Research and Writing - San Francisco Style

I have been spending the last few days researching for a story I am writing.  The story line was created a little over ten years ago.  Suddenly in the past week, I have had more and more information and ideas come to me for this story than I almost know what to do with.

Looking through at lot of pages from the Outside Neighborhood Project, SF Genealogy, the Ocean Beach Bulletin and the California Digital Newspaper Collection I have found a wealth of information on subjects that have stumped me for years.  Many of these places were still in existence when I was a child or still are around...at least building wise.  Many have been torn down over the years, caught fire or just vanished in the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire.  The history I have found has been fascinating!  The articles from the years of 1895-1896 in the San Francisco Call Newspaper Archive have more than charged my imagination, they have been extremely valuable in giving me a more in depth view of life during that period of time.  One article was humorous in the fact it was written as a complaint to the newspaper from a gentlewoman of the period complaining that the papers gossip had besmirched her good name by printing an article talking about her assignation with a gentleman at the Cliff House in a private dining room.  She claimed not to have known of the Cliff House's sordid history.  Women didn't go out with "strange" men unescorted in those days...and especially not to the first Cliff House.  It was known to be quite a rowdy place before Adolph Sutro purchased it, being a saloon, diner, gambling hall and supposedly rumored to also have some prostitution going on at times.  

If you ever get bored and wish to look through some interesting sites, I suggest you try one of these above and check it out.

For the record, her is a photo from 2002 of myself drinking a Gin Fizz in the corner booth overlooking Ocean Beach in the Redwood Room of Cliff House prior to it's new (and ugly unhistoric) reincarnation.
To the ghosts and memories of the Old Cliff House...Cheers!

And again that same day by the old lookout at the Cliff House by the Camera Obscura.