From the Western Neighborhoods Project comes today's backward-looking diversion: footage from 1930s San Francisco. Mostly shot along the water front near Ocean Beach, the Cliff House and a pre-bridge, pre-freeway Embarcadero.

Our friends in the Richmond District tell us the pier running out from Ocean Beach actually served as a pipeline for pumping saltwater all the way to pools at the Olympic Club and Lurline Baths downtown. The Pacific Cable — a telegraph line that connected San Francisco to Hawaii, the Phillipines, Japan and Shanghai — also came ashore at Ocean Beach, just south of the Cliff House.

In addition to the Ocean Beach shots, the second half of the video is a quaint look at a time when streetcars were more than just machines for crushing cars and crossing the bay meant driving onto a ferry. Since SFO was just a cow pasture back then, seaplanes brought air travel a little bit closer to downtown.

[RichmondSF]