I was poking around Ebay in the beginning of this year doing my usual search terms when I came across a set of black and white photos of Stanford from 1922 which were called “Bardell Miniatures.” When I searched for those I found all kinds of sets ranging from 10 to 30 cards that were apparently able to be mailed as a single postcard.
I grabbed the Stanford set and then picked up a few others which are relevant to my collecting interests. They turned out to be fantastic 1920s photographic prints of regions around the US. There are many sets from California because Bardell appears to be have been based out of the Bay Area so I had to limit myself to places which were personally important.
The cards are slightly smaller than the traditional baseball card size and fit wonderfully in 9-pocket pages. I scanned them all and will go through the four different sets which I purchased
Stanford
The first set I got was also the oldest. The Stanford set is from 1922 and consists of 20 photos.
Unsurprisingly the plurality of photos are of the
Quad and
Memorial Church. These are the original campus buildings and look the same in 1922 as they do today. The biggest difference is in the roads out front since
the Oval was only created in 1980.
A few more photos from within the inner quad which is not as manicured as it is today. The surface is gravel instead of tile and the planters are a bit more overgrown but it basically feels the same.
A few photos of specific buildings on campus. The
Stanford Museum is unchanged. The President’s Residence predates the now-traditional Hoover House and is the building that’s now known as
the Knoll. The
Art Gallery is also the same now though in my experience it’s been mostly closed. The Union, now known as
Old Union, is also basically unchanged. As is
Roble Hall which is the only dorm building that appears in the set. Sort of surprised that Encina Hall or the Library did not make the set.
There are two cards of campus memorials. Leland Stanford Junior’s
Mausoleum is a fun one to see since it was the site of the annual Halloween party. The
Angel of Grief (a memorial to Jane Stanford’s brother) is hidden way out on the edge of campus.
And there were three cards of sites in Palo Alto. The
Community House was designed by Julia Morgan and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s currently the location of the
Macarthur Park restuarant. Palo Alto High School is right across the street from campus and had just finished construction in 1918. The Palo Alto itself is
a subject which I have collected on its own.
This set came with two extra photos of football at Stanford Stadium. I don’t know the dates of these photos but the stadium opened in 1921 and since these were with the miniatures I’m assuming they’re from the 1920s—an era when Stanford Football was one of the better teams in the country.
Oakland and University
The set of 20 views of Oakland and “University” (aka Cal) is from 1923. I don’t mention Oakland much on this blog but there are some old posts which explain my history there.
Photos of 1920s Oakland are interesting. The view of Broadway is taken from
Latham Square where Telegraph and Broadway merge. Kind of wonderful to see all the streetcars and the building at 1440 Broadway is basically unchanged today.
The second card is looking in the opposite direction with City Hall on the left and what is now known as Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of it. San Pablo Avenue heads off down the middle and on the righthand side is Latham Square and the Cathedral Building.
And the view of Oakland, San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate from Skyline Blvd in the Oakland Hills is a classic one. Different development today but the feel is very much the same.
There are half-dozen cards of specific Oakland buildings.
Oakland City Hall is basically the same. The Civic Auditorium building is unchanged as well though it’s now known as the
Kaiser Center for the Arts. The
Claremont Hotel has managed to survive despite being located in prime fire territory. While it’s no longer a hotel, the Hotel Oakland is also
still in business as an assisted living community.
The houses have proved to be tougher to track down. There’s a Facebook post with more photos of the H.H. Hart Residence but no information about the building itself. And the Taylor House might be this listing which has no photos of the building but the description sort of matches. If it is that building then it was demolished in 1935.
Four of the cards depict scenes around Lake Merritt. The boathouse building remains but is
more of a restuarant now than anything else. I love the photo of the wild ducks but have no idea where on the lake it was taken. The view of lake in front of downtown shows why Oakland got its name as there are so many trees visible. And the Pergola looks about the same as well though it looks like the weir has not been installed yet.
And there are seven cards depicting various buildings on the Cal campus. Obvious heavy hitters like the
Campanile,
Sather Gate, and the
Greek Theatre. The Chemistry Building is
Gilman Hall where Plutonium was identified in 1941.
Doe Library is still the main library and
Wheeler Hall still has the largest lecture hall on campus and has been one of the campus focal points. And the Le Conte Oak was an extremely popular and photogenic tree which
appears to have fallen in 1939.
San Francisco
The set of photos from San Francisco is dated 1926 but feels older since the card stock and photo sizes are not consistent. This is the largest set I got with 30 photos.
A dozen of the photos are of various buildings around the city so I’ll break those up into manageable chunks. The first three here are all buildings around
Civic Center Plaza.
City Hall of course anchors the space. It and the Civic Auditorium, now the
Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, both look about the same and remain used for the same purpose. The library building though is now the home of the
Asian Art Museum with the library being housed across the street in
a building built in 1995. The most interesting thing for me looking at those three cards is how different the landscaping of the actual plaza is compared to the way it looks today.
The card showing Market Street really feels like a card of the still-extant Palace Hotel which is indeed where President Harding died in 1923. I really love that a previous owner made that annotation.
The
Telephone Building was built in 1925 and was the tallest building in San Francisco until the
Russ Building matched its height in 1927. Yeah the presence of the Russ building suggests that the 1926 date on the box for this set is wrong. I’m used to the view of the other side of the Telegraph Building because it was the background of one of
my standard new camera test shots back in the day.
Mission Dolores is one of the few buildings which is not downtown. This card only shows the 180th century chapel building and crops out the Mission church next door which was built in 1918.
Another view of the Russ Building shows how tall it was at the time. The
Commercial Union Assurance Building is to its left and a little beyond it on its right is the
Standard Oil Building. This view is looking eastward toward Oakland and while I can’t see the Ferry Building I can identify the
Matson Building and the
Pacific Gas and Electric Company General Office Building as the high rises beyond the Commercial Union Assurance Building.
