What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The original City Hall structure, completed in 1898 at McAllister and Larkin Streets, collapsed in a heap during the 1906 earthquake. The focal point of the Civic Center, the current City Hall, was designed by John Bakewell and Arthur Brown. This 1915 building covers two city blocks bounded by Polk, McAllister, Van Ness, and Grove. The huge lead-lined dome is modeled after Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome and dominates the area, rising 301 feet above the street, higher than the Capitol dome in Washington D.C. The building, 400 feet long and 300 feet wide, has an exterior of granite from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. In 1960, civil rights and freedom-of-speech protesters were washed down the central stairway with fire hoses. Mayor Dianne Feinstein was married at City Hall in 1980 and invited the entire city to her wedding reception. Badly damaged by the 1989 earthquake, City Hall’s arches were supported by large wooden struts until the building was closed in 1995 for seismic retrofitting. (San Francisco’s previous City Hall was built of inferior materials, including trash and newspaper, by a corrupt city administration.)

John Snyder

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Hope

Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, 

Whispering 'it will be happier'. . . 

Alfred Lord Tennyson

You just have to live and life will give you pictures.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Whoever laid the town out took the conventional checkerboard pattern of streets and without the slightest regard for the laws of gravity planked it down blind on. . . a confusion of steep slopes and sandhills. The result is exhilarating.

John Dos Passos 

The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.

Annie Leibovitz

In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.

William Blake

Denim

Like many merchants during the Gold Rush, Levi Strauss journeyed to San Francisco to sell goods to the prospectors. An immigrant from Germany, he brought a load of canvas to turn into tents. Strauss had no success selling the tents, but constantly heard miners complain that their pants didn’t hold up to the rigors of the gold mines. He turned the canvas into pants instead, and the garments were an instant hit. He eventually switched from canvas to a tough blue cotton fabric loomed in Nimes, France, called serge de Nimes, which quickly became the word “denim” and gave the trousers their trademark color. The name “jeans” came from the French word Genes (meaning “Genoa”), as the trousers were reminiscent of those once worn by Genoan sailors. The copper rivets, originally designed for saddles, were added to reinforce the pants in the 1870’s and emblazoned with the initials SF for San Francisco.

John Snyder

 

 

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Buddha

I went to San Francisco

I saw the bridges high, 

Spun across the water

Like cobwebs in the sky.

 

Langston Hughes

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. 

Joseph Campbell

When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.

P.D. Ouspensky

 

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children."

Ancient Native American Proverb

Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge began on January 5, 1933 and the last rivet was placed on May 27, 1937.  

The red-orange color of the Golden Gate Bridge is somewhat of an accident. When the towers were constructed, they were coated in the red-orange primer, which was extended to the rest of the bridge as the work continued. Designers of the bridge liked the way the distinctive color complimented the hills of Marin County and provided a contrast to the fog that swirled through the towers, so the bridge remained International Orange. It also increases the visibility of the bridge in fog. The top coat of orange is replaced constantly because the auto exhaust and chilly, salty air eats away at the finish . A team is employed fulltime to apply about two tons of the coloring per week to keep the paintwork in good condition and prevent the bridge from rusting. It takes four years to apply one coat. The job is not for the faint-hearted. Painters have to be able to climb to the top of the bridge’s 746- foot towers and routinely brave 30-mile-per-hour winds.

John Snyder

And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The solution to the problem of the day is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the divinity within.

Hazard Inayat Khan

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

Emily Dickinson

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.   

Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Dorothea Lange

Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

Frida Kahlo

A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.

Aberjhani

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

Jane Goodall

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. 

William Shakespeare

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Ansel Adams

Music is . . . A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy

Ludwig van Beethoven

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.

Buddha

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

Garry Winogrand

In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, 
And all you behold, though it appears without, 
It is within, in your imagination, 
Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.

William Blake

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Margaret Mead

Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.

Jack Kerouac

Thank God we’re all living in San Francisco. I’d hate to be this annoyed anywhere else.  

Herb Caen

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."

Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

San Francisco

That City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand.

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

William Blake

First in rapture
And first in beauty
Wayward, passionate, brave
Glad of life God gave.
The sea-winds are her kiss,
And the seagull is her dove.
Cleanly and strongly she is--
My cool, grey city of love.
                            

George Sterling

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Susan Sontag

Don't shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.

David Alan Harvey

This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination. In spite of so many discoveries, researches and scientific knowledge, the creation remains a great unsolved riddle.

Meher Baba

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Lao Tzu

I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important.

Jacques Henri-Lartigue

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

Man Ray

Opened in 1937, the 4,200-foot suspension bridge was the longest in the world until 1959. It took four-and-a-half years and $35 million to build; in 1991, according to one estimate, it would cost $1.25 billion to re-construct. The 746-foot towers of the Golden Gate Bridge were the world’s tallest until 1997, when they were exceeded by a bridge in Denmark. The clearance between the roadbed and the water is 260 feet, a distance set by the military to allow ships to pass underneath. Over 2000 lawsuits were filed in an attempt to prevent the bridge from being built. One of the first obstacles was winning the approval of the War department. The military feared an enemy might bomb the bridge, which would block the harbor and the naval ships anchored there. The War department granted permission for the bridge in exchange for control of the structure in time of war and for allowing government vehicles to cross free of charge. 

The paint color of the Golden Gate Bridge is International Orange.  There are now well over a thousand known suicides who have jumped off the bridge since it opened in 1937.  Nearly all these desperate souls who finally went over the side, did so facing towards San Francisco, but that is simply because pedestrians are not allowed on the ocean side of the span.

 

Whatever we believe about how we got to be the extraordinary creatures we are today is far less important than bringing our intellect to bear on how do we get together now around the world and get out of the mess that we've made. That's the key thing now. Never mind how we got to be who we are.

Jane Goodall

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

Aaron Rose

 

There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.

J.R.R. Tolkien

For all its contradictions . . . San Francisco remains a beacon,  always with that dangerous streak of insanity,  built in at birth.   

Herb Caen

 

 

There is no stupidity great enough to ruin the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge. It has been the subject of terrible poetry and worse paintings, but it rises easily and grandly above the mundane, its towers poking through the fogs, natural and man-made. 

Herb Caen

Humanity is the earth’s nerve-endings through which planetary vibrations are received for transmission.

Gurdjieff

Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we're really talking about is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that's when you start taking pictures.

Annie Leibovitz

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.

Diane Arbus

 

 

693,000 cubic yards of concrete and 100,000 tons of steel were used in spanning the Gate.  25,000,000 man hours went into building the Golden Gate Bridge. . .eleven men lost their lives during its construction. The bridge, as designed,  can sway 27.7 ft.  during high winds.

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life. 

Omar Khayyam

Things happen in front of you. That's perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography.

Annie Leibovitz

To some people a tree is something so incredibly beautiful that it brings tears to the eyes. To others it is just a green thing that stands in the way.

William Blake

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

Whether we want them or not, the New Year will bring new challenges; whether we seize them or not, the New Year will bring new opportunities.

Michael Josephson

When we pay attention to nature's music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony.”

Harat Inayat Khan

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.

Mother Teresa

TREASURE ISLAND

Named after the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, Treasure Island was created to serve as the site of the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40. The fair was a celebration of the city’s simultaneous completion of the Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. It was attended by 17 million. There were 13 states and 37 nations participating in the fair, including Italy and Japan. Less than 14 months after the close of the festivities, the United States was at war with both nations.

John Snyder

Photography's like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It's always hungry.

Annie Leibovitz

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

My pictures are my eyes. I photograph what I see - and what I want to see.

Mario Testino

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange

Some people become San Franciscans almost immediately,  feeling the poetry,  sensing the specialness,  seeing what makes the city great and not so great,  boning up on the history and walking the streets with glamorous ghosts at their elbows.  Others can live here all their lives and never get the message.

 Herb Caen

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Leonardo da Vinci

The main cables from which the span hangs (each 36.5 inches diameter and 7, 660 ft. long) are made up of 27, 572 strands of 0.2 inch diameter steel cable. . .22,000 tons worth and 80,000 miles long.  This 0.2 inch cable could circle the globe at the equator more than five times.  

To a traveler paying his first visit,  San Francisco has the interest of a new planet.  It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world.

Friz Hugh Ludlow

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

Emily Dickinson

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake

.  The bridge is 6, 450 ft. long and 90 ft. wide. The towers rise 746 ft. above the water and the height of the roadway span at center is 220 ft. above low tide.  

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC 

Kurt Vonnegut

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Susan Sontag

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.

Oprah Winfrey

 

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

William Blake

 

One doesn't stop seeing. One doesn't stop framing. It doesn't turn off and turn on. It's on all the time.

Annie Leibovitz

 

What's past is prologue, and the world awaits.

Lisa Mantchev

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

Chief Seattle 

Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth... these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women's empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all. 
Ban Ki-moon

 

 

The person who does not believe in miracles surely makes it certain that he or she will never take part in one.

William Blake

Do few things but do them well, simple joys are holy.

Francis of Assisi