Livable Communities Program Resource Collection

callenbach, Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach— never know when you might need this!

MSN Careers - Lessons From "The Apprentice" - Career Advice Article: apropos Canessa one-year apprenticeship in architecture. Learn how to practice.

On view at Canessa Gallery are works from the collection. Over the years, exhibiting artists have been generous in presenting works, mostly landscapes and seascapes. Visit any time during business hours.

The Black Cat
(former)
710 Montgomery
San Francisco

This landmark is the first floor of the Canessa building.

An underground is a loose network of creative people who are denied established outlets for what they do, and the history of an underground is ultimately a history of places, of the gathering points and outlets which grew up spontaneously in bars, cafes, coffee-houses and other hangouts.

Thus the North Beach underground began in the 40s with the Iron Pot, the Black Cat, the old Montgomery block....

The places were important because of the people who congregated there, and because the North Beach underground was never a "movement" with philosophy, credo, or sense of evangelistic mission, but simply people who came and went, sharing certain acquaintances, interests, and hang-ups, sometimes influences, usually rejection....

The Iron Pot, the Black Cat, the old Montgomery block belonged to the tail-end of the Bohemian era, a tradition which established itself around Telegraph Hill when it was little more than grass and shacks in the early years of the century. The Pot and the Cat were Bohemian spots in the classical sense, and so was the generation of artists who centered there: Alex Anderson, who did the Cat's murals; Sargent Johnson, Hassel Smith, Jean Varda, Dong Kingman, Luke Gibney, Beniamino Bufano, Avrum Rubenstein; Pat Cucaro even lived in the Montgomery block, and Sam Francis once sold Henri Lenoir, then the Pot's proprietor, one of the little harbor scenes he was painting then....

The Black Cat was the North Beach setting that Jack Kerouac wrote about in On the Road, but by the time the book was published, the action had shifted elsewhere....

—Thomas Albright, "The Elevated Underground: the North Beach Period," Rolling Renaissance: San Francisco Art in Celebration 1945-1968, San Francisco, 1968, Intersection, pp. 15, 16

YLEM (Flash) what's new is already missed (March 10, 2004), but there are similarities between YLEM and Canessa Gallery so keep an eye on both. Flash of a different sort: Canessa puts an ad on craigslist.

'Golden Gate' by BrennanOB - DPChallenge:

Summer fog has arrived early to the San Francisco Bay, with winter colors ( more intense ) and summer tempatures (colder)
Increased saturation and red shifted hue

VanAller's FotoLog, a recent picture of San Francisco from the Marin Headlands, and this one are both worth a look.

DRIENDL SKYLINES from the Google ad: S-a-a-a-n  F-r-r-r-a-a-a-n-n-n-c-c-c-i-i-i-s-s-s-c-c-c-o-o-o !

Workstation for Rent in Historic Jackson Square: they say just get the word out on craigslist and the people will fall in love with it. Yes, it's shameless promotion of a place that is just as it was after Canessa Printing moved its letterpresses out in 1966.

Panoramic Maps Collection is where to find them.

MrSID Viewer - The city of San Francisco. Birds eye view from the bay looking south-west. Sketched & drawn by C. R. Parsons. 1878

MrSID Viewer - Graphic chart of the city and county of San Francisco respectfully dedicated to the leading interests of California and the Pacific coast. 1875

MrSID Viewer - San Francisco : Bird's-eye view / drawn & lithographed by C.B. Gifford.: 1864

MrSID Viewer - San Francisco, 1862, from Russian Hill / C.B. Gifford del. et lith.: 1862

Bainbridge and Casilear, Sarony Major lithograph: "1851" from Western Hill near the foot of Telegraph Hill (includes view of Rincon Pt.)

Carles Meryon: "1856" (northeast view)

MrSID Viewer - View of San Francisco, formerly Yerba Buena, in 1846-7 before the discovery of gold. A copy of this hangs in the history room.

MrSID Viewer - The city of New York. Will L. Taylor, chief draughtsman (1879) via kottke remainder, and oh, how Canessa Park likes maps.

They're trying to figure out what to do with the Presidio Parade Ground, and they have architects working on it. They have no clue. One lady says, just plant some grass. Maybe she's right. I remember going through there and seeing all the old brick barracks perfectly kept up and full of soldiers I guess. As I was passing by, one poor guy was mowing grass under gunpoint if you can imagine that. A guy in uniform was just sitting there with his gun "supervising" the cutting of the grass. Uniform in those days was Vietnam synthetic all green. Seems like they could still do that, except kind of urban camo CCC and forget the gun, but the Presidio is so market rate it will never happen. It will be a largely vacant office park.

Presidio's parade ground leaves a lot to be desired:

"What you've shown us looks like a high-end shopping mall," one neighbor complained to Sanders during a break. "You don't need fountains and rocks and all that stuff. Just roll out grass and keep it low-key."

Once upon a time there was a shack on the roof of Canessa with a great view of the TransAmerica Pyramid. The Cat helped take it apart, moved it to the country and rebuilt it completely. It works as a painting studio now.

The Cat remembers a time in San Francisco when there used to be shacks everywhere, not just a bunch of hokey restaurant names, but real shacks. When he was still just a kitty, the Cat used to live out in Dogpatch, and there was a little Bay beach nearby where the Western Pacific had a train ferry. The beach was full of tires, and there was a shack off to the side with the door not really closed. So the kitty went in late one afternoon and it was all a-jumble with junky stuff, but he had the distinct impression it was a household, so he left without disturbing anything.

Then there were all the newspaper shacks. Not the fancy French kiosks, but kind of cobbled together plywood sheds with a little lemonade stand or carnival booth front and flaps that came down at night for padlocking, no two alike, and some were big enough you could live in them, or at least have friends over while you're sitting in there poring over the Racing Form and selling 10-cent papers.

Yvonne Chu has an excellent list of San Francisco and East Bay non-profit galleries.

Canessa Park is a blog that consists of stories of any kind and shameless promotion of Canessa Gallery, a volunteer-run exhibition space in the middle of creative offices located in San Francisco's North Beach above the former Black Cat.