Drawn by C.R. Parsons for Currier & Ives, The City of San Francisco: Birds Eye View from the Bay looking South-West shows the 19th-century metropolis thirty years after the discovery of gold less than 200 miles to the northeast.

This work epitomizes the idealized vision of American promise and optimism embodied in the populist Currier & Ives works. Shipping traffic is propelled by wind and steam. Market Street bustles with horse-drawn carriages.

Follow Market Street west beyond the Palace Hotel to find the Opera House and City Hall. See Golden Gate Park stretch into the distance. To its north, the Cliff House is the sole marker at Point Lobos. Barracks dot the Presidio Military Reservation while Fort Point watches the Golden Gate long before the Bridge. Union Square is shown surrounded by churches, bank buildings and hotels; Telegraph Hill has yet to be developed.

This 1878 view of San Francisco is densely detailed. More than one hundred landmarks are named in the index that appears just below the drawing. From the Oakland Ferry to Governor Stanford’s residence, this birds-eye view is a clear, sharp depiction of everything San Francisco in 1878.

Our Perfect Recreation™ captures every detail and reproduces every fine line of this perfectly preserved example of the now-rare hand-colored lithograph.

About Currier & Ives

The high-quality, hand-colored lithographs of American scenes by Currier & Ives are the images by which Americans and the world came to know the rapidly growing America of the last half of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Currier began his career as an apprentice lithographer in 1828. By the mid-1830's he established his own firm on Spruce Street in New York City. In 1857 James Ives became a partner in this flourishing business that produced more than 7,000 lithographs in half a century. Currier & Ives' enormous productivity was accompanied by consistently high standards of printing and hand-coloring — and by their ability to commission original works by many of the finest American genre painters of the era, including C.R. Parsons, Fanny Palmer, Louis Maurer, George Durrie and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait.