Month

September 2014
The Pulgas water temple is located in Woodside, near the Crystal Springs Reservoir and one mile north of the Filoli estate.   It was built in 1934 to celebrate the completion of the Hetch Hetchy pipeline, and represents the terminus of the pipeline.   The Temple closely resembles an earlier structure, the 1910 Sunol Water Temple, designed...
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  Visitors to the Bay area are curious about, if not fearful of earthquakes. They have seen pictures of earthquake aftermath, understand that another quake is inevitable, and want to know how Bay area natives live with this threat. I usually reply with an old saying, “earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do”. Major quakes in...
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“Chinese Whispers” is a local research and storytelling project dedicated to recording the history of the Chinese in the Bay area. Currently they have teamed with the National Park Service to tell the story of the Chinese shrimp-fishing industry of the late 19-early 20th centuries. Saturday, I drove to Richmond for the kick-off event, a...
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Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), photographer, inventor, and artist settled in San Francisco in 1866. He soon established a freelance business photographing landscapes of the west, such as Yosemite, and accepting commissions to document the homes and possessions of the wealthy. Later (1872-1882) Muybridge collaborated with Leland Stanford, photographing Stanford’s trotting horses at his farm in Palo...
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