The Skyscrapers photo is shows the same are of downtown but is looking Northish instead. The Russ Building has not been built yet so the tallest building here is the Standard Oil Building. On the far left is the Commercial Union Assurance Building and the Russ building will pop up between them. Because the Russ was completed in 1927 and the Standard Oil was completed in 1922 we have a very small window for when this photo was taken.
The St. Francis is the only hotel explicitly named in the set. This photo includes a nice view of Union Square as well. No annotations about the Fatty Arbuckle scandal however. The Palace of the Legion of Honor was completed in 1924 and remains an art museum today.
The Municipal Pool card is the only one of the 30 which depicts something that’s been completely destroyed. Fleishhacker Pool opened in 1925 and was indeed huge at 1,000 by 150 feet. It was closed in 1971, eventually converted into the parking lot for the zoo in 1999, and the only thing that remains of it are some ruins of the bathhouse that you can see from that parking lot.
There are three cards of Chinatown. The two which show the street scenes, signage, and pagoda architecture are instantly recognizable as San Francisco Chinatown. I’m pretty sure the vertical card shows the intersection of Grant and California Street. The card showing the “flappers” is noteworthy in that it’s the only card in any of these sets which shows people and the point is very clearly “these are not Americans.” No idea why these kids are being called flappers though.
There are nine cards which feature sites in and around
Golden Gate Park, four of which depict the area around the
Music Concourse. The first two of them show the museum, not yet named after
M.H. de Young. This building did not survive the 1989 earthquake and had to be replaced but the museum remains in the same location. The second museum card is actually of the
Francis Scott Key Monument which is shown in its second location in the park, not the location I remember it being. That statue was torn down in 2020 and so only the plinth remains now.
Steinhart Aquarium and the California Academy of Sciences suffered a fate similar to the museum in that the building was damaged in the 1989 quake and has since been replaced by a fancy new building. I’ve only been to the new building once but visited the old one depicted in the card many times on elementary school field trips.
The bandstand though remains looking very much the same. I had zero idea it was actually named the Spreckels Temple of Music until I started writing this post.
I was always fascinated by Stow Lake and its island when I was a kid and I missed that it was renamed to Blue Heron Lake only a couple of years ago.
Portals of the Past at
Lloyd Lake became famous after
Willard Worden photographed them as the only thing left standing after the 1906 fire destroyed the Alban N. Towne mansion.
The Japanese Tea Garden is another fond childhood memory as I distinctly remember climbing/crossing the drum bridge. On the other hand, I’ve never been to the Conservatory of Flowers. Completed in 1879, this is the oldest building in the park and I suspect that when I was a kid it was not in the best of shape.
The Dutch Windmill was one of two windmills built to pump water for irrigating the park. It can be seen in the postcard of Playland at the Beach.
The last batch of cards feature the coast. The view from
Sutro Heights shows Playland at the Beach (or what would become Playland at the Beach) and both windmills. Looking the other way up the coast from around the same spot shows the Cliff House and in the Pacific beyond the Cliff House are
Seal Rocks. The Seal Rocks photo is probably taken from the Cliff House itself.
The view of looking through the Golden Gate is looking into San Francisco Bay since Fort Point is on the righthand shore. Twin Peaks is close to the geographic center of the city and, as the high point, offers nice views in all directions—assuming there’s no fog. In both of these cards it’s weird but fun to see what things looked like before the Golden Gate Bridge.
And the last card is of the Ferry Building in action which is a nice reminder of San Francisco as a working city rather than a tourist one. The tourist part of me is a little surprised that there are no images of the Palace of Fine Arts or the Cable Cars in this set but the Palace may already have been deteriorating and cable cars may not have been novel yet since the car companies hadn’t destroyed streetcars yet.
Yosemite
The last set is also dated 1926 and consists of fifteen views of Yosemite. I won’t have much to say about these since Yosemite has changed a lot less over the last century than the cities have.
Two views of the valley, one from the Inspiration Point trail—a nice surprise of effort when the
Tunnel View is the trailhead—and another from valley floor with the Merced River in the foreground. El Capitan is on the left. Bridalveil Fall on the right. And Half Dome would be in the distance but neither photograph is clear enough to see it.
There are five cards featuring the big four waterfalls in the park.
Bridalveil Fall is the one seen from the famous views.
Yosemite Falls is a spectacular double waterfall that you can see from the valley floor.
Vernal Fall is a short hike from the valley which I remember doing when I was a kid. I remember wanting to continue on the
Mist Trail all the way to
Nevada Fall but we turned around after reaching the top pf Vernal Fall.
The last card here is all four waterfalls together. Thankfully the photos are different even if they’re from the same set of tripod holes.
Six card featuring prominent rock formations. The first two are the most famous two as
Half Dome and
El Capitan need no introductions. I think the photo of Half Dome was taken from
Glacier Point since the view there is spectacular. The giddy thrill of seeing people on that overhanging rock makes for a very exciting photo. I’m pretty sure that was off limits even when I was there as a kid.
Three Brothers are behind El Capitan on the Valley View photos and the hike to the highest point, Eagle Peak, takes you past Yosemite Falls. Cathedral Spires are back behind Bridalveil Fall. And North Dome is across Tenaya Valley from Half Dome.
Mirror Lake is actually at the base of North Dome. I appreciate that this photo really understood the assignment when it comes to something named “mirror.” And the last Yosemite card is of the
Wawona Tunnel Tree in
Mariposa Grove.
And that’s it with the Bardell Miniatures. This was a very cool type of collectible to discover and I’m going to have to be very disciplined about not getting any more of them.
n j w v