Cliff House from Ocean Beach
All the postcards on this page are based on a photo © 1902 by Goeggel & Weidner ("Cliff house" #18431 6/02/1902).
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These cards are all Weidner 1 variants. Catalog: Weidner shows two additional variants, with the earliest postmarked SF 9/21/1902 (three months after the copyright date). Weidner's lighthearted trompe l'oeil extension of the posteriors of the foreground couple over the image border is unusual.
- Goeggel & Weidner 1, credit front left, AutoChrom logo, undivided back, postmarked Plouha (France) 12/27/[1903] (postmark year illegible, but the writer posted several other cards to the same household in December 1903; see Set: Pivert).
- Weidner 1, Weidner credit, AutoChrom logo, undivided back, postmarked SF 8/10/1904.
- Weidner 1, Weidner credit, no AutoChrom logo, undivided back, postmarked SF 1/16/1906.
- Weidner 1, Weidner credit moved to back, divided back, "California" added to bottom caption; postmarked SF 1/08/1912 (P.P.I.E. cancellation).
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The Weidner 1 photo appears uncredited on cards from many other publishers.
- Buedingen 2205, postmarked SF 8/27/1903, is the earliest card in my collection with this image. The foreground couple is mostly cropped out, but traces of the their hats remain.
- Selige 3179 (b+w).
- Charlton (b+w); another example is postmarked 3/20/1906.
- Charlton, color version of preceding; see Britton 517 below re blotch at lower left.
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- Britton & Rey 517 "showing holiday crowd on beach" (per caption) adds two kids in the lower left corner and accentuates the Cliff House windows.
- Britton & Rey 517, postmarked Alameda 2/06/1904, has an ungainly blotch at lower left, where the two kids were in the preceding. Several other cards on this page show variations of the blotch.
- Mitchell 40, postmarked SF 11/18/1903.
- Unknown publisher, postmarked 11/15/1906.
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Apparently Cliff House comes in several sizes (S / M / L).
- Unknown publisher 1A4.
- Behrendt 4; another example is postmarked 4/28/1907.
- Mitchell 40, postmarked SF 7/20/1908, is very different than the 1903 Mitchell 40 above. The image is manipulated to show a much more imposing Cliff House.
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It's another nice day at Ocean Beach. Wait, those people look familiar; aha, they're the same people as above. But wait... Cliff House doesn't look the same at all. The Victorian Cliff House #3 (Britton & Rey 521) survived the 1906 earthquake and fire without major damage, but it burned to the ground on 9/07/1907 (Britton & Rey 1030, Britton & Rey 1031). Cliff House #4 (Cardinell-Vincent 400) opened on the same site in 1909. Here the postcard artist has replaced Cliff House #3 in the pre-fire image with #4. The scale is wrong: Cliff House #4 should be shown as much smaller, as seen in a later Unknown publisher card.
- Mitchell 40, postmarked SF 1/12/1916, the same stock number as Mitchell 40 above but a different image.
- Mitchell 40, probably later variant, different coloring, same caption in different typeface.
- Pacific Novelty 40. The front is identical to Mitchell 40, including the stock number and caption.
- Pacific Novelty 40, a later variant postmarked SF 7/26/1925.
Cliff House from Sutro Baths shows a similar modification of a view of Cliff House from the other side. You would think they could just take a new picture instead...
Other postcards (not in my collection) using the Weidner 1 image:
- Mitchell 40 (postmarked 10/29/1902), another variant.
This animated GIF displays all the postcards shown above for comparison.
Steve's SF postcard pages:
