symbolisms of things like vases and what's an appropriate vase for a birthday or a family wedding and what's not an appropriate vase for a funeral, these types of things. And so that type of nuance is represented in the symbolism applied to the map and that was very fun to research. Actually it was really not only entertaining but enlightening and reinforcing of the value system that says places of importance in understanding and the intellectual values of these symbols. It also touched on ethics and the ethics that he represented that we found within the map was the old podai and it was a word we'd never heard and it hearkens again, once again, to Dobie's book about Chinatown from a couple of years earlier to his arrival. So the book in 1935 is influenced in his map of 1947, pretty substantially, both visually as well as its story content. And the old podai has a story of a rental contract between a landlord and a tenant going bad and in the process a failure being applied to the tenants and a loss and until that loss is rectified, the space will not be rented. And it sounds like a great story but basically this store's front on the corner of Clay, at Grand Ave, shows being empty from 1932 a few years prior to Dobie's book about Chinatown and why it's included all the way through to 1958. Now for me, living in North Beach the last 30 years, I just call that the curse of the corner and we can look at some amazing corner spaces that have sat empty for years and years and you wonder why, but that's I think something else. This was a specific reference and this is the specific property. And then Cathcart form, we have license plates and locations and street names all within the photo to really tell us exactly where we are and what's going on there. And it's really fantastic to have that kind of visual reference support from his own photographic collection to explain the icons on the map. Some things wouldn't have been explained quite as well and they were harder to figure out but what we've realized is anything that was shown on the map with only half of it as is the man in yellow with half of him missing. This was a reference to the underworld and the other half of that person was underground or underworld presumably. And it's an interesting reference. This specific icon is two gentlemen, one with a hatchet following another into Waverly Place is a direct reference to the 1884 or 87, I think it's 87, Tong battle on Waverly Place. It took place in May at midnight and what used to happen at this time true to form was that each family would hire high binders, hire criminals to act on their behalf and fight on their behalf to defend that which was theirs. And these men fought it out on Waverly Place and they did so frequently in the 1880s and 1890s and this event really was violent and shocking and a fascination to European and Western newspapers. So this was one of the ways of the Chinese being vilified when in fact the process was ultimately a way of maintaining some order among the vices within Chinatown. As such other vices within Chinatown as we saw in the 1885 map weren't necessarily those of the Chinese. Here we have the mansion house and the mansion house operated from 1875 to 1913 when legislation eliminated all prostitution within California. But we see again a woman only half the woman and then here from my collection we have the business card for a walk-in from Madam Lazarine and Ladies. It's 730 Commercial Street between Kearney and Dupont. And that's the exact business card for the exact icon that we have on the map. And I've seen other stuff that supports when she worked openly and out in public. But these vices were very much part of Chinatown that Cathcart is documenting historically if not in the time. And with that we have the old underground most of which is gone. This icon is from just below St. Mary's coming off of California Street. We have reference to the opium resorts and opium as an industry remembering that the tourist guides of the 1880s and 1890s solicited and promoted people going in and looking at these venues, et cetera, et cetera. So this was part of the predecessor's history that he wanted to include. But he also things like a opium pipe that says smoke them on it. Kind of easy to figure out, it's a little literal. What's this? This is the GE and it looked like an outhouse down on Montgomery Street. And it came without any other detail and explanation. But I went and kind of looked at the photographic record and indeed here's the building that is identified this 730 Washington excuse me, 730 Montgomery Street address and it's the Washington Broome Company. I thought, well, that's somewhat unremarkable. But at the end of the day, it isn't unremarkable. I asked my friend William Stout, William Stout Architectural Books and I said, Bill, your building's right around the corner and historic structure. Why do you think this structure is historic? He goes, I don't know, but he goes, where's all that's 730? Well, that was Maynard Dixon Studio on the second floor. All through the 30s and 40s, that's where Maynard Dixon worked out. Maynard Dixon, great