People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

About this book

"This book seeks to simultaneously document and engage. We aim to make disappearing and long-gone landscapes more visible in social memory, and to combat the erasure of visual clues to the past. We offer this geography in the form of a guide book, which is a practical approach through which to connect to readers as more than consumers of words on a page. We hope you will travel these streets, seeking clues to the past that help explain the present; these are real places where people have sought to make the world as they would want it. To that end, this guide is about understanding how places come into being, both in the Bay Area and beyond. The first four chapters each address a geographic region, first the East Bay, then South Bay & Peninsula, followed by San Francisco, then North Bay & Islands. These chapters are organized geographically and alphabetically; most essays are titled by the place in which events occurred, rather than with descriptive titles that suggest what took place there. Also, watch for the 'nearby' and 'related' sites after many entries. Chapter Five offers suggestions for creating thematic tours out of the material in the first four chapters. Finally, two appendices offer further resources for wandering and thinking critically about geography, history, politics and culture in the Bay Area, as well as a timeline of key historical moments that frame the text"--