After my recent post on San Francisco’s original Emanu-El Synagogue I got a link to this photo from Richard over at Sparkletack and in that picture of Sutter Street of just after the earthquake of 1906 there is an advertisement for MJB coffee clearly visible on a wall of one of the destroyed buildings.
That was intriguing, since I actually had written about the MJB coffee ads in San Francisco before here and here, and all the research I had done on the mysterious MJB – WHY? ads pointed at a timeframe of after the earthquake until sometimes in the 1910s for these ads… but here was one done before the earthquake of 1906.
I mentioned this to Richard and he pointed me to a book: “Coffee, Martinis and San Francisco” by Ruth Bransten McDougall, who happens to be the daughter of the founder of MJB Coffee. It’s a spirited and very personal biography of Ruth and her parents Mannie and Renee Brandenstein (later Bransten), which begins with a scene just after the earthquake of 1906 and then moves back to the very beginnings of the MJB brand in the 1880s and on through to the 1930s.
Mannie was a born marketer, and he relished in figuratively and literally painting the town with advertisements for his products, which is why even now, one hundred years after he invented the campaign, one can still find MJB Coffee – WHY? painted on walls in the Bay Area.
Many people in the last hundred years must have passed these ads and wondered… why WHY?
Well… here’s the answer…
At one point, the young Ruth asks her dad: “Why the WHY?” and Mannie’s answer is: “What’s the difference, as long as people ask. That makes sales.”
Update: As it turns out, my original research was not correct – Temple Emanu-El was located between Powell and Stockton, not Mason and Powell… I’ve made several substantial changes below to reflect this new information
—
For a city with barely 160 years of history as a dense urban environment, San Francisco has undergone remarkable changes. Here is a small panorama of Nob Hill from the corner of Market and Third that was probably taken in the early 1870s.
The houses in the foreground are on the north side of the 100 block of Geary Street, which of course has undergone many changes. In fact, due to several earthquakes and blazes in the 1800s and the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, very few of the buildings in this photo could still be around. To the left in the picture are the buildings around Union Square… and most intriguing to me, in the center is a long-lost house of prayer with a very distinctive silhouette.
I found this photo in the Library of Congress archive and none of the buildings were identified, so I randomly browsed more pictures of that era to see if I could find out more about that building.
Several hundred photos later I hit the jackpot:
I had never heard of this synagogue before – and in fact, the congregation still exists, but had moved to Laurel Heights in the 1920s after this building had been damaged in the earthquake of 1906.
This is an interesting photo (click for a large version), since Sutter Street looks positively rural here. We are looking at the corner of Sutter and Stockton, the building on the left has made place for the gargantuan Hyatt Hotel tower and the neat little house across the street with the huge garden is now buried under a Hannspree store.
This photo also gives us a very good location for the synagogue – it was at about the spot where the parking garage for the 450 Sutter Medical Building is now.
Not sure if Sutter Street is surfaced at this time, it looks almost like it’s just dried mud with what could possibly be rails for horse-pulled cars in the center. These are probably not cable car lines, since the cable car didn’t make it to this block until 1879, according to the information from the Cable Car Guy. The area looks too freshly built up to me to be from that late.
This is also one of the first times I’ve actually seen wood-decked sidewalks in a photo of San Francisco. And it looks like somebody just parked their one-horsepower buggy in front of the synagogue.
Here another shot from Powell Street near Post looking north towards Sutter Street and the synagogue.
The label points out (correct, now that I have located the true address of the synagogue) that this was taken from Union Square, which in the mid-1860s was still an open meadow from the looks of it. Where the photographer stands it seems it has never been touched by a shovel – the grass is very au naturel.
Yep, definitely packed mud as road, which must have been hell during the rainy winter season with the steep grade of our hills. This last shot is from the intersection of Mason and Sutter looking east, down Sutter and across Powell towards the synagogue. The houses uphill from the synagogue on the block between Powell and Mason are much more substantial than in the other photos, similar to houses that still exist in the Pacific Heights neighborhood.
