This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
Animal City
WARNING: This application may not emulate properly.
Authors: Liz Fenje, Mark Sanchez, Jake Coolidge, Erik Steiner, and Andrew Robichaud
This preliminary visualization offers a glimpse of how and where animals lived in nineteenth century San Francisco in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Using data from city directories, this time series shows where certain animal businesses listed their addresses from 1860 to 1900. Where did animals live in San Francisco? Do we see patterns and shifts in how city spaces were used as animal spaces? Do we see a growth in business offices downtown? Which decades show the biggest shifts in how animal businesses inhabited the city?What emerges from these visualizations is a city full of animals, living and dead. But not all parts of the city were evenly inhabited. Dairies, for example, occupied almost entirely separate spaces as horse stables. Businesses involved in processing dead animals into products congregated in other parts of the city. While horses and cows shared little common space, sheep and cattle often shared many of the same spaces, if for a brief moment in their lives. San Francisco was not a singular or homogenous “Animal City,” but a series of animal spaces and zones that constituted multiple “Animal Cities.”
Click through to see how the animal zones of San Francisco changed over time.
Note: Business directories rarely published businesses owned by Chinese immigrants. While some records of Chinese businesses exist, the data is too sporadic and inconsistent to be included here. Chinatown is highlighted on the map to show this critical data gap and to recognize that Chinese owned animal businesses—-especially butchers and poultry dealers—-were important features of urban animal life.
