On Friday, I went down to Lost Landscapes 4, at the Herbst Theater, on the protest-unfriendly side of City Hall. I only had one ticket, which illustrates a vexing conundrum: when I want to go to an event where tickets are scarce, I need to buy the tickets early, but I don't like paying the price of two tickets without trustworthy confirmation that I will have a companion for the event. Some people might suggest scalping the extra ticket, but I have neither the talent nor the inclination to do this successfully. So I bought one ticket - but it was numbered so that I could not add a companion at a later date in an adjacent seat.
The actual presentation of Lost Landscapes was an intriguing mix of event footage and home films. I may have been better prepared in some regards than other members of the audience thanks to many talks with senior alumni of my troop, but there were plenty of surprises, and sights of things known but never seen. San Francisco archivists have benefited from the nearly concurrent development of early photography and the expansion of San Francisco, as well as the ubiquitous desire of tourists to document their holiday. Several things which I learned from this: the traffic on Market has always been bad; the first transportation battle in the city was between horses and horseless carriages; hats used to be an acceptable substitute (predecessor?) for placards. I really do wonder at that last point: did the strikers feel that waving a hat was sufficient to indicate their cause?
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