 Welcome everybody. And first up, some library news. First off, thank you for joining us tonight for our second in the three parts with SF Neon and the Tenderloin Museum, our neighbors. Tonight will be a neon type of free presentation presented by Stephen Coles, who is part of the letter form archive. And now library news. So it's summer stride still we are doing all adult programming virtually up until August 31 we have a program that's celebrated under the summer stride umbrella. It's not just for kids. So do your 20 hours reading, get your iconic library tote bag, and this awesome room. I welcome you to see the aloney tribal people and acknowledge the Romney Shosh aloney tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards, and which we reside in our San Francisco Bay area. This is the library to uplifting the names of the lands and community members from these nations with whom we live together. We learned more about first person culture and the document that I share the chat chat link that I put in there has a list of reading and resources on these topics. The library campaigns we have coming up at the library. Total SF is part of Chronicles T Heather Knight Peter Hartley books with us. And together we curate together we curate a book, we have the authors. So August 24. We have the end of the Golden Gate writers on loving and sometimes leaving San Francisco Beach and Gary Kamaya. So come on for that. Then November and February are slated for the career of touring. So, maybe we can do it. The library has a five monthly reading campaign called on the same page it's been happening for many years. So August we are celebrating Jacqueline Woodson, and her book adult read at the bone. Jacqueline Woodson is typically a children's novelist and YA novelist, and she will be in the virtual library August 12 talking about her youth. On Saturday, we have a film screening and filmmaker panel following the film. The film is the prison within and this coincides with our jail and reentry services department. San Francisco Public Library is very proud of the work we do with our jails and retreat. We serve all of the jails west of Mississippi for male reference. So pretty intense job. And it's a small team so we are just, I can't pronounce I can't promote them enough. Please come check out this film. This is based in our neighbor, San Quentin prison, and about social reform and social justice programs. On August 3 we have Cheney Kwok and Oscar Villalon in conversation. And then Sunday August 8. We have author Carla Huebner talking about her book Magnetic Women, Toyan and the Surrealist erotic. It is going to be a hot one. So come on by. And then our third and final Summer Stride event, hopefully our final event with Tenderloin and SFNION. We have Jim Van Buskirk, who is also one of ours, a past librarian here at San Francisco Public Library, and he will be talking about celluloid and San Francisco. All right, and I'm going to stop and turn it over to Albarna and Randall and Holman of SFNION. Thank you so much. We're so happy to be here at the library and you've got some great programs lined up. Yeah. So yeah, join us for cinematic neon. That's the last neon event but tonight we're really excited to be working with Stephen Coles. We met Stephen the first time we visited the Letterform Archive. They've got a new place he's going to tell you about. And we've been partnering for years now with Katie Connery, Executive Director of the Tenderloin Museum. The museum's our neon home. And Katie, we'll let you get us rolling. Hello. My name is Katie Connery. I'm the Executive Director of the Tenderloin Museum. The Tenderloin Museum opened in 2015 with the mission of uncovering the lost history of the Tenderloin neighborhood as well as celebrating the vibrant present day community that's there. And we do so through historical exhibitions and art gallery walking tours and weekly public programming. And we are currently open 10 to 5 Tuesday through Sunday with walking tours at 1pm every Saturday. So come see us. And as Randall said, the Tenderloin Museum is the physical sponsor of San Francisco Neon. And they are our long term collaborators and friends. And together we've collaborated on neon art shows, public programming, walking tours. And we have an initiative with the city to restore neon signs in the Tenderloin neighborhood called Tenderloin Neon A-DZ. So in 2019 we published the matchbook. Ah, better, better. So this collection of matchbooks from the Tenderloin neighborhood from like early 1900s through the 1950s. So we published the book and we did an exhibition, temporary exhibition and public programs series. And we really discovered that you could learn a lot about history through the aesthetics of the past. And I would describe matchbooks as the intersection of design art, advertising art and nightlife history. And I would say the same about neon signs. So the connection between the two of them was immediately obvious to me. And the Tenderloin Museum collaborated with San Francisco Neon throughout the exhibition on public programming, including a version of this event, which we are excited to share with you today. So without further ado, I'd like to turn things over to Stephen Coles. Hi, we're going to go to SF Neon first. Okay, we'll get this order straight. So as Katie said, we're SF Neon, our mission is to preserve the neon landscape and enhance that in San Francisco, which also all these old neon signs really point to small historic businesses and that's the deep connection for us. And there you see the, the top of the hotel Jefferson and Jim Rizzo, working on that and that's our most recent restoration project in the Tenderloin just a block away from museum. And what do we have next Stephen. Oh, our books. Yeah. So we, we like to publish books about neon if you need, need any more books for your neon bookshelf. You can get these at the library. Thank you SFPL, but we've got them at SF neon.org too so you won't have to return it. Yeah, so it's your choice. We're, we love doing these books and just doing more neon education about this really special type of light signage and art graphic design. Really, really neon essentially makes a dull street a vibrant street. And that's why we need to hang on to it. Do we have anything else, Stephen. Okay, we're ready, ready for you. Thank you so much. It's a really a pleasure to collaborate with SF neon and Tenderloin Museum. Letterform archive is is my day job I'm an associate curator at this kind of crazy small library slash museum in now in the dog patch and we're a nonprofit center for design. We have this incredible collection of everything to do with lettering and typography. And we've just moved to a new space in the dog patch and the American Industrial Center will be opening up to the public with our first, first exhibition in that new space in October, hopefully. But this is just to give you a sense of what the archive does we try to give people an idea of the history of written communication and the art form of the letter through these tours of our collection. These tours include tables of original artifacts from a cuneiform tablet to Gutenberg Bible leaf all the way up to psychedelic posters and type specimens and even current work. So that is the perspective from which I'm talking today is the about the letterforms and the typography of matchbooks and and also a little bit about the neon as well. Okay, that's my day job and then I also help run a website called fonts in use and another one called typographic and if you're interested in those you can go to Stephen polls dot work and learn about those. But we'll start out the evening talking about matchbooks and unique. I think one really cool thing about this, you know, some some people have asked when we've we first announced this program. You know what's the connection between matchbooks and neon and I like to think of it as neon being the largest form of advertising for a lot of these venues that we'll talk about tonight, and matchbooks were the smallest form so we're covering these two very typographically rich media forms that both kind of draw people into a venue or restaurant bar. So matchbooks are really the simplest form of advertising there. For the most part they're a single cardboard covering first manufactured 1992 and really peaked in the mid mid 20th century. As they became cheaper to produce and, and there were more and more kinds of venues to advertise. Another interesting thing to think about is those who collect matchbooks are often called filuminous, which I think is a great word, which means lover of light. And there are all of these other fun terms. So, you know, if I were a matchbook guy, I would know all of these and we'll talk about some of them today. The book vocabulary is fascinating there are hundreds of terms that only collectors know and I want to apologize in advance to any collectors who are in the audience tonight, because there are times that I don't use the correct lingo for those who are really into matchbook collecting. I understand what it's like when people use the correct lingo because typographers have the same kind of bug abuse, but we'll learn about a few of these things tonight. And, and this matchbook pro.org is a great place to learn about some of these. It's been a good resource for me. Another thing I think it's good to kind of understand is, when we talk about these matchbooks and the neon signs is the difference between type and lettering. We often hear these two terms in her mixed but there are, they are distinguishable they're different kinds of disciplines and different media type is made from pre manufactured letters so those could be made out of metal or wood or film or digital files, as we use today. And those pre manufactured letters work as a system. So they're designed to work in any order any letter you put in any order. But they're also, even though this is kind of changing now with digital type it's mostly a static kind of medium and that you're taking something that somebody else has already made and putting it building up a word or phrase or a logo or a matchbook or a neon sign if it's made out of type with with those pre manufactured letters or a font, whereas lettering is different it's usually drawn or manufactured or written or built by hand or whatever tool you're using on the spot for that moment. In that way it's more intuitive you're not working with pre manufactured letters, you're making those letters on the spot to fit in that particular word of phrase in the best way possible. And so most of what we'll look at tonight is lettering it's an example of taking letters and drawing them or writing them or building them with neon to really fit that sign or that matchbook cover. And that's how it's different from just typing something out with the font. And I think a really easy way to help you understand those differences is that type is kind of like Lego it's like building blocks you're working with pre manufactured blocks and you're building something with them and that can be really useful if you have those pre fabricated tools. But lettering is like clay where you can form it in shape it into any kind of piece of artwork that you need it to be. A little piece of an example from letter from archives collection which helps you kind of see the source of a lot of the lettering that we will look at today is the speedball textbook archive. The speedball textbooks are have been and still continue to be a huge resource for lettering artists for calligraphers. So we were formed by Rossf George who was this lettering artist who helped invent a pen that was made it easy to do lettering and in his brilliance, his marketing mind said well why don't we also create a manual at how to textbook, which helps you understand how to do lettering using the pens that we make so we have the archives from Rossf George in our collection and you can see the original artwork for these textbooks which are still in print. I think it's now and it's 25th edition or three edition something like that. So the lettering that was used, or that the speedball pen became known for is what we call no or low contrast lettering so that's where you have a round tip on that pen. And that makes it simpler to draw or write letters because you don't have to think about where the thick and the thin bits and each word or each letter. It helped a lot of people really learn lettering skills and it was a way a lot of people trained, and it also helps define the way that a lot of these letters look they have this really kind of friendly round ended style to them. And just as an example here is a match book in which you see this kind of speedball pen lettering in use. All pens came in a lot of different nibs and you can do other things with them and that's all part of that whole collection of speedball and we'll see examples of these kind of styles as well serif Romans and casual scripts, and even formal kind of graphic scripts like this one. Another thing to understand about matchbooks and where they come from, and how they're made is you have custom designs and you have stock designs, and stock designs are essentially the man, the matchbook manufacturers pre made designs that have a bunch of patterns and illustrations and as a client you could come into the matchbook manufacturer and say, Okay, I don't have a lot of money, I don't want to do something custom just give me something. You know, with a girl on it, or a, you know, a bottle of beer or a martini glass and they have a bunch of pre made designs for you. So here are some examples of the companies that made matchbooks that are represented in the collections that we'll show today. And here's an example of a stock design. It's very apparent that this is a stock design when you look at the restaurant name. This is presumably, you know, a Chinese or other Asian restaurant and yet. A generic mid century, assumedly, white family having having dinner and having probably turkey and potatoes. So this is an example of where a stock design maybe didn't do the best job. But here is something that maybe is, you know, a stock design and probably a stock design because it's using a pretty generic phrase you'll enjoy our congenial atmosphere, and it's using some pretty generic imagery. But at the same time, it's a little bit more appropriate for the use because this is for a bar. So here's a very common style of stock design, which is known among filuminous as girlies. And, you know, you can imagine the kind of clientele that might come to some of these bars, and this was a way to make them grab a matchbook and take it with them. And so you'll often see these kind of pinup girls and a lot of the matchbooks from this era. There are many, many, many of them. Most of what we'll look at though are not girlies. We're going to be looking at custom matchbooks tonight. Finally, one more just, you know, just an example of how, how generic can you get this is, you know, very, very run of the mill stock design. And at the same time, here's something that's very custom. This is obviously the ambassador cocktail lounge said we want our own lettering our own slogan in this design, and we want our an illustration of our building in the design as well so it's very customized. You'll often see buildings in these matchbooks because I think of it as being the neon sign drew you to the bar and brought you in and you spent some time there and you had a good time and then you left with your matchbook and that matchbook was your reminder of where you had been when you wake up the next day and wonder what was that cool spot I went to. Oh, I got a picture of it right here on my matchbook. And here's another really example of something that could be stock actually, but it's a really beautifully designed stock design. And, you know, even though that this is a very generic phrase, having something that's illustrated with multiple colors, you know, more than one color was an example of a matchbook that was, you know, somebody had spent some money on, and the beautiful lettering here that all kind of added to it, even if this is not a custom design, it was a kind of special stock design. Another thing I love about matchbooks and why I think other people are drawn to this era of printing is just how clean and sterile all of our digital design has become today. There are even little scripts and plugins for Photoshop and things like that to add some grit and dirt and imperfection to your design, and so that you can make it feel like it has the charm of the printing of yesteryear. And a lot of people relate to this they want to have something that feels either analog or handmade or at least that it came from another time and has a history to it, rather than something that's very perfect and clean to the effect that it doesn't have a personality. You can see evidence of this kind of printing these printing effects that were, you know, very coarse and rough in these matchbooks when you look at this illustration of Wilbur stump and the half toning of his portrait from a distance it works okay but as you zoom in you can see it's really coarse half tone and that half tone these these dots that dot patterning was a cheap way to get grayscale levels of gray into an illustration without adding another color. So this was a way that they could use a custom design, but only spend money on one color in this print and still get an effect and of a photograph in this illustration. It's been slightly terrific which I think is a great slogan for the place. Yeah, so some quick neon facts do you want to speak to these really quickly Alan and Randall. Sure. Thank you so much for that matchbook one on one. Yeah. One of the things we like to say if you're not familiar with neon, we call it all neon but actually that there's two gases like eastern neon sign neon is the red argon is the blue. And this technology that being demonstrated by the two bender in this photo hasn't really changed in 100 years you still have a human being hold a glass tube over a fire and get it hot and bend it to a shape and that shape might say luncheonette which is really cool. So every single neon sign we'll see tonight in fact every neon sign you see anywhere even open signs beer signs, they're all made by hand, and they can last. We'll talk about the repo lounge later. It's been on Grant Avenue for 75 years same sign. So, I think that makes neon signs pretty pretty green. In terms of, you know, they're not throw away plastic. We've got some great great matchbooks and neon signs to talk about and we'll throw some history San Francisco history in there too. Awesome. So we're going to take a quick tour through San Francisco, and we'll visit each of these neighborhoods. My thanks to Laura Sarah for doing these illustrations for us for this for the map. And there's, we're going to start in the tender line a lot of good reasons for that Katie do you want to just go over some of the great reasons why the tender line is such a mecca for this kind of stuff. Yeah, so I think that preservation can be a really interesting mix of effort and neglect. And a lot of the economic development in San Francisco has passed by the tunnel line. So, many city wide kind of efforts to modernize that destroyed a lot of neon signs that affected nearly every other neighborhood pretty devastatingly have not really affected the tender line in the same way. And as a result we have more neon signs than any other neighborhood, and some are not necessarily in the best shape, but with support and sustained effort from the city, and San Francisco neon and the tunnel and museum but the tender