Next Three Events:
Download the Spring 2025 calendar as a pdf here.
Saturday, April 26, 1–3:30 PM
with gathering 3:30–5:30 PM
Noe Valley Then & Now Photo Hunt
with SFPL Noe Valley Branch Library
Who was José de Jesús Noé and where did his former residence stand? What about John Meirs Horner, and why did he create Horner’s Addition? Traverse Dale and Vale Streets, walk the route of dairy cows and billy goats, and more!
Shaping San Francisco and the San Francisco Public Library Noe Valley Branch host a “know your neighborhood history” photo hunt. Join us and explore the neighborhoods of “Then” Rancho San Miguel, of which today’s Noe Valley was a part. Around Noe Valley and Fairmount Heights, historic images will be posted where they were originally taken. Participants are encouraged to capture the “Now” views of today’s city using their own cameras. Choose from our selection of routes.* Each one reveals how this neighborhood’s industry, landscape, and demographics have changed over time.
You are invited to share your photos from the hunt, the best of which will be added to Shaping San Francisco’s digital archive, FoundSF.org. Wrapping up at the San Francisco Public Library Noe Valley Branch, enjoy light refreshments, tell tales of discovery, and receive a keepsake “zine” specially designed for the event.
* Some chosen routes have hills to climb and descend, and others are more forgiving.
RSVP to shaping@foundsf.org
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Saturday, May 10, 11-1 pm
What's That Smell? NE Mission Industrial History
A Walking Tour with the San Francisco International Arts Festival (tickets link below)
Chris Carlsson, long-time grassroots historian and guide to San Francisco's lost, forgotten and overlooked histories, takes participants on a walk around the old industrial sites of the North Mission. Pungent odors such as ammonia, baking bread, and roasting hops, once common, are now only memories. As part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, this is a ticketed event. Tickets on sale here.
Wednesday, May 14, 7:30 pm
80 Years After HUAC:
McCarthyism Resurgent
In 1960 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held its last-ever public hearings in San Francisco City Hall. Police turned fire hoses on peaceful student protesters while fiery rebukes were issued to the reactionary congressmen by Communist Party “witnesses.” This was a crucial turning point between the bone-chilling McCarthyism of the 1950s and the soon-to-explode movements for social liberation of the 1960s. We welcome David Palumbo-Liu to discuss what we might we learn about today as we witness transphobia on the rise, efforts to stamp out all pro-Palestinian speech, and other attacks on resistance in a strange echo of the ghosts of Cold War hysteria eight decades ago.
Co-sponsored by Left in the Bay
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Explore Shaping San Francisco:
Ecology Emerges
Discussions and reflections on the history of Bay Area ecological activism, based on oral histories documenting the past 50 years.
Ecology Emerges is an oral history gathering project to explore the past 50 years of ecological activism in the Bay Area and the role that individual and institutional memories play in the development, policy proposals, and interrelationships that together make up the existing networks of ecological politics. We document the living ecological activist movement, in their own words, but also in a larger context of urban growth and globalization.
Oral Histories
Shaping San Francisco, as part of our ongoing work, sits down with people who have stories to tell and conducts oral history interviews.
Check them out here.
"Editor's Pick Tour" from FoundSF.org
Comprised of over 1,400 pages, and 2,500 historical photos, the wiki-based archive FoundSF.org is the product of hundreds of contributors, regular people who were compelled by the chance to investigate some piece of this City's past.
Shaping San Francisco is fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media, a California non-profit corporation.