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Something is funny in the picture
above. According to my Santa Cruz Wharf summary chart below,
the Railroad Wharf was present during the ENTIRE life of the
Steamship wharf (aka, Powder Wharf) Then, why is it NOT
present in the etching/ photograph above?
Answer me that one. I did not discover this. It was sent to
me in a VERY interesting email. Here it is -
"I found your page about the Santa Cruz wharves just by
chance, but was
impressed by the effort you've put into documenting the
sequence of
wharves: a chart and a map and a timeline. Somehow those
wharves are
tricky to visualize in time, but you've made it easier.
As an example how tricky, here's a hand drawn panorama of
Santa Cruz
from the collection of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
The
Library sells prints through Zazzle.com:
http://www.zazzle.com/Bancroft/product/137551914372157794
A small copy, but if you trace across it you get an enlarged
detail window.
Nice panorama, and the Bancroft Library dates it to the
1870's.
But it has a fatal flaw: the wharves are wrong, dead wrong.
Cowell
Wharf is fine, shown in exact alignment with Bay St., very
accurate.
However there's no Railroad Wharf, it's totally missing. You
can see
the low point in the shoreline where the railroad was
connected to the
Railroad Wharf, but there's no wharf there. Instead the only
other
wharf in the panorama is the Powder Wharf, which is shown
quite
accurately, connecting directly to the powder warehouses on
the top of
Beach Hill (no railroad ever went there).
Since the Railroad Wharf was there before the Powder Wharf,
and during
the entire lifespan of the Powder Wharf, and also after the
Powder
Wharf, this panorama is an impossibility. Whatever the exact
date,
it's missing an entire wharf.
Obviously whoever drew the panorama didn't have your map or
your chart
or your timeline. As far as I can tell, somebody did walk
the streets
and take notes about the buildings, that part of the
panorama seems
reasonably accurate. But then he sent his notes probably to
somebody
else to do the drawing, perhaps a professional illustrator
back East.
And the Powder Wharf got lost, if it was ever in the notes
at all. So
the result is an impossible picture. Nobody who ever looked
at the
wharves would have drawn this view, but seems whoever drew
the view
never saw the Santa Cruz shoreline himself.
The Powder Wharf isn't the only thing that got lost. You can
see the
detail of the San Lorenzo river canyon, that must have made
an
impression. But the entire Ben Lomond mountain is gone,
vanished. In
the direction of Ben Lomond mountain you can only see flat
lands,
stretching on into the distance. So flat that the edges of
the river
canyon are higher even.
Turns out that this same picture is one of the most popular
items for
sale on the Bancroft/Zazzle site:
http://www.zazzle.com/bancroft
(in the second row)
So that's how history gets written, perhaps. "Sure, there
were only
two wharves, I saw it on a T-shirt!". Not worth much effort
trying to
get the Bancroft Library to issue a correction, but you
might include
a link to their picture on your page. To show how easily
anyone could
get confused about the number of wharves, even if they saw
them in
front of their own eyes."
. . . Peter Nurkse
After reading these excellent
observations by Peter, one must take historical etchings
with a grain of salt. Even the wharves we are shown are
suspect, in terms of what they looked like. So, this is an
interesting etching - but, it is decidedly not an accurate
depiction. Thank you, Peter.
Ross Eric Gibson - Can we get you to weigh in on this
issue?
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