San Francisco in 1955, 1930s and 1963

I stumbled across this YouTube Video of a travel promotional film from 1955, although I would have thought it was earlier since I don't see any examples of our 1955 Ford Station Wagon!  It is quite interesting and I think Mother would appreciate it.  I figure that the first time I went to San Francisco was the year that Susan was born, in 1953, when we stayed at the Oxford Hotel with Nana.  I remember that Mother said we could each pick out a toy to buy.  Penny got a dolly but I remember wanting a space helmet and ending up with a yellow plastic squirt gun that we used to squirt at passerbys out the window of the hotel.  We were quite a ways up so the water would have evaporated by the time it hit the ground.  No, parents didn't worry about their children falling out the windows.  We were too smart for that.

To get back to the video.  The narrator says that Van Ness Avenue (pronounced vanice as in Venice) stopped the 1906 fire.  Whatever happened to the Skyway at the Cliff House that went out over Seal Rock?  What ever happened to the amusement park Playland??  If I had known they existed in 1955 I would have made sure that we got there instead of Tommy's Joynt!!

If you watch closely, you can see that one of the cable cars has an ad on the side for Yamato Sukiyaki!!

And then at the end, I can see that there is also a video of 1930s San Francisco.  And even in the 1930s they were calling the cable cars "quaint"!  Mother should like this since she was there in the 1930s. 

And then there is the 1963 Story of a City.  "Sweeping views of clean, white homes..."  San Franciscans "dress well and walk briskly..."  And they highlight the pigeons of Union Square with the Hotel Plaza in the background.   These documentaries are so interesting to watch and we still haven't gotten to the Transamerica Pyramid!  They talk of the "old houses standing in timid contrast to the new apartment buildings, as if wondering when they too must give way to progress". 

And of course, I had to watch the video of the Sutro Baths.  They must have been quite spectacular.