Family in San Francisco

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Since I live in San Francisco, it’s always fun for me to find a vintage photo from San Francisco and see how my research into the photo enhances my understanding of where I live. This is an 8×6-inch photo mounted into what was probably a cardboard folder-type frame, though what’s left of it is damaged enough that I cropped most of it from this scan. Fortunately, the image itself isn’t too damaged. It’s a nice, clear image of an elegantly-posed group of people I assume are a family. The photographer is “Monaco”, which turns out to be J. B. Monaco, an Italian-Swiss immigrant who made his way to San Francisco and had a decades-long career. (He went by “J. B.”, though his name was actually Giovanni Battista. He had been in partnership with his brother Louis, but Louis had died by the time this photo was taken.) He had different studio locations over the years, but this photo was taken at 234 Columbus Street, which the article here says he occupied from about the mid-1920s until 1938, when his studio finally closed due to the Depression, and he died. The address is in the North Beach neighborhood, which is traditionally considered the city’s Italian neighborhood. These days, it often feels like the bulk of what is Italian about the neighborhood is the concentration of Italian restaurants. But the family in this photo could easily be Italian, reminding me that it was once considered the Italian neighborhood for a reason.

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