Found Ektachrome slide. Fisherman's Wharf at night, November 1969. Peter Alioto's Italian Specialty House. Hof Brau. Sea Foods. The Sea Captain's Chest. And up top, in blue neon, the two words that sold a restaurant back then: AIR CONDITIONED. I've seen this scene during the day before, but historic slides of this block at night are more rare. Every tube lit. This is what the Wharf looked like when it was loud and red and unembarrassed about wanting your money. Neon on neon, and the hills behind it doing their own light show. Look at the cars. A Yellow Cab, 789, a white Falcon in the foreground. A block of Detroit iron at the curb, and not one of them new. In November 1969 the cars on the Wharf were already somebody's old cars. There were a couple of different Alioto's on the Wharf back then. This one was Peter's. The famous one, Alioto's at stall number 8, started in 1925 when Nunzio Alioto, a Sicilian immigrant, opened a fish stand. His widow Rose built it into the first building ever put up on the Wharf, and the family says she invented cioppino. San Franciscans have been arguing about that claim for 80 years. Alioto's closed in 2020 and never reopened. This past January the city took the famous sign down and tore the building down for a public plaza. A hundred years of family history, replaced by picnic tables. Peter's is gone too. And the Sea Captain's Chest, the nautical gift shop on the corner, did not survive the 70s. Everything lit here is dark now. I have photographed more than 30,000 neon signs in America myself, and I am still out there shooting them. But I do not own a time machine. I cannot go back and photograph the thousands we have already lost. So I find these slides. Somebody stood on Jefferson Street in November 1969 with a camera loaded with Ektachrome and figured an ordinary night was worth one frame. Finding their work is the next best thing. Did you eat at Peter Alioto's? Or drink at the Hof Brau? And when did Peter's close? I cannot find it written down anywhere.

Sheng Thao won the Oakland mayor's race by 677 votes. The mailer that darkened Loren Taylor's face and gave him red eyes went to 168,000 homes. It was paid for with $75,000 from the Duongs' California Waste Solutions, per the deal points in Andy Duong's own WhatsApp note, shown to the jury this week. Thao's own campaign consultant testified he thought the piece was offensive and wanted the campaign to denounce it. They refused. Because it was working.

Powder River, Wyoming. Population barely a hundred. And standing over a dead log cabin steakhouse on the highway, this guy. Twenty one feet of rusting cowboy, giving you the thumbs up. Tumble Inn across his belly. LOUNGE CAFE on a big blue arrow. Sizzlin Steaks down at his boots. Every tube in him broken, the paint peeling, the neon long gone dark. I love him anyway. He was built in 1959 for a restaurant in Las Vegas that never installed him. Too big, the owner decided. A Wyoming oilman named Bill Grey found him, bought him, had the waving arm added and the Sizzlin Steaks base built, and hauled him out to Powder River around 1960. An old timer said that when they first lit him up he was the biggest, brightest thing in all of Wyoming. The steakhouse closed in 2005. He stood there alone for 18 more years, rusting in the wind off the high plains, outliving the business he was built to sell. I have photographed more than 30,000 neon signs in America, and most of that has meant driving. Backroads, old highways, the main streets of towns the interstate forgot. It is a race, honestly. The weather takes them, the bulldozers take them, the plastic sign companies take them, and there are thousands I will never get to in time. These signs are art. Hand bent glass and painted steel, built by local sign shops for local dreamers, and when one goes dark a whole town gets a little less itself. He got rescued. In 2023 they hauled him 35 miles to Casper, power washed decades of bird nests out of his belly, repainted him and rebent his neon. The crew named him Earl. He is being lit again this year at the Yellowstone Garage in Casper, close to home, still on the highway, still working. Anybody ever eat a sizzlin steak at the Tumble Inn? And has anybody seen Earl lit up in Casper yet? Enlarge this one big. Look at the rust. He earned every bit of it. Shooting neon signs is one hell of a rabbit hole to go down. It's more like a black hole really as you will never get them all no matter how hard you try. Here are just a few thousand of the neon signs that I've photographed in an album on Flickr: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk…

This is why I walk. I drive plenty. Half my photography life is road trips, pulling over for neon and grain elevators and whatever the highway hands me. But in a city I walk. I put a camera over my shoulder and walk for hours, no destination, because the city hands you things it will not hand anybody in a car. This morning, my last morning in New Orleans, I turned down a side street in the French Quarter. Not a main street. Just a random turn, the kind you make for no reason at all. And there it was, parked against a wall, lit by a single ray of sunlight. House of Wings. N'awlinz Style Seafood. An old step van with a big red rooster on the side, a little chick beside him, both of them strutting. No vinyl wrap. No QR code. That rooster did not come off a printer. Somebody painted him, brush in hand. Old school. Step vans were built to replace the horse a hundred years ago, for milk and bread and laundry routes. Drivers stood up at the wheel and hopped out either side, a hundred stops a day. The best were skinned in aluminum by Grumman, the airplane company, which is why they do not rust and are still out here working long after they should be dead. Every food truck you have ever eaten from is one of these or its grandchild. This one spent its life delivering door to door and now it sells wings. Same job, same truck. And then look at the wall. Cream on top, red on the bottom, the same two colors in nearly the same place as the paint line on the truck. The truck is camouflaged against its own building. Serendipity. I did not arrange it. I just showed up on foot, with a camera, and it was there. That is the whole secret to photography, if there is one. Serendipity is not rare. It is everywhere, parked on side streets in every city in America. It is just invisible at speed. You have to be out there, walking slow, looking at everything, believing the next corner is the one. I never ate the wings. I left town today and the House of Wings is my unfinished business in New Orleans, along with two girls in a truck in the Quarter in 2006 I would still love to photograph again. Walk your city, camera in hand. And enlarge this one big and look at that rooster.

This is the Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho, and it is the only bridge in America you can legally jump off. 486 feet above the Snake River. No permit, no permission, no season. BASE jumping is allowed here 365 days a year, the only man made structure in the country where that is true, and jumpers fly in from all over the world for it. Stand on the sidewalk long enough and you will watch somebody climb over the railing, step out into three or four seconds of freefall, pop a canopy and float down to the canyon floor like it is the most normal thing in the world. This canyon has form for this kind of thing. In 1974 Evel Knievel tried to jump it in a steam powered rocket, from a dirt ramp a few miles east of this bridge. His parachute deployed too early and he drifted down to the riverbank and walked away with minor injuries. The ramp is still there. I did not come to Idaho for a bridge. I come to Idaho the way I go everywhere now, on the road with a camera, working on photographing not only the 100 largest cities in America but all 50 states. Shoshone Falls is right down the road, which Idahoans will tell you is taller than Niagara, and then there is this bridge, with people falling off it on purpose. My Idaho album is here: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk… Would you jump?

.@DanielLurie all talk no action, all hat no cattle. All he does is just say “welp folks, we still have a lot of work to do” over and over and over and over again while doing absolutely nothing about the fentanyl crisis in our city. Weak, ineffective mayor. There is no accountability, there is no plan. San Francisco needs a @spencerpratt

Why are people so opposed to single family homes?

This is Oscar Jonesy. For more than 20 years he was the silverback at the San Francisco Zoo, and he lived there for 44 years, since 1981. Generations of San Francisco kids grew up watching him. I took this portrait of him at the zoo, and of all the animals I have ever photographed, he is the one who looks most like he was sitting for it. Like he had something to say. In February 2025 the zoo put him under anesthesia for what they called a routine medical procedure. He never woke up. He was 43. Six months later it came out that Oscar had been diagnosed with advanced heart disease. The Great Ape Heart Project, the authority on gorilla heart care, says a gorilla with heart disease should never be put under anesthesia unless it is the only way to save his life. The zoo did it anyway, and then said nothing about the heart disease for six months. His daughter Kabibe was crushed to death by a hydraulic door at the same zoo in 2014. She was 16 months old. There is a new silverback at the zoo now, a gorilla named Cecil, who came from Louisville last year. I wish him a long and healthy life. I also hope somebody at that zoo is made to answer for Oscar. San Francisco grew up with this gorilla. I shot him many times over the years. Did you ever visit him and if so what do you remember about him?

