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Digitally Restored Panoramic Composited View of The Golden Gate, Fort Point, and San Francisco Bay as seen from "Land's End" near Sutro Heights, c. 1895.
(Image digitally restored and composited by
Bruce C. Cooper, DigitalImageServices.com)

The image below was digitally restored and composited from two severely deteriorated and mildew damaged 5" x 7" glass plate negatives taken about 1895 by Frank Ruffley Tindell, a prominent San Francisco tobacconist and avid amateur photographer. A native of Manchester, England, Mr. Tindell and his wife, Isabelle, emigrated to the Bay area about 1885 and lived in San Francisco and Oakland for more than fifty years.

Mr. Tindell took this composited panoramic view of the Golden Gate from "Land's End" located in Lincoln Park on the Northwest tip of the San Francisco Peninsula looking East towards the mouth of San Francisco Bay. The southern tip of the Marin Peninsula is seen to the left of the Golden Gate with Angel Island in the distance inside the Bay. Fort Point occupies the point of land on the San Francisco side guarding the Golden Gate and the Presidio to the right.

The mile wide strait was named the "Golden Gate" in 1846 by Col. John C. Frémont, the U.S. Army topographical engineer and explorer, briefly (and controversially) Territorial Governor of California, and unsuccessful 1856 Presidential candidate, who later wrote in his Memoirs: "To this Gate I gave the name of Chrysopylae, or "Golden Gate," for the same reasons that the harbor of Byzantium was called Chrysoceras, or Golden Horn." While the channel would not be successfully spanned until 91 years later with the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, in 1872 CPRR construction boss Charles Crocker made the first formal proposal to physically traverse the narrows by presenting a plan to build a railroad bridge which would bring the CPRR's trains directly into San Francisco. —BCC

(Click on the image below to enlarge.)


Digitally restored composite image of the Golden Gate, c. 1895.


One of the two severely deteriorated and mildew damaged original glass plates before digital restoration.
 


Digitized and Ortho-rectified Aerial Image showing perspective of the c. 1895 Golden Gate panoramic view. (Base image courtesy USGS.)

Golden Gate from "Land's End" near Sutro Heights, c. 1895 (high resolution restored and composited panoramic view).
 

Digital image restoration and compositing by Bruce C. Cooper, DigitalImageServices.com.
Scanned glass plate original negatives courtesy of Judie Moore (Frank Tindell's great grandaughter).


Images courtesy of:
DigitalImageServices.com

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