About The Book

Alec Scott's Oldest San Francisco comes out fall 2023, from Reedy Press. It features stories of the institutions that helped make San Francisco the place it is today, a forward-looking city with a strong sense of its past.

From sleepy outpost San Francisco became, with the discovery of gold inland, a sudden city, a louche, anything-goes frontier town, one that has since drawn generations of seekers.

Oldest San Francisco speaks of transformations: Of the storied prison-turned-museum, Alcatraz, of the fort-turned-park, the Presidio, and of the ferry building’s shift from transit hub to temple to food.

On the subject of food, the book features some food firsts. Here is the white-tablecloth restaurant, the Tadich Grill, that has, from the Gold Rush on, served downtown diners — and that brought mesquite grilling to America. Here also is the chocolatier, Ghirardelli, a family firm that helped make San Francisco a chocolate mecca, its illuminated sign one of the last sights seen by those sailing out from here to fight the War in the Pacific. Here is the origin story of a local fast food, the Mission Burrito, that went on to become a global sensation — or here are the origin stories, since two restaurants claim to have introduced the dish to a hungry public.

It speaks of the oldest Chinatown in North America and the city’s first public square, Portland, aka Chinatown’s living room. This square was where the first baseball games in this baseball-mad city were played. (Re this madness: the book also gives a potted history of the San Francisco Giants, the oldest pro sports franchise here.)

Oldest San Francisco tells tales of the city’s oldest building, Mission Dolores, and the first scientific institution founded West of the Mississippi, The Academy of Sciences. It speaks of the oldest public-affairs forum in the country, the Commonwealth Club, and one of the oldest operas, San Francisco’s world-class company.

And so, the book has short versions of many of the tales of this city you’d expect. But it also recounts some less told tales: of San Francisco’s oldest auto-shop, Sicilian immigrant Babe Alioto’s garage, which has gone from fixing Packards to Teslas; of its oldest mattress-maker, McRoskey’s, manufacturing what, for years, has been considered the Rolls-Royce of mattresses; of the longest-running bookstore, Books Inc., begun by a man who peddled books to prospectors in the Gold Rush.

It speaks of innovations in social services pioneered here: of the world’s first community-run suicide hotline; of America’s first proper senior center; of an orphanage founded in the Gold Rush that has turned into a youth-focused agency, expert at helping young people in crisis; and, finally, of the US’s oldest non-sectarian free clinic, the Haight-Ashbury Clinic, the place that ministered to the collateral damage of the so-called Summer of Love.

Oldest San Francisco speaks, literally, of civic fabrics: Here are the stories of the oldest extant blue jeans in the world and the first rainbow flag.

Throughout, the book focuses on the people of San Francisco, those connected to these longstanding institutions. The book visits with Grace Slick, Neil Young and David Crosbie, as they lay down the soundtrack of the ‘60s in a still extant recording studio in the Tenderloin. … It spends time with a woman, Abbie Dwelle, who not only knows how to wear a fedora, but has learned how to make one — after she took over the century-old Paul’s Hat Works. … Here is Fritz Maytag, one of the appliance-company Maytags, a beer lover who decided to rescue the city’s flagging historic brewery, Anchor, and preserve its distinctive method of brewing — will the brewery live on? We’ll see … Watch as Marc and Vicki Duffet, the unlikely owners of the deco motel, the Ocean Park, weather (with their customary resourcefulness and good humor) a hold-up.

Through these small stories, a larger one maybe emerges – here, distilled, is some sense of San Francisco's spirit.

BOOK INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781681064994

Softcover, 6x9, 224 pages, $22.50

Available 10/1/23

ORDERING INFORMATION

Phone: 314-833-6600

orders@reedypress.com