Cliff House from Ocean Beach



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These Weidner 1 variants all use a photo © 1902 ("Cliff house" #18431 6/02/1902) by Goeggel & Weidner. 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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The Weidner 1 photo appears uncredited on cards from many other publishers.



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More postcards showing the Weidner 1 image:

Other postcards (not in my collection) using the Weidner 1 image:



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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.

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: