RetroBayArea
@RetroBayArea • 6,371 subscribers
An independent project featuring all original video edits that document culture and everyday life in the SF Bay Area. 1950s - mid-2000s. - DM for Business.
Shorts
Videos
The San Francisco smoking ban. San Francisco, 1998. California banned smoking in bars and restaurants on January 1, 1998. I was working in a restaurant at the time. Management still let the regulars smoke after closing until things cooled down. Twenty-eight years later, Supervisor Myrna Melgar introduced a bill to extend the ban to open-air patios and parklets at bars. Health advocates say it will protect workers and patrons from secondhand smoke. Bar owners at places like O'Reilly's Pub, Zeitgeist, and El Rio say it will hurt their business. The question being raised is why cigarettes on a patio are the priority when fentanyl overdoses in the city topped 700 last year and open drug use is still a common sight around downtown. Cannabis retailers are exempt from the bill. source footage 🎥: KGO-TV
RetroBayArea78,246 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
In 1982, this 63-year-old San Francisco native described a version of North Beach he grew up in that doesn’t exist anymore. His name was Dante Benedetti, and he was born and raised in North Beach. He owned a restaurant there called New Pisa, which existed from 1927 to 2003.
RetroBayArea114,904 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Scenes from Palo Alto in 1989. This footage captures Palo Alto during a time of transition. The city was already starting to change, but not at the scale or pace seen today. Tech companies were present, and venture capital was part of the picture, but the footprint was smaller, and the transformation was not yet complete. Some of the places shown are still recognizable. A few streets, storefronts, and buildings remain much the same. Others have been replaced, rebuilt, or removed entirely. It’s a mix of the familiar and the forgotten. What comes through is a version of Palo Alto that feels more grounded in everyday life. Before it became a global center for innovation, it was still just a town, with all the ordinary details that come with that. The song is by a now-defunct Redwood City band called Nord Mariner. It felt like a fitting soundtrack. Its lyrics about change, memory, and the things we take for granted echo the feeling of watching a place change so much that it becomes something else entirely.
RetroBayArea97,861 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
This is what a computer assembly plant in 1970s Silicon Valley looked like. San Jose, 1978. Back when America actually built its own computers, IBM was doing it right here in San Jose. That campus is now a Lowe’s Home Improvement. Manufacturing operations continued there into the 1990s, including the assembly of large disk drives in clean-room facilities. Over time, IBM gradually moved manufacturing overseas, primarily to countries in Asia such as China, Malaysia, and Thailand. Key manufacturing buildings on the Cottle Road campus were closed by 1996. A few years later, IBM shifted its focus from manufacturing to research and development, and its current San Jose-area presence consists primarily of research labs rather than production facilities. Today, the former Cottle Road location is occupied by the Lowe’s Home Improvement store at 5550 Cottle Rd, San Jose. Look it up on Google Maps. The only remaining reminder is the IBM Cottle Road Campus Historic Landmark, which is visible in the Lowe’s parking lot. source footage 🎥: KPIX
RetroBayArea68,911 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Rich kids cosplaying as cultural revolutionaries. San Francisco, 1968. They came to the Bay Area in the name of peace and love. Today, many of these same kids would probably end up joining Antifa or some other highly charged movement where they could cosplay as protectors of democracy, rebels, or social justice warriors. Boomers really knew how to party. source footage 🎥: Jack O’Connell
RetroBayArea79,736 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had space programs, there was this guy who was building rockets in his backyard. Saratoga, 1980s. Robert Truax was a rocket engineer and inventor best known for his pioneering work in both military rocketry and the early private spaceflight movement. He played a significant role in U.S. Navy missile programs and after retiring from the Navy, he founded his own company, Truax Engineering. By doing things differently and avoiding what he called ‘government waste,’ he believed space travel had become too expensive and bureaucratic under government control, and that simpler, reusable rockets could be built more efficiently by individuals or private companies. He remained a vocal advocate for commercial spaceflight throughout the 1980s and 1990s, years before companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin made such ideas mainstream. In the 1980s, he launched Project Private Enterprise, an ambitious attempt to send a human into space using a privately developed rocket. The centerpiece of this effort was the X-3 Volksrocket, a low-cost, reusable vehicle designed to democratize space access. Although his private rockets never reached orbit, Robert Truax is remembered as a visionary and a determined ‘garage engineer’ who challenged the status quo of space exploration. His efforts helped lay the philosophical foundation for today’s commercial space industry, paving the way for innovators like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, whose companies have turned private spaceflight into a reality. Truax remains an important, if often overlooked, figure in the history of rocketry. RIP Robert Truax (September 3, 1917 – September 17, 2010). source footage 🎥: MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour | NBC | Video West
RetroBayArea48,664 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
James Burke ponders what working from home could do to a city and its community. San Francisco, 1985. This edit is from a British documentary series called The Day the Universe Changed, written and presented by celebrity science historian James Burke. It originally aired in 1985 and explored how scientific and technological advances transformed Western society’s philosophical understanding of the world. The series presents the idea that new knowledge changes our perception of the universe, and in doing so, changes the universe itself. 🎥: BBC
RetroBayArea63,067 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Pope John Paul II visits San Francisco in 1987. Pope John Paul Il visited San Francisco on September 17, 1987, during a ten-day tour of the United States. His stop in the city included a visit to the Golden Gate Bridge, a Mass at Candlestick Park that drew over seventy-thousand people, and a visit to Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco.
RetroBayArea39,190 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
You used to have to go to a store just to buy software. Egghead Software, San Francisco. 1993. Sure, they had all sorts of educational and productivity software, but all anyone really cared about was getting Leisure Suit Larry and the rest of the Sierra On-Line games that were out at the time. I used to spend hours playing King’s Quest and Police Quest. This was 1993, right in the middle of the golden age of boxed computer programs. Back when software came in shrink-wrapped boxes with thick manuals and floppy disks inside, stores like Egghead were where people went to get the latest programs and games for their PCs. Egghead opened in 1984 and eventually grew to more than 200 stores across the United States. It became one of the most recognizable names in software retail, but by the mid-1990s it faced growing competition from big-box retailers and the rise of online sellers. In 1998, the company closed all of its brick-and-mortar locations and transitioned to an online-only model. A major data breach in late 2000 damaged customer trust, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. The San Francisco Egghead location was at 2300 Lombard Street. source footage 🎥: Jerry Hogsett
RetroBayArea41,479 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
This is what a Silicon Valley office in Mountain View looked like in the 1990s. There's something very comforting and familiar about this place. I think it is the Atrium. I've never been to this exact building, but somehow it feels like I have. It reminds me of being a kid, running errands with my mom and sister in places just like it, banks, the cable company, doctor’s offices, the phone company, back when you still had to pay bills in person. That circular cement bench in the atrium quietly reminds me of Apple Park. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. The footage was filmed at the offices of Software Publishing Corporation, once located on Landings Drive in Mountain View, right next to where the Googleplex stands today. The company was best known for Harvard Graphics, one of the first presentation software programs. It was hugely popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before PowerPoint became the standard. In 1984, InfoWorld estimated that SPC was the ninth largest software company in the world, with $14 million in sales the previous year. By 1985, revenue had skyrocketed to $50 million. But as Windows replaced DOS and introduced built-in graphics tools, demand for Harvard Graphics quickly faded. SPC released a Windows version in 1991, but it couldn’t keep up with PowerPoint or Lotus Freelance. By 1994, revenues had collapsed, half the staff had been laid off, and the company was sold to Allegro in 1996. Allegro later sold it to Serif, which continued selling Harvard Graphics 98 until it was finally discontinued in 2017. source footage 🎥: Scott Clark
RetroBayArea36,288 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
The implosion of Geneva Towers. San Francisco, 1998. They were built in 1967 as a private apartment complex but failed to attract renters so they were turned into public housing. Over the years as the owners failed to maintain the property, the complex fell apart. Conditions got so bad there that the feds took it over in 1991. The buildings were demolished on May 16, 1998. source footage 🎥: KTVU
RetroBayArea47,851 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
1 of 9: Welcome to Great America A Retro Bay Area Series: The Early Days of Great America in the late 1970s. 🎡🎠🎢🎟️ In 1976, the Marriott Corporation opened Great America in Santa Clara. It represented the state of the art in theme park design and attractions at the time. It was designed and built with a strong commitment to authentic theming, reflected in the rides, entertainment, food, merchandise, and more. The goal was to create a top-quality experience for families to enjoy together. If you were a kid when it opened, you eventually took your own kids there. If you can, take your grandkids before it’s gone forever. source footage 🎥: Bryan Walker
RetroBayArea40,237 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
This is what sending emails from a San Francisco McDonald’s in 2001 looked like. Seeing things like this felt so exciting back then. I’m not sure people feel that same kind of excitement about tech today the way they did in earlier times. You’ve never been excited about having a washing machine or refrigerator in your house. It's just always been there. But your great great grandparents were. In 2026 touchscreen ordering systems are at every McDonald’s and people seem mostly frustrated and annoyed with them. “Walk up to the Web, it is free!” That’s what the sign advertising the new McDonald’s internet station read. You could use it for email, check sports scores, read the news, browse local San Francisco guides, and even do some shopping. It was a novelty to have something like this available to anyone inside a fast food restaurant back in 2001. The guys in this video were genuinely amused and likely mentioned it in the emails they sent that day. This was six years before the iPhone was introduced and two years before this McDonald’s on Powell Street closed.
RetroBayArea29,396 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten