Blast to San Francisco's Past

A modern Bay Area resident wouldn't recognize the San Francisco of 100 years ago. The city looked alternately like a Kansas farm with wooden shacks and dirt streets, or like Cape Cod with windy, grassy dunes.

LookBackMaps gathers olde-timey photos from around the web and places them in time and space, then sets them alongside a current view of the street from Google -- the results are like hovering in a time-traveler's pod.

 The corner of Fillmore and Post in the 1920's looks like a movie set from a western. Dolores Park in the 1860s wasn't a park at all, but a cemetery. Eddy and Filmore in the 1920s, mansions at Gough and Ellis in the 1960s -- layers of ghosts that San Franciscans stroll by every day.

Some of the most remarkable photos are from the recent past, such as the demolition of buildings in the Fillmore to make room for housing projects.

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