Watching C.J. Chenier tear it up at the New Orleans Funk Fest right now. His father Clifton Chenier invented zydeco. Literally invented it. The King of Zydeco, and the first Creole musician to ever win a Grammy. C.J. joined his dad's band on his 21st birthday. When Clifton died in 1987, C.J. inherited his father's accordion and the Red Hot Louisiana Band, and he has been leading that same band ever since. Almost 40 years now. He is 69 years old and he plays that accordion like it’s part of his body. If you ever get the chance to see CJ Chenier perform down in New Orleans, don't pass it up.

I took this photograph 20 years ago, in the French Quarter in April 2006, eight months after Katrina. Two girls in a slow moving pickup kept yelling, take our picture, take our picture. One of them got shy and turned away, so her friend pushed her face back towards my camera. Snap. The truck was gone in an instant. As far as I know, neither of them has ever seen this photograph. I wrote that the girl on the left embodies the joie de vivre New Orleanians have, that even the people hardest hit by life here carry a spirit about them. Twenty years of photographing cities later, I still believe that. Tennessee Williams said America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland. San Francisco is home. I have spent half my life photographing New York and New Orleans. There is a lot of truth in that quote, and some days, standing on a corner in the Quarter, I believe every word of it. But I am also in the middle of photographing the 100 largest cities in America, with albums published for 60 of them, and the project has ruined the quote for me a little. Detroit has a grit and a dignity all its own. So does Pittsburgh. So does Memphis, and El Paso, and a dozen other places Williams would have waved off as Cleveland. And of course Chicago has that pizza. And don't you dare try to say Lou Malnati's deep dish is not pizza. Every great city has its own charm. You just have to walk it with a camera until it shows you. So no, I will not take the Williams quote as religion. But back here in New Orleans this weekend, with the food and the music and the art and the people. I understand exactly why he said it. My 100 Largest American Cities collection: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk… Now the part I actually care about. Somewhere out there are two women who were girls in a truck in the Quarter in 2006. Were they sisters? Friends? I would love to take their portrait again, 20 years later. How awesome would it be if this found them? And Cleveland, defend yourself. Tell me why your city belongs on the list. You are one of the hundred American cities I still need to photograph.

Tom Catz. Somewhere in New Orleans there is a story behind this sign. I photographed this last night inside Chickie Wah Wah, a little music club on Canal Street in Mid-City. Red neon, TOM CATZ, over the grinning face of a cat in round glasses, hanging over the bar like he knows some secrets. And maybe he does. I just cannot find where he came from. Here is what I do know. Chickie Wah Wah's walls are a museum of dead New Orleans. The club is covered in signs rescued from local businesses that are gone, packed in tight around the stage like a collage. So Tom Catz was something once. A bar? A club? A restaurant with a cat for a mascot? Somebody's uncle's place? The club itself is a survivor. Dale Triguero opened it just before Katrina, in a derelict building that had been the Canal Bus Stop. The storm wrecked the building, and he rebuilt it and reopened it anyway. He named it after a 1950s Bobby Marchan record, Chickie Wah Wah. Huey Piano Smith had cut his own version, Little Chickie Wah Wah, and the club calls the two of them its patron saints, with both 45s on the wall. Triguero died in 2021, and rather than let Mid-City's music room become a parking garage or a law office, the musicians who loved the place kept it alive. It is a listening room. They will politely ask you to take your conversation outside, where they pipe the music so you do not miss anything. This is why New Orleans is New Orleans. The band is ten feet away, the room holds almost nobody, and the walls remember everything the city has lost. So help me out. What was Tom Catz? Where was it, and how did its sign end up glowing across the bar inside of Chickie Wah Wah? Grok tells me it’s from the Tom Cat dinner from Wildwood, New Jersey. I don’t think that’s right though. What would a sign from a diner in New Jersey be doing all the way down in the Big Easy. Surely somebody out there knows or knows somebody who knows.