The gardens are a bit questionable with the one three houses down being full of tall shrubbery to conceal the first floor windows from the road and the garden closest to the camera seemingly being used to raise Christmas trees.
I was very happy that I’ve followed up on the first photo – the synagogue was a substantial building in a still very young San Francisco and I’m glad I’ve learned something about it and the times when these shots were taken. At this time, the peak of the gold rush had just been over for maybe ten years, and none of the buildings in any of these shots is older than fifteen years – Mark Twain was in town and these are the streets he walked in as a young reporter for the Daily Morning Call, a local newspaper.
While idly searching the Library of Congress archive for old shots of San Francisco I stumbled over the photo below (click for a very large version) – It shows Market Street from between Stockton and Grant towards the East, with a clear view of the Call Building over an elaborate arch that spans Market Street.
Now, I’ve spent some time looking at historical photographs of San Francisco, and I’ve never seen that arch before.
The photo was taken by B.L. Singley from the Keystone View Co. as a 3D stereograph, and the Library of Congress dates this photo to 1899, but looking at the numbered sequence for other photos of the Keystone View company would move this shot into 1897 – where other photos by the same photographer document a “Christian Endeavor Parade” on Market Street in July of 1897.
The convention of the Christian Endeavor Societies seems to have been quite an affair – here is a quote from an article in the New York Times from July 5th, 1897:
“This city is a sea of color, the decorative ribbons of the Christian Endeavor Societies, the Stars and Stripes, and the bunting hung in honor of the National Holiday floating in the breeze…” – this sounds very much like a description of the scene in the photo.
The article further chronicles the arrival of several thousand convention visitors, and a local reception committee of more than a thousand.
I haven’t been able to find any other online resource that mentions this arch and it is conceivable that it was built to welcome the convention guests in 1897 and then torn down in spite of its rather elaborate design, but there is one more wrinkle in this story… the Call Building was not finished until 1898!
So either my theory is wrong, or the exterior construction of the Call Building was already finished by July 1897, which would make this one of the earliest photos of the then tallest building west of the Mississippi!
It’s amazing how little the city has changed in these 40 years. Many of the scenes around Nob and Russian Hill just look different because the trees have grown a bit along the streets.
I’ve been talking about vintage MJB Coffee ads in San Francisco before, and while I was researching that blog post back then I remember seeing references to a second “Why” ad in San Francisco, but I could never find an address for it.
A few weeks ago that problem solved itself when I was walking along Columbus Avenue and just happened to look up at the houses across the street from the City Lights bookstore.
The two ads happen to be only about six blocks from each other – the first ad is on Clay just above Stockton and this one is on Columbus and Kerouac Alley.
The two ads look similar, but this one on Columbus seems to be a little bit less elaborate in the painting style. It is known that these ads were painted around 1906 and it must have been after the earthquake, since both houses are in an area were barely a wall survived the earthquake and firestorm of 1906.
I’m still looking for a well-rounded explanation for the message of this ad campaign. MJB Coffee – WHY? sounds very much like it is only one half of a more complex ad message. Was this supported by newspaper ads or billboards? Was there a little story around this ad on the tin cans the coffee came in? Inquiring minds would like to know…
While I’m on the subject of old street signage, there is also an amazing number of old painted advertisements that can be found in American cities. Sometimes and old house will fall to the wrecking ball and on the walls of the neighbors old advertisements suddenly see the light of the day. And then there are some ads that survive for long, long times on open walls.
Here is one example. MJB Coffee had these advertisements painted on house walls all over the Bay Area around 1906. The message was a simple one: “M.J.B. Coffee. Why?”
There are several sources that can be found through Google for some background on these ads, but nobody seems to have a conclusive explanation for the message in these ads. “Why?”
This ad has survived in San Francisco’s Chinatown for one hundred years… and if you look closely, you can see that it is actually painted over an even older MJB coffee ad!