line is really poised for this restoration effort. Fantastic. So let's look at some of the matchbooks that and the neon signs from the neighborhood. So we're going to start out with club Lafayette and the top drawer. Here's another example of, you know, probably a stock design but a cool pattern in here and three different colors and use. And the top drawer, I just love because it's as obvious as an illustration as you can imagine for it but it's just so charming that it really works. Let's talk a little bit more about the top drawer and that opening about 19 in 1964 and it closed probably in 69 or early 70 because the building was actually demolished in 1970, but the photo on the left is the nightclub that preceded the top drawer. And that was the famous black Hawk, which a great jazz Mecca in the heart of the tender line. It opened in 1949 and closed in 1963. After many years of battling the San Francisco police department civic organizations who were looking for civic improvements and considered jazz and alcohol, and that combination to be morally questionable. And the best thing about the black Hawk was the acoustics in the in the bar itself, and a lot of legendary jazz performers, not only perform there but also recorded live albums. Some of the performers in the black Hawks hey they were people like Billy holiday Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Shelly man, Dizzy Gillespie, and even Charlie Parker, everybody. In 1959 Time Magazine did a profile on the club and it was titled success in a sewer, which prompted co owner we do Cassiante to proudly respond by saying, I've struggled for years to keep this place a sewer. And if you look in the back there you can see it says who tell Lafayette, and that is where club Lafayette was that was our first matchbook. Yeah, in fact way right above the gentleman's head in the photo you can see the club Lafayette sign. Very cool. Another really lovely matchbook that I love from this area here the teakwood teakwood room and rose room for cocktails. One of the things that you'll notice in a lot of these logos and other lettering that represented the venues is how much letters can do to give you the feeling of a place. And so what you see up in teakwood room, you know, kind of a Tiki style, or something that may have been made with with itself because letters feel like they're crafted out of wood. Another thing to kind of keep in mind, as you look at these matchbooks and as you go through the city and look at neon signs is that cocktails style there at the bottom, it doesn't seem so special maybe but it's something that is kind of interesting in the history of lettering arts. And I'm going to show it next to another sign it's actually in the mission districts. Some of you may know the elbow room and that's where this sign comes from we're not going to go over to the mission tonight but maybe on a future show we should do that. But this is a style that sign painters and other lettering artists called gas pipe letters and gas pipe is is really a nice easy way to get up a sign or piece of lettering because it's almost modular you have this no contrast you know monolinear form, you have straight sides on all the letters and that makes it really easy to space. And it was just an easy first style of lettering for a lot of sign painters and show card writers and neon sign makers to learn because it has this this kind of, you know, these examples of ways to easily space a form. One thing though to note and I'm sure that Randall and now will tell you is that corners are not as easy in neon so the sharper the corner sometimes the more difficult it is to bend. And that's another reason why these kind of rounded corners are a little bit better when you're when you're working with a straight side of letter forms. And here's another example of that kind of style of gas pipe letter but in a little bit more jaunty upper and lowercase mixed style for bunnies waffle shops. And this gives us another opportunity to look at another printing technique. And that's the technique that is most common for matchbooks. Even today. And that is flexography. And flexography differs from traditional offset printing offset printing is the kind of printing you'd see in a book or a magazine. And that the plate is flexible like rubber and the substrate can be flexible as well which makes it ideal for printing on all sorts of things like cardboard, which a lot of these math books are plastic bags metal foils cartons labels. And it's primarily used today for packaging. So most everything you see in a grocery store today is is flexo printed it's kind of the colloquial term for flexography. But it was commonly used for matchbooks because it's really good for long print runs in offset printing you're using single sheets. But when they were printing matchbooks they're they're doing it on a long roll of paper and then later cutting them and that's much faster. It makes it a cheaper kind of a print. And then this little diagram here just kind of shows you how you can identify the difference between flexography and traditional offset lithography. You can see that right here in the bunnies logo that kind of halo effect around each of the letters. Katie is going to tell us a little bit about the why not. I just want to tell you that it, even the placement of letters can say everything you need it to say. Well said, and the why not open in 1951 on 518 Ellis. And it was San Francisco's first leather bar. It closed shortly after it opened and the leather scene moved to Stoma where it still is today. But we also have this featured in our matchbook on a coaster and on a pin. So if you're a fan of this image, we will see you at the tenderloin museum soon. Another nice matchbook. In terms of lettering style and how the, you know, that the kind of lettering can kind of give off an air of what the venue wanted to convey is the Olympic hotel and this nice swashy scrolly fill agree in between the letters. And then we have a couple of images of science here I don't know if you have anything on these. Yes, I do. We're looking at the Olympic hotel itself and the photo on the right, which was made in 1948. You can see that the Olympic at that time had an enormous vertical sign went down on the front of the building. The photo was removed probably sometime in the 50s. And also you see a 31 Balboa streetcar, or on the streetcar under 31 Balboa line, and those were taken out of service in 1949, roughly a year after this photo was made, which had a huge impact on the sign in itself. But in the postcard on the left, you get a little, an example of a few different sign typologies. For instance, the TV sign with free parking advertising. It used to be a lot of free parking advertising in the tenderloin district. That's a thing in the past. That's a projecting sign. And the blue neon where you just see the end of the word Olympic. That's a marquee sign. And on the front of that marquee sign, you have what's called a raceway sign. You see how the letters, letter forms are extended above the marquee. They're supported at the base of the letters, but they give the impression of being freestanding. And you might ask is that neon, it actually was neon under the, in the channel letters neon was seated with a plexiglass facade over the front of the letters on the channel so it was backlit neon filtered through plexiglass. All right, next slide. Thank you that's really interesting to know because sometimes you assume that when you're when you're looking at a flat plexiglass cover that there isn't neon involved. That neon was, that was a primary primary source of income for sign makers and two vendors into the early 90s, since been supplanted with LED. It's actually more practical to use LED for backlighting that is for neon. It doesn't last as long as neon but that was a major part of sign makers income at that time and that disappeared and things got a little tough for neon people in the late 80s and into the 90s. People think that LED is better is better than neon well we don't agree because LED can only shine light in one direction neon has that 360 round tube glow, and there's just really no comparison in my opinion. I agree. Another lovely matchbook for the cliffed I think this just a nice elegant design you see some more gas pipe letters here and but here it's not about the lettering it's more about the composition and the pattern here that that spans over to the back of the matchbook itself. You see a photo of the cliffed hotel this is taken from knob hill, looking down towards a tenderline, and you can see that the cliffed hotel still has a neon sign up there on the roof alongside. I think I don't know if that's a penthouse or utility housing you know for the elevators and everything. But also, you know and it still lights up at night it's it's huge I guess I'm guessing the letters are at least 1012 feet tall. By contrast, it's a lot more interesting at night than the Hilton sign which you see to the left of the cliff which is all plastic and led. Here's a great example of color and you know pink and brown not colors that are maybe they're coming back in vogue now but this is the kind of style that I think is indicative of the 40s and the 50s. So Jack tar occupied a square block bounded by Van Ness Avenue Franklin Geary and post streets, and it was demolished in 2013 so not too long ago to make a way for Sutter health medical complex. Here's a shot of some people enjoying the poolside amenities at the Jack tar hotel. And the more I look at this photo I think what's really happening here is is a fashion suit, fashion shoot for the latest in drip dry business suits. I think we have to point out that clock that says Jack tar hotel you just don't see that kind of detail outside of building these days it's this is just very, very much of