California in 1915 - San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Presidio

August Chevalier, San Francisco's own lithographer-publisher, designed, engraved, and copyrighted this pictorial tourist map of the city in 1914, issuing it for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition the following year. Chevalier had produced an earlier edition of the same map with the title on the right side of the sheet; this version moved the title to the upper left and added an advertising block from the Methodist Book Concern, who sponsored the printing on both sides of the sheet as a promotional giveaway. He combined a surveyed street grid, accurate to a scale of 1:24,000, with hand-drawn building vignettes and decorative lettering, a hybrid of technical mapmaking and commercial illustration typical of exposition-era tourist maps. Less than a decade after the earthquake and fire of 1906 had leveled much of the city, this sheet presented a rebuilt, confidently modern San Francisco to the millions of visitors expected for the world's fair on its northern waterfront.

Golden Gate Park stretches across the western half of the city as a long green rectangle, while the Presidio Reservation occupies the northwest corner, both shown as deliberate counterpoints to the dense yellow street grid covering the rest of the peninsula. The Golden Gate itself is labeled at the bay's entrance, with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition grounds marked along the northern shore near the Marina, the literal reason the map exists. Twin Peaks and Mount Davidson rise through dense contour lines in the city's southern hills, a reminder that Chevalier was mapping genuinely steep terrain even as he flattened it into a tourist-friendly street plan. Red and black lines trace the streetcar routes, railroads, and proposed tunnels knitting the rebuilt city together.

It makes a strong gift for a San Francisco family, someone who has just relocated to the Bay Area, or a collector assembling a set of Panama-Pacific Exposition ephemera alongside the store's other Bay Area sheets. This 1914 edition is worth distinguishing from Chevalier's own earlier Commercial, Pictorial and Tourist Map from 1904, also in this collection, issued more than a decade before the earthquake and the rebuilt city it depicts here - the two make a striking before-and-after pair from the same publisher. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.