Only 120 years ago this area, as well as neighboring Diamond Heights, was so isolated that only farmers would settle here. Then, in 1892, a German immigrant named Behrend Joost founded the city's first electric streetcar to shuttle residents to jobs downtown, and a neighborhood was born.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Haight-Ashbury first gained prominence as the gateway to Golden Gate Park ; six decades later, it would anchor the worldwide cultural revolution that blossomed in the 1960s. Though synonymous with peace, love, and living outside the mainstream, its history goes back long before the Summer of Love. Starting as a dairy farm in San Francisco's Outlands, the area saw a building boom of Queen Anne country homes for...

San Francisco's Bernal Heights is a hilltop village tucked away in the southern part of the city. Freeways and urban thoroughfares now bound the neighborhood, once defined by the swamps and creeks of the original Mexican land grant. The legacy of Potrero Viejo, or "old pasture," and the farms of the 19th and 20th centuries have developed into today's passion for the preservation of open space. From the 1860s legend of Widow O'Brien's cow to the 1970s...

Ira Nowinski is one of only a handful of contemporary master photographers, who dedicate themselves to the difficult challenge of creating photographs that are both important historical documents, and highly aesthetically accomplished. This book, his ninth, is like a triptych - a portrait of San Francisco through three complementary portfolios. They chronicle respectively the beat poets (Ginsberg, Kerouac, etc) of North Beach, the successful struggle...