The Wandering Cannon

by John Martini

For several years in the late 1990s, I had an office in the old Army Museum building at the Presidio of San Francisco. Decorating my lawn were cannon of various ages, sizes, and artistic merit, dating from the 1600s to World War II. The one that drew the most attention, especially from school children, was an ornate, ten-foot long bronze cannon captured in 1898 by the U.S. Army in Cuba and engraved with the name “Prince de Conde,” a nod to its French origins.

The cannon had arrived in San Francisco in 1899 as a war prize and subsequently underwent a tortuous trail of exhibit locations before ending up on the Presidio lawn in 1973. I’ve been able to document its meanderings with the help of the photo collections of OpenSFHistory.org and a few newspaper search engines.

Pioneer (James Lick) Monument at Hyde & Grove Streets, March 12, 1899. Cannon in front. (wnp13.023, courtesy of a private collector.)

Without getting sidetracked into rivet-counter land (of which I am a resident), the cannon was cast in France in 1754 and classified as a Canon de 24 Vallier, capable of firing a 24-pound iron ball. It was a standard French cannon of the era, and in accordance with the fashion of the time it was lavishly decorated from muzzle to breech with bas-relief carvings and engravings. It also displayed a grim motto in Latin: “Ultima Ratio Regum”—“I Am The Final Argument of Kings.”

Somehow, the cannon came under Spanish ownership and made its way to Cuba where it was emplaced in the defenses of Santiago. There, during the Spanish-American War, it was captured by U.S. Army soldiers commanded by General William “Pecos Bill” Shafter. Numerous other cannon were captured along with the Prince De Conde, and a dozen of the finest bronzes were shipped back to the U.S. as war prizes for public display. Because General Shafter was from California, the government allowed him to select two cannons for his home state. He chose Los Angeles and San Francisco as their homes.

San Francisco’s trophy gun was originally displayed at the busy intersection of 8th Street and Market and Grove, directly in front of the looming, doomed old City Hall and its now-controversial Pioneer Monument. The San Francisco Call covered the dedication ceremony on March 22, 1900, and reported how General Shafter, hero of the Cuban campaign, personally presented the cannon to Mayor James Phelan as a memorial to the valor and patriotism of the U.S. Army.

The article included a photo of derby hatted men surrounding the cannon with a concluding paragraph: “It was an object of interest to the passing crowds all the afternoon and evening, for there were few who did not stop to see and to read the inscriptions it bears…It has probably spilled blood enough to earn a quiet rest on the city’s lawn, where its metal heart may reflect upon the past and where it can do no more harm.”

The Prince de Conde appears in innumerable photos of old City Hall and the Pioneer Monument taken both before and after the earthquake of 1906. The cannon somehow survived the fires that followed the earthquake and reduced the surrounding Civic Center and commercial districts to cinders. It apparently remained in front of the Pioneer Monument for years after the rubble of City Hall was cleared away until sometime, around 1920, the city decided to relocate it to the then-new De Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. There, paired with another 1898 trophy cannon, the Prince de Conde guarded the doorway to the west wing of museum, which appropriately enough displayed military trophies from the just-concluded Great War.

Group posing outside entrance of de Young Museum, with Prince de Conde cannon on far right. (wnp27.1704, courtesy of a private collector.)

It’s not recorded when the Prince de Conde and its mate were removed from the de Young but it was definitely before the 1950s—otherwise this Boomer-era kid would have remembered scrambling all over it. The gun likely went into storage for a couple of decades before re-emerging as a display piece at old Fort Point, where I photographed it in 1969 alongside a Civil War reenactor lowering the American flag.

Fort Point and the Prince de Conde cannon in 1969. Photograph by John Martini.

In July 1973, the cannon was relocated once again, this time to the front lawn of Presidio Bldg. #2 (originally built in 1864 as a hospital) near the post’s main parade ground. The Sixth Army was creating a military museum in Bldg. #2, and the Prince de Conde became part of an “ordnance park” of antique cannon displayed outside the Presidio Army Museum, which formally opened in March 1974.

When Congress ordered the Presidio to close down by 1994, the Army’s Center for Military History reclaimed many of the museum’s artifacts and transported them back to Washington, D.C. However, the Prince de Conde and several other cannon were left behind since they were still the property of the City of San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museums.

Although the Sixth Army and its museum are long gone, the Prince de Conde remains where it’s been for nearly 45 years—on the Presidio lawn at the corner of Funston Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard, its muzzle forever pointed protectively at the YMCA parking lot across the street.

Retired National Park Service ranger John Martini is a volunteer helping us process the OpenSFHistory collection. His excellent book on Sutro Baths is available on outsidelands.org

Prince de Conde cannon in the Presidio. (GOGA-18848, courtesy of Golden Gate National Recreation Area)

Temple Emanu-El: A Closer Look

by Woody LaBounty

A closer look at an OpenSFHistory image.

As naively disrespectful boys in the 1970s, we would ride our bikes into the Temple Emanu-El courtyard; do a quick loop around its fountain; and coast back downhill on Lake Street to our 11th Avenue block. The red clay tile dome rising from the northwest corner of Arguello Boulevard and Lake Street was a landmark of the Richmond District for us, an orientation point to lead us back home when wandering the hilltops of Fort Miley, Buena Vista Park, or Golden Gate Heights.

Temple Emanu-El on Arguello at Arguello Boulevard and Lake Street, March 1972. (wnp25.2465, 35mm slide, courtesy of a private collector.)

The predecessor Temple Emanu-El on Sutter Street between Powell and Stockton was just as much an icon, culturally and visually. At the time of its dedication in 1866, the temple was home to the largest Reform Jewish congregation on the west coast, and for decades its distinctive onion-domed twin towers shone on the slope of Nob Hill, gleaming in bronze-plate above the smaller buildings that separated the temple from Union Square.

Temple Emanu-El on Sutter Street, circa 1890. (wnp27.4144, Pope Collection, courtesy of a private collector.)

Designer William Patton was an expert in Gothic Revival and he brought hallmarks of the style to Emanu-El with details celebrating Jewish life. Illuminated six-pointed Stars of David glimmered in stained glass windows and the Tablets of the Law was set above the main entrance. The onion domes that topped the eight-sided towers were plated in bronze with golden globe finials. Fred Rosenbaum, in his book, “Visions of Reform, Congregation Emanu-El and the Jews of San Francisco 1849-1999,” wrote how the synagogue’s towers acted as beacons of the entire Bay Area:

“One hundred sixty-feet high, these gold-tipped spires were an integral part of the early San Francisco skyline: they were a prominent landmark for ships entering the Golden Gate; they could be seen by hikers across the bay in the Berkeley hills.”

The towers were iconic landmarks even after the April 18, 1906 earthquake. While the massive fires that followed the quake gutted Temple Emanu-El, the frame and towers remained standing. As we sort through hundreds of post-earthquake images in the OpenSFHistory collection, Temple Emanu-El’s ghostly skeleton acts as a wayfinder for us, a place-marker, along with the Call Building and the “birdcage” Whittell building, to identify locations in a landscape of blackened rubble.

Ruins of Temple Emanu-El after the 1906 earthquake. (wnp14.4603.jpg, negative courtesy of a private collector.)

After the earthquake, the Jewish community rallied to restore the temple. Cone-topped blocks on the towers replaced the elegant onion domes, and the walls and the stained glass were restored. On September 1, 1907, the doors to the sanctuary reopened, and the space served as temple for another 15 years.

After the Richmond District was chosen for a new temple in the 1920s, the growing Emanu-El congregation sold the Sutter Street property. (The medical office building, 450 Sutter Street, occupies the lot today, and the golden gleam of the temple’s old onion domes is more than matched by architect Timothy Pflueger’s Neo-Mayan entryway and lobby.)

Ground was broken for the new Temple Emanu-El in August 1924. The cornerstone at Arguello and Lake was laid with the same trowel that had been used for the Sutter Street synagogue sixty years earlier.

The San Franciscans: Irene Canby LeRoy & Family

by Nicole Meldahl

Researching locals found in an OpenSFHistory image.

History work is anything but glamorous. Long hours, laughable pay, up to your elbows in dusty boxes that reek of mildew half the time. But we history nerds are a passionate, persistent sort and sometimes that pays off in what I like to call “archival serendipity.” One extreme example of archival serendipity allowed me to meet another San Franciscan—Irene Canby LeRoy.

Irene Canby LeRoy with daughter Peggy on the lawn of Colonel James Canby’s Presidio of San Francisco residence, c. 1926. (wnp14.0314, negative courtesy of a private collector).

While working at the Park Archives and Records Center in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area a few years ago, I was cataloging a batch of photos and ephemera in a large blue envelope marked “Irene Canby” that was inherited from the old Presidio Army Museum. This one was a real conundrum: no donation receipts, partial IDs that often weren’t very helpful of photos that ranged from formal portraits of nineteenth-century European nobility to 1920s snapshots of a small Jack Russell terrier wearing a snazzy harness. Each time I tried to unravel this puzzle I inevitably failed and had to set it aside, hoping something mixed in with another collection would be the key to unlocking the Canby secrets.

The Canby-LeRoy family dog: key to solving a history mystery. (wnp14.0320, negative courtesy of a private collector).

The Canby-LeRoy family at the Presidio with their dog—our archives serendipity. (wnp14.0315, negative courtesy of a private collector).

Then one day I was processing a batch of unidentified family snapshots and negatives at Western Neighborhoods Project, and I couldn’t believe my eyes: there he was, the Canby’s Jack Russell terrier wearing the same harness, photographed in the same location in the Presidio of San Francisco. Piecing together scraps of information—visual and written—from materials held by both organizations, I was able to compile a history of Irene Canby and her family. Archival serendipity made possible by one persistent archivist.

Peggy and her pooch at the LeRoy residence on Vallejo Street. (wnp14.0308, negative courtesy of a private collector).

The LeRoy family home decorated for Christmas c. 1930. (wnp14.0311, negative courtesy of a private collector).

And what lovely local history it is. Irene F. Canby was the daughter of Eugenia (Cunningham) and Colonel James Canby. Colonel Canby had roots in Delaware that distantly relate him to former Secretary of State John Kerry through that European nobility. The colonel came to California as an officer in the U.S. Army. He served in the Spanish American War and settled down in the Presidio of San Francisco as post paymaster with his wife and daughter. Irene married Eugene Rene LeRoy, son of a French importer/exporter who inherited much of a defaulted Mexican land grant called Rancho Guadalupe located near Santa Barbara. The couple had one daughter in 1925, Marguerite, and the small family lived just outside the Presidio gates—taking trips with their pooch to visit Grandpa Canby on post, playing at Ocean Beach and in Golden Gate Park, being San Franciscans.

The LeRoy family enjoying a day at Ocean Beach. (wnp14.0322, negative courtesy of a private collector).

Colonel Canby passed away at Letterman General Hospital in 1935, and by that time the LeRoy family was living in Palo Alto where Marguerite (better known as Peggy) would attend Stanford University. There she met and later married a dashing young man named William Nichols, who left University to enlist in the Air Force during World War II. Sadly, Irene would outlive her entire family—surviving the loss of her mother in 1951, her daughter in 1981, and her husband in 1985.

Irene pushes Peggy and friend on a ride at Children’s Playground in Golden Gate Park, c. 1930. (wnp14.0321, negative courtesy of a private collector).

It’s hard to know how and why family archives are split up, but my guess is the LeRoy family had an estate sale after Irene’s death. According to our private collector, he purchased the Canby materials now accessible on OpenSFHistory at an antique store in San Francisco sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Materials that ended up at the Presidio Army Museum and later inherited by the Park Archives may have been purchased at the same antique store, perhaps directly from the estate…who knows? I’m just glad I was in the right place at the right time to ensure another family of San Franciscans no longer suffer the injustice of being forgotten.

1868 Earthquake: A Closer Look

by Woody LaBounty

A closer look at an OpenSFHistory image.

It is not surprising that a collection of historical San Francisco images would have many, many views of the 1906 earthquake. Outside of the Gold Rush, which turned the small Mexican pueblo of Yerba Buena into the boomtown of San Francisco, no single event has had a bigger effect on the city’s landscape, legacy, and lore than the earthquake of April 18, 1906 with the fires that followed.

But I hope you forgive me when I say, after viewing hundreds and hundreds of images of the city destroyed in 1906, I feel a perverse interest in coming across photographs of a different San Francisco earthquake.

Damage on Commercial Street from the October 21, 1868 earthquake. (wnp37.00713, stereograph by Carleton Watkins, courtesy of a private collector.)

To an old-timer walking on Market Street on April 17, 1906, the “Big One” was two generations past. On October 21, 1868, 149 years ago this month, an estimated 6.8 magnitude earthquake hit a little before 8:00 a.m. (Although it would be known until 1906 as “the great San Francisco earthquake,” the event flattened the city of Hayward and did far more damage in other Bay Area locales.)

Earthquakes were noted before the arrival of the Americans—a major one in 1836, another damaging Mission Dolores and Presidio buildings in 1838. Significant earthquakes also struck in 1857 and 1865. But the city continued to put up masonry buildings (good against the frequent fires, bad in seismic events) and filled in creeks, marshes, and parts of the bay to expand into shaky “made ground.”

October 21, 1868 earthquake damage to Tobacco & Cigar Warehouse on 300 block of Commercial Street. (wnp37.00950, stereograph by Oscar Foss, courtesy of a private collector.)

The October 21, 1868 earthquake killed five people, injured another two score, and inflicted $400,000 in property damage, mostly in areas reclaimed from the old Yerba Buena cove. Frightened horses charged through dry goods store windows, sidewalks caved in, California Street erupted with fissures, and collapsing brick walls crushed men.

Malcolm E. Barker’s book, “More San Francisco Memoirs, 1852-1899, The Ripening Years,” has two excellent accounts of the quake. Louis Laurent Simonin was taking a bath in a hotel when it hit. He ran out of his room half-dressed, and he wasn’t alone: “[T]he hotel guests, panic-stricken, terrified, screaming and gesticulating wildly, were crawling down the stairs on all fours: the women in their nightclothes, with hair unkempt, the men in their bathrobes and, for the most part, barefoot…”

The Rail Road House, the S. P. Taylor & Co. paper company, and a tobacco warehouse on Commercial Street were some of the most dramatically affected. Edward Bosqui ran down to his office in the vicinity: “Two dead bodies were discovered under the debris of the coping and fire-walls which had fallen on them on Clay Street, nearly opposite our office; and farther down the street, between Sansome and Battery, another body was found under similar circumstances.”

Damage at Market Street and First after the October 21, 1868 earthquake. (wnp37.00891, stereograph by Oscar Foss, courtesy of a private collector.)

Of course, one doesn’t have to go back so far to remember a notable October earthquake. Like Monsieur Simonin, my roommate Marty was in the bath when the Loma Prieta “World Series” earthquake struck on October 17, 1989. He too ran out wild-eyed, wearing only a towel.

The 1868 earthquake struck on the Hayward Fault. Seismologists and other researchers say a major event on that same fault, now with millions living and working along it, is overdue.

The major San Francisco earthquake anniversaries in April and October, separated by six months, serve well as reminders to refresh and replenish your personal earthquake kit. Go to http://www.sf72.org to get a supplies checklist. Change the batteries, switch out the gallons of emergency water, get prepared.

Really… are you ready? The next Big One could happen the minute after you finish reading this.