its era. So tell was featured a lot in Francis Ford coblues movie the conversation, which we're going to talk about a little later to. So the old poodle dog will hear more about this restaurant from Katie but I this is a rare example of the formal script rather than the kind of casual scripts we looked at easy earlier and illustration. Just, just too good, Katie. Yes, so the convoluted life and afterlife of the poodle dog restaurant has continued to delight historians collectors and San Francisco cultural enthusiasts. And the poodle dog is a French restaurant that originally opened in 1849 and in what was known as Chinatown, or later it wasn't known as that at the time. But basically there just been many, many poodle dogs in San Francisco, it just became a very popular thing to name a restaurant. We had menus from some of the poodle dogs in our ephemera show, which is when I first found out about this establishment in 1897 ownership splits and an offshoot called the original poodle dog was open on Mason and Eddie in the Tenderloin, and it was run by Blanco of Blanco's cafe which was later known as the music box and is now the great American music hall. And the previous restaurant was then renamed the old poodle dog. And the menus of these two places really hinted at the bad blood between between them. And the menu of the old poodle dog would refer to the original as a pretentious establishment, and they would just go back and forth, kind of on their menus. And the poodle dog is a great example of what you can learn from history through ephemera there is series of business cards postcard city listings between 1897 and the 1980s that reveal a web of ownership and affiliation. Basically there are dozens of poodle dog restaurants and they often although not always had some kind of connection to one another. So the old new original or otherwise one thing is clear for over 100 years savvy restaurant tours have wanted to tap into the iconic legacy of the poodle dog by giving the restaurant this name. And historic references to the poodle dog. And this pre prohibition names usually mentioned elegant private sweets on the upper floors of the ground floor restaurant and whatever took place there was never revealed by the owners or stuff, all of whom maintain French restaurant tour levels of discussion. But we know as a historical fact that many French restaurants were friends for brothels and the poodle dog was one of many of these. I have for years wanted to use this photograph in a tour and finally get the opportunity so first of all let's talk a little bit about the sign. We talked about projecting science this is a projecting sign, but we didn't talk about the backboard or the backing for the neon tubing and that that's called a cabinet, or quite a quite often people refer to it as a tin can. But what's interesting about this one is the fact that it is the tin can is integrated into the design of the overall sign. It's it's not a rectangle it's not a square. It's the sheet metal has been cut in a design style and then the outside border the fancy framing is also a very early style for science that tended to go away later but it's a very art deco style right and even prior to that a lot of signage actually was done with what looked like a picture frame around the borders of the sign and those are now extremely rare and collectible but let's let's talk about what's going on this photo came from the San Francisco public library. This is one of our favorite resource is the SFPL History Center, but I'll just read the copy from the old SF call bulletin newspaper this was on July 14 1957. The bandit trap is set at post street entrance of old poodle dog restaurant as police armed with shotguns and tear gas, await for government who held up the cafe with four robbers escaped through skylight with $160 in hasty flight. They left behind $920 taken from the cash register and safe. Well it turns out there were actually 30 policemen had the building surrounded and these four bandits got away through skylight in the ceiling. Across a few rooftops came down on an adjacent street where they actually stole the car of the owner of the old poodle dog restaurant at the time a man named Lewis Lalon and use his car as a getaway car. If they were I never know I don't know if they were apprehended I've never been able to trace the story back that far. I also just love the nonchalant stance of this plain clothes police officer here. Yeah I think he either knew they didn't have a chance or he does this every day but he's so casual it's really it makes the photograph doesn't it. Moving on to original Joe as many of you may be familiar with this name if you're here in the Bay area. After 80 years of this location that's average advertised here. It was destroyed in a fire and it's now at Washington Square in the North Beach. One of the kind of tropes that I love from matchbook lettering is the large cap or other kind of lettering with the what we call in typography the ascender or the descender that kind of spans through the whole composition. This is a great example of that. And they continued it here on to the this design. There are also scripts that are at an angle those are very common techniques that you'll see in on matchbook designs and other kinds of lettering from the mid century. And here's yet another really nice designs kind of shows you the lifespan of original Joe's when you see how many different designs of matchbooks that they went through and this is kind of the dilemma of the matchbook collector is, is, you know, how many do we need to find for each of these venues. I think you have something to add here to this one is that right. Yes. Let's see the next slide. There we go. Okay here. This is a photo by me by a great photographer here in San Francisco Bay Area named Thomas Hawk. And thank you Thomas for allowing us to use this photo. This gives you a good idea of the corner of Taylor and Eddie, which was where original Joe's was located before the fire to shut them down in 2007, and take a look at the sign you see the chef in the in those circular part of the and then the two peace signs below. That was all presented as one unit, but when they move to. Also you'll notice over the doorway you'll see some script that says original Joe's and once again that's raceway lettering. But when they moved to North Beach and opened in 2012 they were able to take this sign with them. And because of the design of the building in North Beach, and probably maybe a little something to do with codes, they had to break that sign down into three different pieces. And in the next slide, you'll see the most prominent piece which is on the exterior of the building on the Union Street side of building, and the rest of the sign that we saw in the black and white photo. It's on the stocked in street side of the building and some of it is actually illuminated and mounted inside the restaurant itself. So when you're walking around North Beach, it's kind of fun to walk around the building and find all these different little pieces of the, the sign that was once on. Is that Jones. Yeah, Taylor and Eddie. Okay, and yet again, more matchbooks from original Joe's and new Joe's. And thank you Heather David for collecting all of these and let us letting us use them she's prolific collector. Flickr account I highly recommend following hers, lots of great matchbooks there really love the lettering on the left with that kind of flat extension on the serifs and new, and just the really nice fluid script for Joe's. Some beautiful stuff here and again, more great illustrations of the storefront itself the building itself. Maybe the most impressive matchbook in that will show tonight just in terms of color. I think I counted seven different plates here and that means seven different ink seven different colors used including a metallic silver. And also just a lovely design again more gas pipe lettering there in the rainbow room. This kind of glowing martini glasses is another recurring theme that you'll see in other matchbooks as well. And I think that there, I saw a question in the chat something about why seven spot colors why seven plates instead of four color printing. That's a really good question. I think it comes down to just the effect with four color printing especially that size. You've got to use some sort of mixing of colors and it may not get you the effect that you're looking for there also might be some examples, or some reasons behind that in terms of flixography. But I'm not so sure I think it just gave you a nice bright color for each of these stripes in the rainbow. I'm going to talk about the lovely history of the blue lamp in San Francisco. Here's an example though of a matchbook which where the building itself is kind of the star the storefront or the entrance is the star of the matchbook and there are a few examples of the collection that's in the matchbook tenderline and line and other collections. And I think it's just a great example of that. Where is it that I was last night and remember it by the look of that entrance and it spans the whole side of the printed side of the matchbook. So if we can go back to the other side. Um, so the blue lamp has always been a part of our matchbook tour but we didn't really know much about it other than that it was a bar that had live music. And our motivation for researching the blue lamp in more depth is Rachel Kushner. She's the best selling author and former blue lamp bartender and Booker. And Rachel writes about working at the blue lamp in two of her essays in the hard crowd which you're seeing here which is a collection of nonfiction essays that was released this past May, and you can pick up your own copy at the National Museum or SFPL Rachel's novel the Mars room partially takes place in the tenderline and reading the hard crowd you really get a sense of the tenderline landscape she draws from to create fiction. And we recently had the honor of interviewing Rachel about her experiences in the tenderline and out the blue lamp, which led to interviewing other staff members and musicians that played there. And but compiled these interviews and a performance into a video that premiered on May six and is now available on our YouTube page. And so I can share the full interview we did with Rachel Kushner and our blue lamp compilation video that features our interview with Rachel, as well as interviews with at least 10 other staff members and musicians. And we're going to screen just two short clips from our interview with Rachel Kushner now. There was this kind of like witching hour between the late afternoon regulars like the hardcore tenderline crowd, and the people who were coming for live music. And it was different every night the crowd depending on who was booked there, you know, we had like metal bands with punk bands, we had some kind of like classic big bands like Lev A Smith and her red hot skillet liquors. We had, like, old timey music with skiffle drum and instruments and, you know, so it just depends on the night but that crowd was always going to be a different crowd than the regulars. In the two of them meeting it was almost like the freshwater outlet to the sea and the strange like brackish mix, but in a certain way they understood each other and you would see like my regular Rick who drank the party 151 and pushed a walker and just quite frankly fell down a lot and it was very serious alcohol. Him sort of telling somebody to get out of his way who was like a hipster with purple hair. It was just a funny mix of people who kind of tolerated one another and by the end of the night sometimes if it was a really rocking band, there were people dancing and the regulars were dancing with these like hipsters from the mission who were there to see their friends band play. Yeah, that's Lev A Smith. I can't remember her real name which is not Lev A Smith. So they still very much regularly formed at the blue lamp when I was working there, and it was really exciting when they did for a lot of reasons. First of all, she's incredibly talented and so glamorous and has an amazing voice and she had top notch musicians playing in her band. It was a multi set, a multi piece band, I don't mean there might have been nine or 10 people on stage. They had a very passionate crowd so when they played the place was packed, which also you know for us to make really good money when you've got Lev A Smith playing. But I think the most important thing about those nights when she and her band played was that she brought an old fashioned dignity to that bar that almost reinvented what it was right before my eyes. It was not a city place. It wasn't about alcoholism and destruction and the sadder aspects of what it was like to work there somehow vanished in the face of this glamorous woman who was a very serious musician who brought almost like she traveled with her era. Like it was 1923 when she walked into the bar and she brought that dignity into the room. So to hear more about these amazing San Francisco characters from the characters themselves be sure to watch our video I'll share the link. And while you're there you can subscribe to our YouTube page. But this is an image of Johnny Nitro, which we're going to hear a little bit more who's playing at the blue lamp and I was going to tell us a little bit more about him. Right Johnny Nitro was a regular at the blue lamp and a lot of other bars around town is a regular on some of the blues bars on Grand Avenue as well. He was a guy who you never saw without a guitar in his hands you could be on Van Ness Avenue at 130 in the afternoon. And here would be Johnny Nitro walking down the street with a guitar in his hand and unfortunately he passed away in 2011. He lived in an apartment above the saloon on Grand Avenue in North Beach and he passed away while a blues band was wailing away downstairs in the bar. So I guess he went out in true blues fashion. That's great. Thank you for those stories so we're going to sadly leave the tenderloin and move up Market Street to Union Square and look at a few spots there. Including the magnificent Bernstein's fish grotto with these awesome characters, the foods that you could eat there apparently are also in their own little show. And I think it is also pretty amazing when you think of this spot besides yet another another character there mixing the drink famous cuckoo cocktails. That you look on the other side of the match book and you just you see this ship coming out of the facade of the building you might think well this is just some fantastical idea of what the restaurant could be. But then you see a photograph and you realize that was really what it looked like to enter the fish grotto. And here's some beautiful neon on the other side. Now here we have a photo of Bernstein's and the ship was modeled after Christopher Columbus's Nina. And if you look you can see the neon ropes that lead up to the sale which the cabinet of the sign was integrated into the overall design and it basically served as the sale for the ship. Lots of neon in this photograph. They were carelessly placed for sale but effective. You gotta work with what you have I guess you know, and I always like the small neon sign on the left that says shore lunches so if you were not in a seafood you could get something else that was more land land based. And this this photo comes from a great website called short be calm. Lots of history from lots of places around the United States, and a lot of San Francisco history can be found on short be calm. So now we're moving on to the Congo club and again this kind of what might be terms exotic lettering with the logo here, and, you know, giving you a sense of the ambiance that you might experience as you enter the club. One of the things I really love about this. If you look way in the, in the just about halfway up the street you can see the Macambo, but above that is is Bernstein's. And you can see kind of the triangle of that sale. And I love that you can, you can stumble out of Bernstein stumble out of the ship. Go to the Macambo club like leaving the ship and going right to the island. I wish we could still do that. Okay. And also, if you look on the corner you'll see the sign that is advertising white rock sparkling water. That sign might be familiar to a lot of people in the audience, as the old Markards new stand sign. It was basically this was removed and replaced with Markard signage. They kept some of the signage. As you can see liquor cigars magazines. They kept that, but they did change the name to Markards. We were there until 2004 and soon after that the all the glass tubing was removed from the sign and it has since been painted solid black. The plan is for a long term leaser to take over the spot at some point there's a hatch up in there now, but at some point, I think the city is on board with this plan as well to a new business would come in and and install neon and there was a sign but but it would at least it would be a neon sign. So we keep our fingers crossed that that happens. Also the clock advert at one point. There was a neon added around the crown or the top of the clock that said the New York Times. Britex fabrics is, you know, a San Francisco institution. And one of the things that makes this matchbook so great for me is that the, the logo of Britex, which was also the sign is such a part of the of its identity this really kind of Art Nouveau or Eugenstiel style lettering, and that's actually not lettering it comes from a typeface from the early 20th century called Franconia, this German typeface from that era of Art Nouveau, and just it has that kind of wrapping flow of what you might think of with the fabric that works so well for this logo, and for the sign, even when you curve it around the very iconic entrance of the original location of Britex. So this is the original sign that used to hang right above that original entrance and yeah and the sign is still there the building's being renovated and Britex has since moved to Post Street, where they commission a smaller version of the sign to be mounted on the building. The sound so big that even if they were allowed to take it with them. It wasn't going to work on the building there they're occupying on Post Street because there's so much of a class facade on the building. And so arrow, it was arrow sign shop built a new built a replica. There was a man named Martin Spector who opened Britex fabrics. He had come to San Francisco with his wife for a vacation in prior to about 1950 or 51 or 52, and they just fell in love with San Francisco they went back to New York City, and close their fabric shop and moved to San Francisco and opened Britex in 1952. And today, the business is still in the family it's run by Martin's daughter Sharmin. And in that black and white photo there you can see that as big as Britex sign is the city of Paris was huge, and that is a neon Eiffel Tower, it was the coolest thing on Union Square and even though there was a huge movement in the city to save it in the 70s, they were not successful and that sign came down. Where can you see that sign in a movie. Oh yeah we talked about Francis Ford Coppola's movie called The Conversation. Some of the opening shots are filmed around Union Square, and there are some great cameos of the city of Paris sign in that movie. The building was torn down in 1981, the sign probably went up in the late 40s. It's a shame the whole thing is gone but it was a massive sign so I really don't know where it could have been stored. We don't know. So here's Charlotte's fine food. We don't know a lot about this restaurant if you do