San Francisco is the kind of city where it feels like a great story can always be found right around the next corner. Well, in this case, that is exactly what happened because this story begins with something sitting on a Mission District street corner three years ago. It was a small, gray filing cabinet, one barely bigger than a microwave oven.
To one passer-by, it appeared not to be something left for the garbage collectors to pick up but left there in the hopes that someone would give it a new home. The man, a San Francisco artist named Donnie Weaver, obliged.
Inside, he discovered more than 900 photographic slides of life in San Francisco in the 1960s. For a while, Weaver considered using the slides for an art project but eventually, he reached out to someone he knew would be fascinated by the history contained in them: David Gallagher.
Gallagher is an archivist and avid collector of old San Francisco photographs. He displays many of them on his website, sfmemory.org, and has gained a large following on X (formerly Twitter) posting historic photos daily.
Weaver was correct that Gallagher would be interested.
Local
“I started looking at them, I got excited about them. They're great,” said Gallagher. The photographs stood out for two reasons. One, they captured a wide variety of daily life around the city, from BART construction to mounted SFPD on patrol. They were also clearly taken by a professional, each one well-composed and exposed. The only thing missing was the name of the person who took them.
“Over the years, I've realized that honoring the photographer, honoring the creator of the material is important. And putting a name to that is important,” Gallagher said.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
After a while, a light bulb clicked for Gallagher when he saw one set of photos taken at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. “I said, 'This is a big event. There are all kinds of people in the picture. Something's going on,’” Gallagher recounted. He did some research and pinpointed the date the photo was taken and confirmed that the San Francisco Chronicle had sent a photographer to cover the event as well.
That is when he turned to Peter Hartlaub to aid in his search. Hartlaub is a Chronicle reporter who has made many forays into the basement archives of the paper’s Mission St. headquarters in the service of a good story.
“There's nothing that makes me feel more like a kid, than when someone comes to me and says, 'I have a mystery. And maybe you can help me solve it,’” Hartlaub said.
Hartlaub immediately grabbed the negatives from that day and discovered the mystery photographer’s face staring back at him in a handful of the photos.
Hartlaub asked Chronicle photographers he knew who worked during that era if they recognized the man. No dice. So, Hartlaub turned to his readers for help.
He published a story about the file cabinet, the photographs, and the mystery of who took them. It wasn’t two hours later that someone reached out to David Gallagher with a name: James Martin.
Martin had worked for the San Francisco Unified School District and as part of his job would take pictures of city life to be used in classroom instruction. The amateur historians now had a name to put to the pictures. They also discovered someone just as interested in the photos as they were: Martin’s family.
Martin’s widow Doris, and son Ted were both delighted to be reconnected with Martin’s photographs. They were in many of them as Martin often used his family as models in his pictures of daily life.
For Hartlaub and Gallagher, they are thrilled to have solved the case of the mystery photographer, and not just for the sake of history.
"It's so great that these photos are out in the world. I mean, they're important to our city. They're important to our community and our history,” said Hartlaub, “but the level of importance to a family member is so much more important."
