Letterform Archive

20th Street station (also signed as Dogpatch) is a light rail station on the Muni Metro T Third Street line in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The station opened with the T Third Street line on January 13, 2007. It has two side platforms; the northbound platform is north of 20th Street, and the southbound platform south of 20th Street, so that trains can pass through the intersection before the station stop. The station is also served by bus routes 15, 48 and 55, plus the T Bus and 91 Owl bus routes, which provide service along the T Third Street line during the early morning and late night hours respectively when trains do not operate.

Building 101 is a neoclassical building located in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood, designed by Frederick H. Meyer. The building was built in 1917 for Bethlehem Steel, which used it as an administrative building while it owned the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation operations on adjacent Pier 70.The building was originally intended to house offices for 350 people, including executives, draftsmen, and naval architects, and included blueprint facilities. By 1945, it also included a Navy cafeteria and a private branch exchange for telephone service. The building has 56,268 square feet of space and was unused since 1992. It was renovated and reimagined into a furniture gallery and restaurant by RH, opening in 2022.

Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICA SF) is an American contemporary art museum that opened in October 2022, and is located in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Admission is free.

Irish Hill was a small working-class neighborhood in San Francisco, near the intersection of 22nd Street and Illinois Avenue. Expansion of the local iron and steel works, including leveling of the hill, effaced the neighborhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The neighborhood was located on a 250-foot hill reached by a wooden stairway at Illinois and 20th streets, and extended from there to the bay. Founded in the 1860s by Irish immigrants, it consisted of approximately 60 small houses and 40 boarding houses and hotels, housing mostly working-class Irish. A large number were single men who worked at Union Iron Works or the Pacific Rolling Mills, in the nearby industrial area known as the Dogpatch. The Union Hotel was run by Frank McManus, a political boss known as the King of Irish Hill.The neighborhood was destroyed when the hill was flattened in two stages, in the 1880s by quarrying to provide fill for under Long Bridge (now the site of 3rd Street) and starting in 1897, by quarrying and dynamiting to clear space for the expansion of the Union Iron Works and subsequently of Bethlehem Steel. By 1918 it had been reduced to a mound less than 50 feet high.

Dogpatch is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, roughly half industrial and half residential. It was initially a working-class neighborhood, but has experienced rapid gentrification since the 1990s. It now has similar demographics to its western neighbor Potrero Hill – an upper middle-class working professional neighborhood. Dogpatch was originally part of Potrero Nuevo and its history is closely tied to Potrero Hill. Dogpatch has its own neighborhood association but shares a merchant association, Democratic caucuses, and general neighborhood matters with Potrero Hill.

Crane Cove Park is a 7-acre (2.8 ha) urban park in Potrero Point, San Francisco, California, located on the city's east-facing waterfront. The park opened in 2020. The site used to be a shipbuilding site occupied by the Union Iron Works and the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation.The park surrounds a large sloped concrete ramp leading to the water and features outlines of various ships launched there, as well as an outline of a segment of the BART Transbay Tube, built and launched there between 1965 and 1969.The park's name refers to the presence on the waterfront of two historic cranes, called Nick and Nora after the characters in the "Thin Man" films of the '30s and '40s.

GeoVector Corporation (originally named Criticom Corporation) began conducting research into augmented reality in early 1990s. The company, co-founded by John Ellenby, who also founded laptop pioneer GRiD Systems Corporation, devised a method to use sensors in a device to associate relevant digital information with places on earth. The basic concept around which most of GeoVector's R&D has focused is that knowing the position and orientation of the device allows the application to provide digital information associated with a place in the real world. Position and direction data can be used to create a virtual vector which intersects with objects indexed in databases by their latitude and longitude coordinates. GeoVector's first patent in this domain, since issued as 5,815,411, was filed September 10, 1993. The company originally held the trademark for "Augmented Reality" (issued in 1995) but abandoned it as the term was generally adopted to describe this technique. Early GeoVector work focused on providing vertical solutions. One GeoVector augmented reality design used compass equipped binoculars along with GPS to superimpose nautical maps on the visual horizon thus improving the safety of navigation. A video showing early Augmented Reality concepts from GeoVector can be seen here GeoVector then discovered that their basic technology would improve the user experience on handheld devices delivering location aware applications. In this instance, actually viewing the real object was not necessary. Simply being able to refine the search for location information by knowing the direction of user interest or the specific object of his attention would be a significant benefit. The GeoVector team then implemented what they now refer to as the "pointing" feature.In 1998, "Clipper" project was initiated. The company built a prototype device known internally as The "Little Guy", a handheld "pointable" information appliance independent of a visual or video element. Since that time GeoVector has worked closely with sensor and device manufactures to encourage them to include GPS and compass elements in their products. In early 2006, there were sufficient pointing capable handsets in Japan for GeoVector to launch its first commercial product on the KDDI network with support of local partners NECM and Mapion. A video showing the functionality of Pointing is on YouTube.The company has continued its research and development in directional searching and augmented reality and has been awarded several patents in those areas. Further information about their intellectual property can be found on line at their website patent gallery.

UCSF Medical Center station (also signed as Mariposa Street) is a light rail station on the Muni Metro T Third Street line, located in the median of Third Street at Mariposa Street in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The station serves the UCSF Medical Center and the larger UCSF Mission Bay campus. The station opened with the T Third Street line on January 13, 2007. It has two side platforms; the northbound platform is north of Mariposa Street, and the southbound platform south of Mariposa Street, which allows trains to pass through the intersection before stopping at the station. The station is served by the T Bus and 91 Owl bus routes, which provide service along the T Third Street line during the early morning and late night hours respectively when trains do not operate.

Union Iron Works, located in San Francisco, California, on the southeast waterfront, was a central business within the large industrial zone of Potrero Point, for four decades at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Kneass Boat Works was a shipbuilding company in San Francisco, California. To support the World War 2 demand for ships, Kneass Boat Works built: US Navy Sub chasers, US Army barges and tugboats. Kneass Boat Works was started by California native George Washington Kneass (1859–1923) in 1868, at 22 Mission Street, San Francisco. George Kneass started as an apprentice to boat builder Martin Vice. The two became partners operating a shipyard at Pier 70 at 671 Illinois Street, San Francisco. Business was good and in 1898 Kneass opened a second shipyard at 718 3rd Street, San Francisco. At its peak, Kneass employed 50 workers. George Kneass died in 1923 and his two sons, George, Jr. and Webster, took over the shipyard. Kneass built small boats, launches, rowboats, barges, lifeboats), sailboats, and a few wooden cruisers. For World War 2, in 1941 the company built a small emergency shipyard. The shipyard closed in 1970, but the site is now the art studio of Ruth Kneass; she kept the boatyard name for her studio.

23rd Street station is a light rail station on the Muni Metro T Third Street line, located in the median of Third Street in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The station opened with the T Third Street line on January 13, 2007. It has two side platforms; the northbound platform is north of 23rd Street, and the southbound platform south of 23rd Street, so that trains can pass through the intersection before the station stop. Caltrain's 22nd Street station is located about 0.4 miles (0.64 km) away from this station, offering an indirect connection. The station is served by the T Bus and 91 Owl bus routes, which provide service along the T Third Street line during the early morning and late night hours respectively when trains do not operate.

Pier 70 in San Francisco, California, is a historic pier in San Francisco's Potrero Point neighborhood, home to the Union Iron Works and later to Bethlehem Shipbuilding. It was one of the largest industrial sites in San Francisco during the two World Wars. Today, it is regarded as the best-preserved 19th century industrial complex west of the Mississippi.