I’ve recently been enjoying a hefty, beautiful book about San Francisco, called, simply, Historic Photos of San Francisco, with text and captions by Rebecca Schall. Dozens of photographs culled from the collections of the San Francisco Public Library span two centuries of the city’s development, from its beginnings as “The Paris of the West” in the late 19th century to the turbulent sixties.

The book is arranged primarily in ten-to-twenty year segments–the reconstruction of 1900-1919, the underground excitement of the prohibition years , the struggles of the thirties, the population boom of the forties, the economic revival of the post-war years, and the friction of the sixties.

The photographs of the earthquake of 1906 continue to be arresting a century later. One of the most memorable shots, taken on street in Chinatown as a crush of onlookers gazes up at an immense cloud of smoke pouring out of the burning buildings, is strangely reminiscent of the photographs of 9/11 that have become so much a part of our national memory.

Some of the most interesting photographs in the collection concern not the iconic, but the everyday–such as the picture of a crowd of twenty or so standing outside the Bernal Heights branch of the Bank of America following a bank robbery on Christmas Eve, 1936. The children are grinning into the camera, as if it’s all just good fun, and the atmosphere isn’t fearful so much as it is carnivalesque, as if something exciting has finally happened in their quiet neighborhood.

There are a couple of great shots of the San Francisco Seals, and a delightful picture of Chinese schoolchildren being guided across a busy intersection during their noon recess in 1941, and a weird, gangland-style image of police officers, guns raised, standing outside the Old Poodle Dog Restaurant on Post Street in the fifties, staking out a robbery.

A great coffee table book for anyone with an interest in San Francisco history. Schall has also put together a similar book about Paris–review forthcoming.