[images] cool grey city

a while back i saw on instagram some images from a long out-of-print book called San Francisco, the Cool, Gray City of Love. the style and subject matter of the illustrations is terribly charming. they bring to my mind perhaps something like if Henry Darger had lived in california and gotten some sun decided to just draw scenes from the real world:

i have since obtained scans from the entire book and have too many favorites to count!

the artist here was Jean Porter, evidently a very San Francisco person of her time who was involved mainly in the performing arts. she was the first manager for the Palace of Fine Arts Theater (according to the introduction of this book, which is the only source of information i can find about Jean Porter)!

Garden Court atrium, palace hotel

the co-author was someone named Leonard Cahn who (again according to the book’s introduction, and not deeply biographied in any other way that Google can see) was a land developer, and who after fighting in the Spanish Civil War came on back home to fix up some of the big brick boxes on SF’s waterfront.

the City of Paris department store, which became Neiman Marcus, which filed for bankruptcy in October

i’m very partial to the Chinatown pages:

a produce market on Stockton. the street numbers have changed, but the produce and those yellow tiles are still here

and these two of the Conservatory of Flowers:

the year 1974 called — i told them about “microdosing” and they laughed and laughed and laughed and hung up on me

Jack’s still has the name on the window but was a brasserie from 2002-09, and in 2016 was apparently purchased and “is set to become a co-working space.”

the book’s introduction notes that Jean Porter planned to travel to “Paris, London, and New York to paint the theatrical scenes she knows so well.” as for Leonard, he was, at the time of publication in 1981, “working on a novel that concerns itself with the development of a large real estate project on the San Francisco waterfront” (!!). i would die to see Jean’s paintings of Paris and read Leonard’s tale of real estate development derring-do. sadly, i’ve found no evidence that either of these projects were completed.

where we at, baby? creepin through the fog.. —DMX, r.i.p.

but i’m very glad for these paintings, and for this city, as it was and as it is. i will probably lay out the $50 for a copy of this on ebay eventually.