then please tell us in the chat. But this is just a wonderful example of San Francisco topography in an illustration on a matchbook and a little story being told just here on this tiny little, you know, four inch or three and a half inch wide piece of advertising. Love this illustration. The Golden pheasant it was at this location from 1922 to 1954. I have a couple of really lovely matchbooks from the Golden pheasant and, but I like this one for this kind of art deco style lettering and the really lovely use of the three different colors plus the gold metallic here. And here is the location at Geary and Powell, and a little bit later on a postcard in a that kind of more a different kind of upright script lettering style it's lovely. Melody Lane. This was a bar on 729 Bush Street at Powell and what a great piece of illustration as well and lettering those ease in Melody Lane are really nice just kind of a two stroke key. What you're seeing here with the bartender winking, you know, reflecting the cover with the piano player winking and then the backdrop the stage with that little village. It was actually replicating what was in the bar itself. That's right. And on the photo on the right, you see the band on stage and again I've got some news copy for you. Entertainment deluxe is the order of the day at Melody Lane 729 Bush Street in the above photograph Larry Larson is shown passing the portable Mike to co owner Margaret Peterson. While the three naturals left to right Mikey Conte, Bobby Gary and sex moral provides some tuneful music. If I'm not mistaken, Melody Lane at some point ended up being the knob hill cinema, which had recent close in the last few years as well it's it's a bacon now. Karl Wilka this must there must have been multiple locations throughout San Francisco this is just a really nice example of Art Deco lettering metallic ink and and just a purely typographic or lettering based a matchbook no illustration here but it still has a really nice effect especially as it spans the whole length of the cardboard. And here's a little sign for one of the location. Yeah. Yeah, I know we have something to say, you say it. Well, it's just a simple neon sign of again a projecting sign on. I believe that's market street. Looks like it. Yeah, I think that's the first building actually right behind it so this. Yeah so this is leading up to market street. Well just it's a great look at at the difference, the small mom and pop places have the small signs that you really are meant to be seen by street traffic and pedestrians, and the bigger, the bigger tall blade is almost always national brands and we're meant to be seen from cars so that's the scale of these of this ephemera. And in most cases smaller science were much more charming than yeah massive spectacular science. Nice. Great point. Here is the Beverly Plaza hotel and it's cocktail lounge, lounge the Panamericana. This is near the Chinatown Dragon Gate. This is the Triton Hotel. But again, when thinking back to the slide about flexography you really see that in the words cocktail lounge here you see the evidence of that halo effect. But I just love the lettering in Panamericana if you're a type designer or a lettering artist, or you love that stuff here's some really great source material this is kind of this very rough brush that you don't really see in a lot of other lettering. And there we have the Beverly Hotel I believe that 10 can is still there but now it's called. It's called the Titan, the Triton Hotel. Yeah. So that's that Bush and Union Bush Bush and Grant, and you just got to love these photographs like open as if history has amazing amount of these color photographs and they got to be somebody's uncle I'm I always try to figure out what the pose is here. The URL wrong I apologize on that credit. In SF history and I think there's a link in chat. Yeah, open SF history is just a treasure trove of amazing images and information. It rivals the history centers. So now we're going to move up to the financial district and the and Soma in that area. And here's a really classy match book just a lovely illustration of the corner, their brains cafe. And the script down here with the slogan you're welcome as flowers in May I think Randall Ann and L have a reaction to that because this was a place they were familiar with. But it's also an example of a match book illustration reflecting that facade and are in a really nice way. As as you remember it so you can remember it. Yeah. Yeah, this was a corner where we spent a lot of time when we were art students and work downtown and brings was a really bustling cigar field bar, but it had a great steam table lunch counter in the back which is where we went for lunch almost every almost every day when we worked, worked in this neighborhood. And at night it just lit up in neon brains was really quite an amazing, amazing place and right next to it was this place Jerry and Johnny's, which is also where he's to hang out and that's actually drinking beer in our 20s, early 20s, very early 20s but one of the things that was so great about this bar is that the guy who ran it, Jerry Hansen was our pal, and he would also cash our checks like that was really what San Francisco was like in the 70s, and he knew that if he cashed our checks we would buy a few beers but also he just really created community with with everybody who was there brings was a little fancier and that was a little artier upstairs was the museum of conceptual art, and and brings was the reception hall, but we were down Jerry and Johnny's hanging out. Right and Jerry and Johnny's had been a really popular watering hole for people who work for the newspapers in that area, the chronicle and the examiner. This was one of their hangouts, they had more than one but this was a popular spot. I think it's really interesting what you said around the room about how these places were not just bars and often they aren't just bars they are a kind of community center and there were a lot of other services that they that they could provide. This was our blue lamp I mean really every dive, this was a whole culture in San Francisco and lots of other cities to where your community was at the, was at the, at the long bar. And of course, know what we laugh about this was a girly matchbook and, of course, there was nobody that looked like that girly in that bar ever. But I guess it, like you said, it basically the ideas that you pick it up and take it with you. And the next day you remember, or you find it you say I've got to go to this. Yeah. Yeah, love the slogan to. It was a photographer's bar it was so close to the chronicle and photography, all the photographers would bring in their best prints and tape it to the wall so it's really quite a place. So Monk Young's don't know a lot about this bar Monk Young though was the founder of Bimbos 365 which we'll talk about later. So that but this particular bar may not have been around for very long but I really just want you to savor the illustration of the lettering here that nice shadow on Young's and the way that Monk fits right in the swash of the why. And also just this patterning on the facade of the entrance I don't know if that really reflected what it looked like but it's such a cool way to add some interest using again just these three colors this metallic gold, red and black. And just a lovely effect and a tiny little illustration. Sam's grill here is another example of a half tone effects at its best. This is a single color matchbook just blue being used here on white paper but you get the grayscale effect with that half tone dot pattern. And a nice casual script and gas pipe lettering there on the reverse side. And then here is another Sam's grill. And here you see two examples of the same venue, but two different matchbooks one using flexography on the left and one using offset printing. And the flexography one had three colors so they have more money to spend at that time apparently. And here you see what you know a small vertical sign for Sam's grill sign is still there and lights up every night. And it's very basic sign, and they have also recently right before the pandemic, ranched out into the building next door. And I think we have a slide of that as well. And opened up Sam's Tavern. Now, Sam's was is the fifth oldest restaurant in the United States, it opened in 1867. It opened at a location on Kearney Street, where which was called the California market. It was a millionaire food Emporium, and eventually after a few other locations ended up on Bush Street where it is now right below Kearney. Still there, the neon, the tubes were bent by a two bender named Dan cuppy who has a shop on Treasure Island, and I'll give you some insight information. Next time you go through the Stockton tunnel and you see the quiet through tunnel sign. Dan also did the two bending for that sign. It's very cool. It's good to know I've always wondered about that. I also just need to draw people's attention to this apostrophe when you think about a neon tubes being, you know, connected, and you have to black out those connections. I think it's really cool the way that they continued that tube stroke by just twisting around to create the apostrophe. There's such an art and craft to turning letters that may have been initially drawn or just conceived into a continuous glass tube and I think this is a really nice example of that. Yeah, it's like for two benders, every job is a different puzzle to solve. And it's interesting to see how different two benders approach the same challenges different way like a possessive apostrophe. There are a number of ways it can be done and so I was fascinated to see how that particular two bender decided to do it. Absolutely. Here's fosters and a nice little illustration of the front there with the awning and