This is a wall of faces by Bruce Gilden, and he might be the most hated photographer in America. I photographed this at Pier 24 in San Francisco, in the exhibition This Land. The series is called Citizen. Sixty enormous faces curved around the room, every one of them shot the Gilden way: a wide lens inches from the face, a flash in one hand, no warning and no mercy. Every pore, every scar, every bad year, printed bigger than the person ever was in life. And there is exactly one famous face in the whole grid. Anthony Weiner. Why is he in a series about America's left behind? Because in 2013 the New York Times Magazine hired Gilden to photograph all the New York City mayoral candidates, and Gilden shot Weiner the same way he shoots a kid on the street in Fresno. No retouching, no dignity lighting, no spin. Weiner was running his comeback that year, and a few months later the second sexting scandal finished him for good. Asked about photographing the candidates, Gilden said he likes people who tell the truth, and he hates politicians. So in Citizen, the disgraced congressman hangs in a wall of poor kids, addicts, ex-cons, and people the world walks past without seeing, and he is the only one you recognize. One critic wrote it works as if to say the ugliness in this one is on the inside. Everybody else in that grid is wearing their life on their face. Weiner is the reverse. His face looks fine. It is everything underneath that rotted. Gilden is Magnum, the real deal, a member since 1998. He works Robert Capa's line like a religion: if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. Gilden gets close enough to smell people. The fight over work like this exploded in 2015 with his book Face, extreme close-ups of people in Fresno, Detroit, and the Black Country in England, communities ground down by poverty and drugs. Critics called it exploitation, poverty porn, a freak show with a Leica. The Guardian wrote that his style seems to work against any intention to humanize his subjects. Fellow street photographer Joel Meyerowitz went further and called him a fucking bully who only wants to humiliate people. Gilden's answer never changes. He says these people are his family. He was an addict himself, he has lived the life, and he says people on the margins can tell he is one of them and not a tourist. Martin Parr, who bought a set of the Black Country faces after British museums refused to show them, called them tough but true. I photograph strangers too, so I do not get to sit this one out. Standing in that room, those faces did not feel mocked to me. They felt seen, in a way that is almost unbearable to stand in front of. But I understand everyone who walks out angry. So tell me where the line is. Is Bruce Gilden a bully with a flash, or do these portraits show some kind of honest authenticity? Enlarge it big. Find Weiner. He’s in there.

Is this the best fried chicken in the world? My friend Daniel Krieger, @smoothdude, photographs food for a living, mostly for the New York Times. He has eaten everywhere. He told me Willie Mae's in New Orleans is the best fried chicken in the world, full stop. My friend Rob told me it was the best fried chicken in New Orleans. Rob was underselling it. I finally ate it today and Krieger is right. The chicken comes out of a wet batter with a crust that fuses to the skin, shattering when you bite it, juicy all the way through with a low slow heat underneath. Gus's in Memphis was my favorite fried chicken on earth for years. This is better than Gus's, and I do not say that lightly. It comes with butter beans and rice and a cornbread muffin, and none of it is filler. The butter beans alone would be worth the trip across town. The deviled eggs are topped with fried chicken. Of course they are. They are the best deviled eggs I have ever had. Then peach cobbler for dessert, in case you were worried this meal might show restraint. Willie Mae Seaton started this place in 1957 in Tremé. In 2005 the James Beard Foundation named it an America's Classic, and a few months later Katrina destroyed it. Volunteers rebuilt it. Willie Mae died in 2015 at 99, and her family is still back there frying her chicken the way she taught them. President Obama ate here. Everybody eats here. Now I understand why. I am down in New Orleans for Funk Fest, I saw great live music at Tipitina's last night, and I am eating like this at noon. Nobody does food and music like this city. The South just operates on a different level. So here is my question, and I want real answers. If there is better fried chicken than this somewhere, name the place. I will travel for it.

