Talks: 2023 Videos

Primary Source

Shaping San Francisco hosts Public Talks on a variety of topics on Wednesday nights, about 18 times a year. Our topic themes vary, but we've grouped them over time into these categories: Art & Politics, Ecology, Historical Perspectives, Literary, and Social Movements.

Since Covid-19 disrupted our use of the 518 Valencia Street gallery for our Public Talks after March 2020, we have started hosting outdoor "Urban Forum: Walk and Talks" which turned out to be as or more popular than our original Public Talks series.. This page has the Walk & Talks from 2023 and if we get to hold some indoor Talks later this year, we'll add them here too.

December 5, 2023

Talking History with Gary Kamiya

Local author, historian, and journalist Gary Kamiya joins Shaping San Francisco's co-directors LisaRuth Elliott and Chris Carlsson for a lively conversation about history, landscapes, sources, silences, research, story-telling, hidden treasures, and more. This is the culminating event of Shaping San Francisco's 25 year anniversary!

December 2, 2023

1862 Flood: Thinkwalk with Joel Pomerantz

Joel Pomerantz of Thinkwalks.org is our guest host for the last walking tour of Shaping San Francisco's 25th anniversary year. This begins at Rainbow Grocery at Folsom and Division sharing accounts of the January 2023 flood as a precursor to our tour of sites related to the under-explored massive floods of Winter 1862. Our walk proceeds westward and ends at Duboce Park, with revelations of lost landscapes and old water paths, early infrastructure and the fate of creeks.

November 15, 2023

Living in the Archives with Jenny Odell

In 2019, through the San Francisco Arts Commission, Jenny Odell was an artist in residence at the San Francisco Planning Department. During her time there, Odell happened across unfiled and minimally marked envelopes of snapshots of San Francisco from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. These images of storefronts and streetscapes depict an ever-changing San Francisco through seemingly arbitrary aspects of the city's distinctive neighborhoods. In this talk, Odell presents images from this archive and discusses the way they read differently through the lens of the present.

November 8, 2023

Peoples History of SFO with Eric Porter

Eric Porter, author of the recent A Peoples History of SFO, gives a deep look at SFO—San Francisco International Airport—which has come a long way from its muddy beginnings as Mills Field in the 1920s. Functioning as the center of the Bay Area’s modernizing transportation networks, SFO’s evolution illuminates fraught questions of access and employment discrimination, while becoming an “infrastructural manifestation of a succession of regional colonial presents, layered on top of sinking concrete, steel, and landfill upon mud.” And today’s airport, with rising bay waters lapping at its shores, confronts us with the implacable role of air travel in climate change, which no amount of berms and protective seawalls will solve.

October 28, 2023

Lone Mountain Cemeteries

San Francisco history guy Woody LaBounty leads a tour of the land once occupied by four big San Francisco cemeteries around Lone Mountain. Now the site of shopping centers, housing developments, and the University of San Francisco, the hills separating the Western Addition and the Richmond District were the final resting place (not! learn why not!) of more than 100,000 people from the 1850s to the early 1940s. Traipsing the edge of Laurel Hill Cemetery, Calvary Cemetery, Masonic Cemetery, the Odd Fellows Cemetery, and ending at the Columbarium.

October 24, 2023

Mountain View Cemetery

Liam O'Donoghue, host of East Bay Yesterday, presents a humorous and rich tour of the illustrious Mountain View Cemetery which opened in Oakland in the 1860s. Featuring famous characters, interesting monuments, lost connections and curious overlapping histories, Liam's talk anchored Shaping San Francisco's "Cemetery Week" as well as being part of the Oakland History Center's Fall Programming.

September 30, 2023

Natural Areas II Bike Tour: Golden Gate Park to Lobos Valley

Part two of the Natural Areas Bike tour that we started with Part One in April 2023. Hosted by Peter Brastow (Bob Hall is injured and could not join, sadly), this one began at the Golden Gate Park Botanical Garden entrance, paid an entertaining visit to Greg Gaar at the Kezar Community Garden, traversed part of the Oak Woodlands, and eventually followed Cabrillo Street as it undulates over the dunes to Ocean Beach. After a stop there, we went up to Land's End, and eventually over the hill and down to Lobos Creek and its eponymous valley, now beautifully alive after 30 years of intense restoration efforts.

September 27, 2023

Trains in the Outside Lands

As part of Shaping San Francisco's ongoing 25th anniversary celebration in 2023, long-time friends and collaborators at the Western Neighborhoods Project join us to explore the deep transit history of the west side of San Francisco. A lively evening featured the inestimable Emiliano Echeverria, whose knowledge of San Francisco's transportation history is unmatched. Emiliano drew from his remarkable DVD publications on the Steam Railroads of San Francisco and the history of United Railroads to reveal the transit-driven process of "conquering" the outside lands.

September 23, 2023

Looking Back at the Frisco Bay Mussel Group

On September 23, 2023, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Planet Drum Foundation and the 25th anniversary of Shaping San Francisco, during a celebratory picnic, Chris Carlsson gave a presentation on the history of the Frisco Bay Mussel Group (1975-78). A seminal group that gave rise to countless common-sense ideas that have since been implemented (from curbside compost recycling to graywater systems to restoring wetlands and rare habitats), they are perhaps best remembered as the instigators of a massive public outcry against the plans to build a peripheral canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Video: Karie Crisp

September 22, 2023

San Francisco Natural History with Greg Gaar

Greg Gaar shows over 100 photos covering the history of San Francisco's natural features including the sand dunes, grasslands, trees, lakes, creeks, tidal marshes and rock formations. He discusses the efforts by government agencies and volunteers to preserve what remains of San Francisco's natural heritage.

An Autumnal Equinox co-presentation with Planet Drum Foundation who celebrates 50 years of actively recognizing and appreciating our life-places (bioregions).

This event is a collaboration with Shaping San Francisco's 25th year celebrations. <iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/san-francisco-natural-history-with-greg-gaar-2023" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe>

August 26, 2023

Bicycle Messenger Crackdown Commemoration Ride

A social bike ride commemorating police crackdowns on bike messengers in San Francisco back in the 1970s-1990s. Howard Williams, Mark Rowe, and Kash bring their memories to this August 2023 ride. Left out of this is our stop at the Grant Building at 1095 Market Street where we spoke about the early history of Critical Mass and the 1996 Cycle Messenger World Championships which had their organizing offices in the building. The last stop was at the Proj Lodge on Sutter between Baker and Broderick, but by then the camera had disappeared with Chris Carlsson's broken back wheel.

June 14, 2023

San Francisco and the New Deal

Gray Brechin presents a far-ranging overview of the New Deal and its legacy in San Francisco. Public works include parks, public art, schools, the zoo, roads and bridges, and more. Speaking as the chief scholar of the Living New Deal project (livingnewdeal.org), Brechin is uniquely capable of bringing context and insight to a retrospective analysis of the one time in U.S. history when the government actually put the needs and interests of the large part of the population ahead of the immediate needs of Capital and the owners of corporations. A lively discussion follows at the end.

May 20, 2023

Food and Baseball in SOMA and the Mission District

The Last Urban Forum Walk'n'Talk of Spring 2023 season, this is on the twin themes of Food and Baseball! Billed originally as a Mission District walk, we actually began at 8th and Market on the site of the old 1890s Central Park, and later the site of the Crystal Palace Market. Our trek took us to 8th and Harrison for some baseball history sweetened by an earlier sugar factory, then a saga of offal and stench near the 1857 Brannan Street bridge, on to Seals Stadium and Hamms Beer brewery, a glance at American Can Co. and Best Foods factory, then across the Mission to end at 15th and Valencia, the site of Big Rec, original home of the Mission Reds AND the San Francisco Seals.

April 23, 2023

Bike Tour: Natural Areas and Native Plants

A bike tour starting at Glen Park Greenway and visiting Glen Canyon's grasslands, its western edges along O'Shaughnessy Drive, the Native Plant garden at the Miraloma Park Improvement Association parking lot, the Twin Peaks slopes, and ending finally at Mt. Sutro Open Space. Led by the SF Department of the Environment's Peter Brastow and California Native Plant Society aficionado Bob Hall, this was an incredible journey through habitats and species, mostly plant, during the super bloom after our rainy winter. Lots of science and information!

March 26, 2023

Tour of the Oakland Tribune Tower

As part of Shaping San Francisco's ongoing 25th anniversary celebration in 2023, old friend John Law offered to host tours of the iconic Tribune Tower in downtown Oakland. John went the extra mile and dug up a bunch of history of the newspaper, the building, and Oakland more generally, and gave a delightfully entertaining tour of various nooks and crannies as well as taking up a series of steep century-old stairways to reach two ladders for the final ascent to the 307-foot high roof.

March 18, 2023

Journey to the Highest Peak: Mt. Davidson

This Urban Forum: Walk'n'Talk began at O'Shaughnessy and Portola and headed past the century-old reservoir to reach an old entry to Mt. Davidson. Up we went, spending some time at the top enjoying the views, as well as paying a visit to the old cement cross which has a large restoration project taking shape next to it. Down the the long steep street on the southwest side of the mountain, we eventually made our way to the Edgehill Mountain Open Space, walking through the forest where many trees fell in recent storms. The top of Edgehill features a number of remarkable homes, and after circumambulating the hill we made our way back to the beginning spot.

January 28, 2023

Bernal Cut to Diamond Heights

Starting at the Richland Avenue overpass at the Bernal Cut, we ascended Fairmont Heights to Laidley Street to see the Poole-Bell Mansion and a number of whimsical architectural statements along that street. The Harry Steps took us to Beacon Street above Billy Goat Hill where we heard about the original Gray Bros. quarry that carved the hill that became a park. Traversing the new path to Haas Playground we continued up to the top of Diamond Heights before following a winding route through the west and southern edges of the neighborhood, along the rim of Glen Canyon at one point. Finally we returned to the starting point.