another great slogan architects of appetites. We just noticed this one last night when we were the other day when we were rehearsing. And also the sign of pure food. So you don't want any of that adulterated food and she get on over the posters. Yeah, this was a common site in San Francisco. That's almost a full story fosters. This is a mission in first streets. Yeah, but there was one at Venice there was one on Polk Street. And this is what we call multi channel letters it's not just one single tube of neon that forms a letter but it's so big that you need three, three tubes to fill the letter in. So now we'll venture past the financial district into Chinatown and take a trip to the magnificent repo lounge. This is the poster child for neon restoration and we're so proud to have been involved in this project which was funded by a group in the city called SF shines and it's for storefront enhancement and so was a grant and the repo sign is so unusual because it's a three traditional Chinese lantern, and it's outlined in neon and then that's actually gold glass that spells Lee pole. And once again the arrow sign company restored this so we think lepo for being the first sign that first business on Grand Avenue to have their sign restored. And it's just kind of interesting to see that it has every kind of classic glass and we made those choices very purposefully. So the outline of the of the of the lamp is neon the lettering is gold glass, which has neon in it but then the green arrow is green glass, and the word cocktails is clear glass with argon in it. And these are all considered classic colors before they invented phosphor coating for tubes and then you could get a whole rainbow array of colors so lepo is looking pretty classic there. It's so good. Congratulations on this. It's really, it's really mostly. Here's another venue in China town. This is a stock design, but a fun one with that kind of leaning Deco, or kind of mid century Deco s. I have a real soft spot for leaning forward SS. And then a little bit further out the Tonga room very well known institution in San Francisco in the Fairmont hotel. Again this kind of loose brush lettering to evoke the islands of Polynesia perhaps. And even in the neon sign itself that style of lettering was replicated kind of hard to see in this image but a really nice image to give you a sense of the street is and for those of you haven't been there. Let I'll tell you a little bit about it. It's a fun place to go. It attracts a lot of tourists but it also attracts a lot of locals I think we've had more birthday parties there than we care to remember. And remember, and it rains, it rains every 20 minutes thunder lightning and rain on schedule. So you get a lot of a lot of island atmosphere without having to leave town. So if you look in the back in the in this photo in the background you see the floating stage on what was actually swimming pool at one point, well they still use that and the band comes out and the stage is pulled out into the center of the pool, and you never change you can see in this photo, it would the bar was more designed as a, almost as a ship. But it's it's since you know for the last 40 years or more maybe it's it's been a true tiki bar motif. And yet again another matchbook from the Tonga room island dining and as close to island dining as you can get without getting to an island. I'm in that same theme. It's the zebra room at the Huntington hotel, just really love the pattern on this and how they've extended that the full length of the match cover, and also the lettering another kind of cool gas pipe mixed with some other deco style letters that you don't see very often. Little about the Huntington hotel sign. Yeah, hi up on knob hill we've got one of the last remaining roof signs or scaffold signs or sky sign you can call it whatever you like that exist in the city. That's still neon that is still neon right and the Huntington hotel actually had an interesting history it was built in 1922 by the architectural firm of weeks and day who did a lot of work on the West Coast, and they actually built it as the Huntington apartments, but in 1924 just two years after it opened real estate developer named Eugene Fritz. He bought the building, and he converted it to a hotel, and his grandchildren his family, ending up with his grandchildren ran the hotel until they sold it to Singapore based company called Grace International in 2014. It was closed for about a year reopened in 2015 as the scarlet Huntington. So it's still a hotel that went through a $15 million renovation when they before they opened it so, but the sign is still neon and I can say one of the last remaining roof signs in the city you've also got the palace hotel, and maybe one or two others but that's it. Now moving on for the last of our two neighborhoods will venture into North Beach and little Italy, and look at this, what I believe is what we'd call a 10 striker matchbook collectors talk about the size of the matchbooks how many matches you can buy a book by either not a 10 a 20 a 30 striker, and this is one of those really narrow matchbooks where you have this just just 10 matches inside a movie. Some really nice inline letters here and a cool triangular a which is replicated in Tabarin. And it was famous for its art deco facade and interior which we'll see a little bit later and you actually may recognize this building because some of this front was maintained when the club was renamed. So the locals in the audience may know what club we're talking about. Bimbos. And you can see how cleverly they just changed the BAL to 365. That's right. There's an interior shot of the bar and all this interior is redone by a really famous architect, name of Timothy Flueger and you can see his touches all over the interior. Right. And one of the things he did was to install basically a suspended ceiling so it eliminated structural columns. So you had no there were no obstructed views and the next slide we'll see the dance floor. There you go. There is no columns. Right and bimbos open in 1931 actually opened on Market Street, which was the same year that the Bal tabern opened on Columbus, but, and we talked about Young's restaurant and the owner of Monk Young, he was bimbos partner bimbos name was actually you know, June totally, but boss, boss Monk Young couldn't pronounce it so he called him bimbo which translates as boy and Italian so, and I guess bimbo was okay with that. And then he really ran with the whole 365 theme. He opened 365 days a year. The special dinner or the world's best dinner as it was known was $3 and 65 cents. So he got a lot of mileage out of the name of the club and what an exuberant matchbook. It was also a huge hotspot during prohibition while it was still on Market Street. It was apparently the place to go. And of course we have to talk about Dolfina, as who you see this rendering of Dolfina writing the fish. Basically, bimbos was famous for the nude swimmer in this fish tank, which actually was all it was an illusion with mirrors and models. But so Dolfina never really did get wet. Okay, let's keep going. So one of the versions of that matchbook, one from Alan Randall's collection one for mine, give you a sense of just the change of the name here so went from theater restaurant to club, but otherwise very similar design. Another thing to keep in mind here though if you're collecting matchbooks is one way to date the matchbooks is by whether it is a so called back striker, or not a back striker. So you see the striking plate there at the bottom. That means that it's an older matchbook because it was before they instituted this safety device of having the striking more on the inside flat there so that second one is a newer matchbook. Usually around 1970s when they made that change so you can kind of date your collection that way. The beige room this just not only an incredible design but also a really interesting San Francisco story we don't have a lot of time so we'll go very quickly through this but the base room was opened in 1949 closed in 58 it was on 831 Broadway, and was one of the first gay drag clubs in San Francisco. Amazing lettering illustration composition here. And unlike other kind of drag clubs that were more for tourists and more of a spectacle for outsiders this was a strictly gay club and the female impersonators were mostly gay. And there's a great collection of these photographs and ephemera on found SF.org which I highly recommend you checking out where it talks a little bit more about the beige room. They often had wild after our parties and many of San Francisco's high society were seen there on special occasions. And it's got a really interesting history that you should go and check out at queer music heritage calm and found SF.org. Earthquake nagoons was the longest running traditional jazz club in San Francisco between 1960 1984. The featured act act was Turk Murphy's San Francisco jazz band, and it exposed many thousands to that style of Dixie jazz. And this character that you see over here is is Turk Murphy himself the club was named after a character in Al Cap's little Abner comic strip, and Cap gave Turk Murphy the permission to use the name as long as you keep your nose clean and play good jazz. He said, Ward Kimball, the Disney animator, who was also a trombonist, and the leader of the firehouse five plus two band was a longtime friend of Turks and designed the logo, and this cartoon rendering of the image you see photographed on the cover of that album there on the right, and he's holding a pale containing a mangled trombone and the tagline is that you often see next to this illustration was, I just happened to bring my form. This is another earthquake nagoons totally different design but I really love this. It's representative of this kind of hand