American muralist painter, mentor to many and including people like Robert Stackpole and others who did the Bohemian Club or Coyt Tower, the San Francisco Art Institute. So an important artist which would have been relevant to Kafka in that he probably knew who lived there at that time. But it still didn't give me GE. At the end, it was the research that eventually turned up The Golden Era, a newspaper operated by Bret Hart, where Mark Twain worked. And so the Twain-Bret Hart connection took him back to a map from two years earlier where he had celebrated the great storytellers and he had a personal love affair with Twain and Hart in his mind. These were the greatest of San Francisco writers and characters and so this was part of his aspirations. We didn't know that. We see it and in hindsight with everything else, we see all the other support document. But so the crypticism of the icon and the vagueness of it was really fun for us to research. I think it's kind of fun in the book for the viewer to take him and absorb it. And of course, many of these buildings, in fact, almost all the buildings photographed in this collection were important enough buildings that they in fact have been preserved for prosperity through historic preservation or through economics. We've been very, very lucky in these parts of town. North Beach, Chinatown, Barbary Coast, many of the structures remain intact, including this Washington broom company. So this is something that the book reader can really run with them. And there's five or six tangents on this single icon alone. So that's the fun I had with researching it. Cathcart pays homage to his literary influences and he aspired to be a writer. There's an article which is printed in the book where essentially it's the only count where somebody is written about actually meeting him. And so a firsthand account of him and who he is and having met him is articulated by Robert O'Brien in an article called Riptides. And it's in the front of the book. And it's really very telling, but what it says in his own words is that he aspired to be an author and didn't get any bites. But as a map maker, he not only could self-produce, he was able to place them in places like the Rand McNally store or in the Thomas Brothers stores. Stores that were retail outlets from the 1940s all the way through until like 1996, 1990. Their existence was here. So he had done and managed to find a paradigm that worked for him, a business structure that would subsidize him throughout his retirement. But his influence nonetheless were Arnold Gente and his photographs of old Chinatown from 1908 and Chinatown done by Charles Dobie as illustrated by Sydom and Sydom's illustrations we see being greatly emulated on the map. We also see his desire to research book history. And as a side story, we see the first book printed in California in shorthand and it has a little book in an X and this X is on Clay Street, first block of Clay Street. And it says life in California, 1849. And as I seem like a pretty easy place to start and so when we start researching that we find that life in California was published in 1846 and it was printed in Brooklyn, New York. So it actually wasn't printed in California at all. So that's wrong. And Cathcart who aspired and prided himself on being right. Well, I've found a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes. And so ultimately this book we found out there were some things where we decided that Cathcart got confused because he factually has some things very correct. Our research showed that the first book printed in California would have been printed in Spanish in 1835 by published by Zamorano in Monterey. It was the manifesto of the California as done by Don Figueroa. Oh, damn it, I forgot. It'll come to me later. Anyway, by the Franciscan priest who is seeding California and been told to hand over the lands back to the native peoples and the rancho system and all the vaqueros of colonial Spain are telling him, yeah, that's not gonna happen. And he disavows any responsibility for where land goes from 1835 on. And that's the first book printed in California printed in Spanish. The first book printed in English in California was printed in 1849. And it was printed by Washington Bartlett who was our first al-Qaeda. And it happened to be printed at number eight Clay Street where the X is. So the date and the X location are absolutely correct in the text. You just gotta put the wrong book in this one. So everybody makes mistakes. I found that really kind of charming and very true to form in regards to how life really works out no matter how pedantic or how thorough you wanna be. Ultimately, there's always gonna be an opportunity to correct it. We also see Asbury's Barbary Coast. Asbury wrote the Gangs of New York as well as Barbary Coast. And he's a pretty fun writer and really brings things to life and Kafka of course lives at the edge of the Barbary Coast. And so this is his opportunity living here from 1937 on to explore this neighborhood. And he has done so. And he's done a pretty good homage to what was there and where it was in various