Cliff House from Ocean Beach
This photo is © 1902 ("Cliff house" #18431 6/02/1902) by Goeggel & Weidner,
and these cards are all Weidner 1 variants.
Weidner's lighthearted trompe l'oeil extension
of the posteriors of the foreground couple over the image border is unusual.
Weidner Catalog shows two additional variants, with the earliest postmarked SF 9/02/1902.
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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.
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Weidner 1, Weidner credit moved to back, divided back,
"California" added to bottom caption;
postmarked SF 1/08/1912 (P.P.I.E. cancellation).
The Weidner 1 photo appears uncredited on cards from many other publishers.
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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.
- Mitchell 40, postmarked SF 11/18/1903.
- Unknown publisher, postmarked 11/15/1906.
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Mitchell 40, postmarked SF 7/20/1908, very different than the other Mitchell 040.
The image is manipulated to show a much more imposing Cliff House.
Many other postcards use the Weidner 1 image:
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.
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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.
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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.
This animated GIF displays all the postcards shown above for comparison.
Cliff House from Sutro Baths shows a similar modification of a view from the other side.
You would think they could just take a new picture instead...
Steve's SF postcard pages: