Bird's-Eye View of San Francisco, 1868

The story of this map

Twenty years after the Gold Rush, San Francisco had gone from a village to the metropolis of the Pacific coast, and it wanted a picture of the fact. This 1868 bird’s-eye view was drawn by G. H. Goddard, put on stone by Britton & Rey, the city’s great lithographers, and sold by the publishers Snow & May. Our restored print is made from the large coloured lithograph in the Library of Congress.

The artist puts you in the air over the bay, so the waterfront and its forest of wharves fill the foreground, sailing ships and steamers ride at anchor in the roadstead, and behind them the famous grid marches straight over the hills as if the surveyor had never looked up. Each block is drawn building by building, and the open ground on the western hills shows how much of the peninsula was still sand and scrub. It is the city before the cable car, the earthquake and the bridges, and it is instantly recognisable all the same.

This is a big, generous sheet, and one of the highest-resolution scans in our collection, so it thrives at 24x36 inches over a sofa or in a wide hallway. It belongs to our American Cities collection and pairs naturally with the 1859 Coast Survey chart of the bay entrance or the 1890 view of Sacramento.

Printed to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.