times. And we find the majority of the map is pretty much east of Kearney Street is actually just Barbary Coast. If they say God spanked the town for being over Frisky, why did he burn the churches down and spare Hottling's whiskey? A great diddy referencing the Hottling whiskey warehouses on Jessup Jones alley at Jackson Street when General Funston was blowing up the city in 1906 to stop the fire, he was determined to blow these buildings up and the sons of Hottling talked him out of it with essentially a bribe of if you go and save this building, I'll give you the content of the building to the west of Jessup Valley. And indeed they save the appraisers building and this building with water pumped in from the bay about a mile away on hoses. And so the rest of the neighborhood burned but these buildings survive as does most of Jackson Street and the historic district down there. The Barbary Coast has that proximity as well. Kafka had had the benefit of walking around and documenting things as they happened. And the one horse shea is a story of a building just simply collapsing on the corner of Jackson and Sansom and that vacant lot is still there 75, 80 years later. It was kind of amazing. One time the downtown financial district was to come up to Broadway and all of this Barbary Coast would have been torn down to make way for more buildings like the Trans-American Pyramid and that was the goal up until 1980, 84. So Cathcart's documentation shows again, a Barbary Coast that's been decimated by prohibition, the repeal of prostitution and a lack of income. This is an African-American neighborhood and a warehouse district and neighborhood of manufacturing with the Sunshine Biscuit Company or the National Biscuit Company, Hills Brothers and MJB and the like. We have the shells and skeletons of all the brothels and juke joints of Easy Street and Terrific Street. Here's an excellent view looking west on Pacific Ave, right? Just off of Columbus. And all of these buildings remain. As I point out, they're harder to see because we planted shade trees in front to make the street a lot softer, which is nice, but the structures remain. Things that don't remain are sadders and nymphs and marvelous hand-carved wood pieces that were in the front of the old hippodrome. And these were so enticing and so realistic that sailors and numerous books and logs and captain's logs and records document men coming to see these carvings at this location for well over 100 years or 75 years and the importance of these carvings. We don't know what happened to them after this period, they disappeared. We also see in summary that Cathcart has had the privilege of a life hosted by the Chinese-American community early on and created a map that documents this community in a celebratory and happy fashion in a way that's been vetted by the community at large in the hopes of celebrating the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act where large sections were taken out in 1943 as well as the ending of the Second World War. And these aspects to daily life for the artist are deemed pretty important and something that are celebrated in the book and we take stock of. One of the things we see here in this particular view are things that are almost entirely unfamiliar to me except for the Montgomery Block. This is where he lived at the Montgomery Block built in 1853 with his big courtyard and the stories written in any number of books about the cat calls between the artists living in here across the hallways and across the courtyards. But the majority of these venues, like Papacopas, the 1902 Papacopas where Jack London hung out and the other Papacopas where Cathcart got to hang out. Bonini's barn is in fact where Sydom and Dobie hang out. So the people with whom he considers influential and mentors, we know for a fact are still hanging out within a block of where Cathcart lives and since he has no kitchen, we recognize that these venues are the venues that fed him and as such, merited inclusion, not just for their historical importance in the authors and literary world, but also to his daily life and remaining fed and having a community support him. They're very intimate and very subtle in its placements. Other things are more historic as we go into downtown. So that pretty much covers the map. The book, Gold Mountain Big City, Ken Cathcart's 1947 illustrative map of San Francisco's Chinatown is the result of approximately 12 years, 13 years of work to create a story that celebrates a story otherwise lost. The material just doesn't exist elsewhere. We found one copy of this map of the California Historical Society and it was a little bit different variation as ours has made from an artist's proof. So that pretty much ends my presentation on the map. I'm happy to take questions. I'm going to stop sharing and hope that the Mechanics Institute comes on here. There's a chat function and it looks like I've got about 30 questions. So it is exactly an hour and a half, which is pretty typical for me, 90 minutes. I try to make it short. I swear, I try to make it short, but there's just so much. This one had 120 slides and images. The one unabbreviated had 160. So maybe you're lucky. Thank you, Taryn. How are you? You did wonderfully. Thank you. Do we have questions? We certainly do. All right. We have time to take questions. We certainly do. All right, great. Let's see here. The first question is, what was, this is from Lou Salis. What was Kafka's process in writing about the stories? Did he go block by block chronologically or did he cover certain subjects one at a time? You know, it's interesting. And that's a good question. We got to see the process by which he manufactured and we got to see the text that was attached to final imagery. But I'd say the initial process was him walking around block to block, taking photographs in 1937, 38 and 39. And in that process, he made contacts with people and he established protocols that worked for him. Because we see later his actual hard work where he's creating like a flyer that says the employees of this restaurant raised $200 and donated it to the War Relief Fund by doing this. And that kind of said, okay, he was sent there to go and speak with them specifically. But there are other things where you can tell he stumbled across it. So I think it was a little bit of both for the first couple of years. The process later became more deliberate. By the 1940s, when he's really looking to create the map, you can tell he's like, well, I need to do this and I need to do this. I imagine that there was a checklist that he started with. That's fascinating. Of course you have to have, you kind of have to be organized once you realize you've got a project. Yeah. That's not just a casual thing. Julie Johnson says, there's a feeling of Dorothea laying. Is it possible that they met and somehow influenced each other? Well, you know, that's interesting. That's nice to hear. Yes, there is that possibility. I have to clarify that, and I don't want to be cruel. I never met Ken Cathcart and I didn't know him as a younger man. He did not see great success financially with what he created. What he did create, I think, is very, very good. Historically accurate, true to form and really creatively very good. I think it really is good enough to be on par with the people with which he lived very closely. He definitely, I have pictures of him with Robert Stackpole and who was in that same building and his Amor, I think he really loved Maynard Dixon. And of course Dorothea laying is Maynard Dixon's wife or I should say Maynard Dixon is Dorothea Lang's husband because that's the case. So, and they both worked out of that 732 Washington Room Company studio. So I like to think so, but I don't know how he was received in his time. Well, it's a great answer. Let's see, George Westermark asks, were there any direct confrontations between Chinese and Japanese in San Francisco during the 30s and 40s? You know, that's interesting. Among the kids, sure. A lot of that friction surfaces among the subtle jibes, San Francisco was a scrapper culture. You defended your territory of strong language with the fisticuffs and this was not uncommon for my generation and older at all. And generally everybody went home and there was really no big deal except for you got in trouble when you got home because your mom already knew about it because it was that small a town. But the friction of the signage that we see in the 1930s and the fact that in many cases the community of Japanese-Americans on Grant Avenue are first and second generation Americans and don't see themselves as much as Japanese as they do Americans. And as such, some of the subtleties of this friction was avoided. But yeah, we see the signage and if you look at the photo collection on our website there are a great number of storefronts from 1938 right into the war. A great number of storefronts had anti-Japanese signage and this would have caused a friction. And I know the stories of the kids battling it out but in other terms I don't know. That's the truth answer. Well, I just wanna ask everyone if you have any questions go ahead and put them in the chat space. You do have a lot of kudos in the chat space. Thank you. Seems like everyone really enjoyed the presentation. I hope so. Great, I hope and I appreciate they're taking the time. You know, it's just a book. That's a great book, but you know. It's a great book. And there's no other questions so far, but oh, here's one, Robert Powell. Is there any information about Cathcart's personal life? I wanna know all the details. You know, the original manuscript that we submitted had a lot more detail and the specificity of Cathcart's life. That was taken down to become an introduction and we created a focus on the map. He, if we have just a second I can tell you that he was born in 1902 in Kansas and he was deemed by his high school graduating classes, most likely to be a genius, most likely to be an artist, which is interesting. His mother was an academic who wound up being the Dean of Women at Sarsie College or at Harding College in Sarsie, Arkansas. So his mother was an academic admissions and remained so until she retired in Sacramento. His father was a songwriter with a couple