Talks

Rick Prelinger

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 6

Recorded live on Dec 8, 02011

at The Castro Theatre

Held at the historic Castro Theater, almost 1,400 enthusiastic San Francisco history buffs packed in to partake of guerrilla archivist Rick Prelinger’s annual ritual. The audience learned from, laughed at, quizzed and heckled the lovingly curated footage of their city’s past.

New material this year (presented for the first time in HD) included San Francisco's lost cemeteries in color, unique drive-through footage of the Produce Market (now Embarcadero Center and Golden Gateway), rides along the now destroyed Embarcadero Freeway, back streets in working-class North Beach, the sand-swept Sunset before its dunes were covered, wild automobile rides through downtown in the 1920s, newly-rediscovered Kodachrome Cinemascope footage of Playland and the Sky Tram, and much more.

watch

bio

Rick Prelinger is the founder and co-principal of the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco, whose moving image holdings may be found online at www.archive.org. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library, a publicly-available collection of historical periodicals, books, print ephemera, maps and government documents.

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