San Francisco History Podcast – Sparkletack

The Park Service website reads simply "sing traditional working songs aboard a floating vessel." The songs? Sea chanteys. The vessel? A majestic iron-hulled squarerigger called the "Balclutha". I had ...

11 Mar 200618min

Though the rest of the country thinks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens as a southerner, it was a spell in San Francisco and the wilds of California which turned young Sam into "Mark Twain". This week’s pod...

4 Mar 200616min

By now just about every San Franciscophile has been alerted to the fact that April 18th of this year will mark the centennial of the 1906 earthquake — the Big One which destroyed the city that once wa...

25 Feb 200617min

San Francisco has a long-standing reputation as a literature-loving town, as evidenced by government statistics ranking us as having the highest per-capita spending on books in the country. Over the d...

18 Feb 200630min

On a tour of the alleyways of Chinatown last week I learned something that I hadn’t heard before — namely, that the world-famous Chinese fortune cookie was invented right here in San Francisco. That’s...

11 Feb 200616min

Downtown San Francisco on a Tuesday afternoon, and every businessman’s face looks the same. Whatever happened to eccentric and iconic characters like Emperor Norton and Oofty Goofty? You search the st...

4 Feb 200620min

There are only three cemeteries left within the city limits of San Francisco. Note the phrase carefully: “left” in San Francisco. There were once far more than just three, which makes perfect sense — ...

28 Jan 200640min

Established at the dawn of the century, the San Francisco Motorcycle Club has thrived for over a hundred years.There are plenty of fossils in this town, relics of another age, but the SFMC represents ...

21 Jan 200635min