lettering swat slash kind of Nuvo Victorian style that was really common in the 1970s, especially in San Francisco. And I just really like that this is just a single color design but really ornamental and interesting, all illustrated in a single kind of composition, you know, bringing both the ornamentation and the lettering together. This is a red metallic paper actually there are two I have two versions of this match but this one's just a single solid red but there's also a metallic red and that one's very hard to scan but one that's worth looking at person. This, this location here is replaced with a residential building. For those of you know, 86 Broadway, but that Alfred's that you see in the script there at the top was produced as a single tube neon so there's this really beautiful piece right here. And here it is from another really fun video which we'll see the clip of life life in San Francisco sets a very high standard, and you first realize it when you get your check. This used to be the old Barbara coast. Today it's pretty tame, but it's still one place if you're on the loose, you can really get tight. So the Barbara coast net then renamed the international settlement which you saw that that lovely neon entrance to that street held the monocothe restaurant this opened in 1939 and closed before 1950 but this one of the more magnificent matchbooks in that I've seen in my collection, both in terms of the color and the design, really great late art deco style. It was the former venue of the hippodrome which also has a really magnificent history of its own, not one that we have time to get into but good for you to check out and here that you saw that little clip is the international settlement. This is the one which the Monaco resided. Del Vecchios. Unfortunately now this is the kind of boring facade of the centerfold strip club but at the time it was this cool restaurant and a really nice example of kind of turning letters into illustration. That's cutlery typography, right. Thank you I didn't know that. So North Beach when moving on into which Fisherman's War for the final leg of the tour. Thanks for hanging with us. Alliotto's really nice illustration here which is not giving you a sense of the front of the building but what it's like to actually be inside dining at the restaurant on Fisherman's War. Also really beautiful number eight that kind of twisted letter style. Alliotto's what I love. Well one it's a gigantic fish it's almost as as wide as the storefront but look at those letter forms. I think that they each have a bubble inside them I've never really seen letter forms quite like this with the little center bulge, but you got to love the neon fish. This is number nine Fisherman's grotto. Another great neon sign pretty extravagant. I guess these are rooftop science I never really thought about it that way. But you might not know that the number eight for Alliotto's and number nine for Fisherman's grotto. When these became full service restaurants they replaced the original stalls like the seafood stalls that the Alliotto's had and people from Fisherman's grotto. And their stalls were just numbered like stall number eight install number nine. So when they became restaurants, they just carried the address with them. And then they made a big sign with flashing and crescent bulbs and neon. I just, I just love that big nine. And it would the conversion from, you know, canvas sided seafood stall to restaurant, at least for Fisherman's grotto took place in 1935 so this is old signage it's still there. And most of it lights up, but just gives you an idea of the durability of neon and spy the fact that a major part of it is made of glass. Absolutely. So the Bell Air Club, another beautiful matchbook. And again this recurring theme of the glowing martini glass we've seen that before with frosty they're both so frosty. Yeah, that's what it is it's not blowing it's frosty thank you. And the point of vista, many of you know, long term long time establishment there in that Marina district. And I love this matchbook. Just, I think it's from 1980s illustration of the steep hill on one. On hide there, and the trolley or the cable car coming down the hill and the neon sign, which has changed over time but here's kind of what we would call in typography and unshield style which has its basis in medieval England. And we think that's the same metal cabinet and it's just been reworked. A little bit. Yeah, you know we'd be remiss if we didn't tell people that the first Irish coffee drink in the United States was served at the point of vista in 1952. You can see the bartenders and the photo on the left, lining up all the Irish coffees, you know, that will be served. And in photo on the right. So take a good look at that cable car, because what you're seeing there is what was called a California style like for California Street, double ended cable car, because before the power hide cable car line was developed and open in 1957. There was no cable car turnaround cable turn around now would be positioned directly slightly to the left of the cable car itself. In 1957 there was no turnabout there so they use the double ended cars like they use on the California Street line. And we're always on the lookout for transit photographs because where there's transit their signs. Great point. Well speaking of transit maybe not the kind of transit you're talking about but cars transit. The odds drive in we don't know much about this establishment but really fun matchbook both in terms of again letter as illustration with the chef there in odds, both in the sign and the lettering on the matchbook. And also, kind of the mid century amorphous blob that are sometimes known as fried eggs there with the clouds. And here is the only photo we found so far of odds, and with a totally different, not as interesting sign but it looks to be neon, and it was a driving not not many drive ins in San Francisco so we'd love to know more about that. I think we're in the home stretch right. That's it that was our last one and I just wanted to say you know, this is only one part of the city. Randall and and Al have really done incredible tours and research, both in San Francisco and in the East base we hope to do more of these in the future. And we do have something big coming up. And neon speaks is now an international online symposium, all about neon and its creative legacy so saves the dates. That's going to be September 1112 and go to nanspeaks.org find out all about it. Yeah, this will be the fourth year we've been fortunate enough to do neon speak so please join us. Yeah, I get to hear from a lot more people who know about neon. Thank you for joining us tonight. Do we have questions. Yeah, I know we're a little short on time but we do have two great questions in the q amp a field so let's stick with those maybe. Is gas pipe a font, or just the name of a style of type that styled after metal or neon lettering. So the question there isn't a typeface or a font called gas pipe there are a lot that are in that style. And I'll drop a link into the chat later and you can find some fonts in that style but it is just a style of lettering initially and then there were more typefaces that were inspired by it. So, what kind of inks were used to print these matchbooks that silver on the rainbow room matchbook was amazing. Unfortunately, not an expert in ink or printing. So what I told you is as much as I know about that. But it is true when they use those metallic inks, either silver or gold added another dimension that was was really interesting but I think in the flexography you did get some more opaque inks than you would get in traditional four color printing so that kind of answered that other question before it was really about getting more saturation in the matchbook. Another thing about ink and printing is that now we always like it's great we have, we have lead free inks soy based inks well the lead big lead based inks were so saturated and opaque and beautiful colors, which is really is like half the charm of these matchbooks so it was, it was the lead that made it so beautiful. It's really interesting you say that because it's the same thing with neon science and the background painting on neon science on the cabinets was lead based paint. In fact, even the glass had had lead component to it which is no longer manufacturing. The leaded glass was easier to work with. Yeah, but much more hazardous to your health. And now through in this amazing. Thank you for sending this yeah. Because it combined both neon sign making and matchbooks. This is a wonderful piece. So basically that if you don't maintain your neon sign it's going to look like a whino on a bender. And if you maintain your sign you look like you just stepped out of the haberdashery. So much fun we really appreciate everybody sticking around so long and such a great turnout. And we'd love to see you at the next SFPL event, which is the 25th of August. That's right. Thank you to a deep or sincere thank you to Steven for all of this all together and just giving a great presentation. And thanks to Anissa and Lisa at the San Francisco Public Library for inviting us and shepherding through the whole evening. Thank you Katie Connery. Always a pleasure to work with you. And I'd like to thank the audience for staying with us tonight it's amazing how many of you stuck around for the entire presentation so we really appreciate it thank you very much. And again I'll just shout out the all the links from tonight as they were going or in that link that I just put in the chat box and yes, you can watch this again on YouTube. Thank you so much. And thank you to new one museum Katie Steven letter for market and Randall and out thank you so much. We'll see you again library community. Good night. Thank you so much.