of country songs to his name and an income there from. Cathcart's families had a round barn, cattle barn, the most modern of round barns. He had a very charmed life. I think he was an only child and was doted upon a little bit. Personally, I think that he sought out an identity. We saw that he left the South sometime 1934, 1933 and went to Denver, was married and quickly divorced, went to Seattle and lived in the Outlook Hotel by the Pykes Market in downtown Seattle and then moved to San Francisco, changing his name from Oran Gwynn Cathcart to Kenneth Cathcart. I think, frankly, and I'm not sure but I think he was a gay man inventing himself and creating a new life for himself in a town that had acceptability as well as work. And he lived that life until he lost his eyesight to macular degeneration and lives almost blind the last 20 years of his life. And only Laura Dorenzo, my friend who has since passed, is the only person I know who knew him personally. So most of what we discovered that I've just told you is a result of research and reinforced by the photographic record. If you go to our website and click on photos, there's a browse function and when you click browse, it brings up 35 galleries and some of those galleries, most people wouldn't be interested in it. So we don't make it readily available but one of them is the photographs of his life and it shows May Day Parades and it shows the school in Sarsie, Arkansas, it shows him in Denver, it shows him in Seattle, it shows the migration which was reinforced by Ancestry.com and his legal record. So that's what we know about his personal life and we know that he was beloved by the woman that I knew who knew him. She just loved Ken and thought he was just catch me out. And so that was kind of fun. Great. And then Phil has a question. The earthquake of 06 and the rebuilding of Chinatown was not mentioned nor the plague and quarantine. Right. I think it was before. Any reason for these omissions other than they just occurred so much earlier than the maps? Yeah. The main reason for any omissions like that is that I'm articulating the map, that I'm really deciphering what is present to me on the map. And I guess correctly so, Phil, I could have commented on like an inclusion of Hang Far Low. Hang Far Low is the creation of a very Chinese-y building built by the Chinatown community to emulate what they thought Europeans thought China should look like and this influenced all of the architecture in Chinatown for a while. Despite being very homegrown, it was done by the Chinese for the promotion of the community. And that probably could have been mentioned simply as an articulation because iconographically, both the telephone exchange which is a genuine building built in Canton in this architectural style. It became, I mentioned it because it became the archetype for all of the other buildings that were built with those subsequent architectural influences to be rebuilt after the earthquake and fire. And then in the case of the plague, that 1906 and 1909 events, anti-Chinese events, are touched upon simply in the revelry of anti-Chineseism. When we talk about the derogatory nature of the promotion of the Chinese-American and subjugation well into the 1940s, that comes into play only in the context of propaganda. But again, on Cathcart's map, I didn't specifically see any fleas. I could have touched on it in the underground story. And so again, but also a story for me, since I had 177 icons, I was trying to figure out a story not represented was one that I wasn't telling specifically and that others can do so. But also I would only include it as a reference point. I think it was how that wound up transpiring. Well, you can't give away all your secrets in the book or no one would ask you to come and talk. Good point. All right. We are bumping up on time because I have to host another event at four. But I wanna thank everyone for coming today. This event has been videoed and so I will be uploading it to our YouTube channel and I will send the link to you all who registered so you can refer to it later or share it with your friends or watch it again. Let me say that if you want to reach out to us, you can shoot an email to info at shine and shine. You can jump on the website and our website shineandshine.com reach out to me through there. You can also buy the book there, simple click and buy. You can also reference the photographic collection of San Francisco and Chinatown through that as well. Photographic collection is free to view and ultimately everything's for sale there if you want it. Those are three things that we have available for you that I think would be fun and if you haven't explored them, I think you should. Thanks for coming and thank you for supporting the Mechanics Institute. An incredible place that I am so proud to be involved with. Thank you, Tara. Thank you, Jimmy. And thanks everyone. I hope that you enjoy the rest of San Francisco History Days and I look forward to seeing you at Mechanics Institute when we reopen and may you stay healthy and happy in the meantime. Indeed, bye. All right, bye-bye, thanks.