Found slide. Fremont Street, Las Vegas, around 1947. Somebody stood out there one night with a camera loaded with Kodachrome and got all of it. The Boulder Club tower on the left. The Eldorado Club in enormous glowing script across the brick building, a neon prospector hoisting a pickaxe at the end of the sign. And on the corner, in smaller letters, the Hotel Apache. Two signs in this frame are advertising faro. Faro Bank, the Eldorado ribbon says. The Heart of Las Vegas. Faro was the biggest gambling game in America in the 1800s, and by this night it was nearly dead. The Hotel Apache had opened in 1932, built by P.O. Silvagni, an Italian immigrant who held one of the concrete contracts on Hoover Dam and figured the dam workers would need somewhere to blow off steam on Saturday nights. His hotel had the first elevator in Las Vegas, the first air conditioned lobby, and the first carpeted casino in town. And here is the thing about this photograph. The Eldorado Club was downstairs in the Apache building, and in 1951 a Texas gambler named Benny Binion bought both of them. The Eldorado sign came down that spring. On August 14, 1951, the corner reopened as Binion's Horseshoe. Carpet instead of sawdust. Comps for every gambler, not just the high rollers. A $500 craps limit when nobody else in town would let you bet a tenth of that. Nineteen years later, the World Series of Poker started in that room. The Apache building is still standing at Fremont and 2nd. They reopened the hotel rooms in 2019 and kept the old name. You can sleep there tonight, right over the corner where all this neon used to burn. Parking was 25 cents. Enlarge this one big and read the small signs. And look at those cars!

This looks like a giant. Moss-covered branches twisting up into a canopy that fills the frame, light pouring through the leaves. You would swear you were standing under something a hundred feet tall. It is not even eight feet tall. It is a Japanese maple at the Portland Japanese Garden. They just call it The Tree. Peter Lik shot it from underneath in the fall when it turns scarlet, called it Tree of Life, and the photo won at the Windland Smith Rice awards and hung in the Smithsonian. Every October since, photographers line up for their turn under it. I went to Portland specifically for this tree. Then I walked the garden for about an hour looking for it, hunting for some towering maple, before I finally asked someone who worked there. She walked me over to this little tree sitting right next to the path. I had walked past it over and over. Near the base there is a small gap. You are not allowed off the path. So you get down, stay on the path, and slide the camera in low through that opening, pointed straight up. That is the whole trick. Perspective does almost all the work. The tree itself barely moves. Everybody photographs this tree red. I shot it green. Enlarge this one big and look up.

This is San Francisco’s Tonga Room before it was the Tonga Room. I found this photograph while wandering around the Fairmont Hotel one day. That is the Terrace Plunge, the hotel's indoor swimming pool, sometime before 1945. Somebody caught a beautiful pair of legs up on one of the boards, top left. She has been up there ever since. In 1929, the Fairmont on Nob Hill built a 75-foot indoor pool, a first for San Francisco, and everybody came. Ronald Reagan swam here. Helen Hayes swam here. The Water Follies performed here. For sixteen years, this room was for swimming. Then the war ended, and in 1945 the Fairmont hired Mel Melvin, MGM's top set designer, to turn the pool into a bar. He did not fill it in. He kept the water, called it a lagoon, floated a stage in the middle of it for the band, and rigged the ceiling to rain. Within a year, Herb Caen was reporting in the Chronicle that a couple of drunk gents had stripped down to their shorts one night and jumped in. Earlier this year, I was at an event in that same room and watched a table of guys pass the hat and raise $1,300 in cash, right there at the table, to get one of their own to jump into that lagoon. Thirteen hundred dollars. He still would not do it. The pool never left. If you have ever sat in the Tonga Room with a Mai Tai while it thundered indoors and the band played out on the water, you were sitting around this swimming pool. The diving board is gone. The water is still there. Anthony Bourdain called the Tonga Room the greatest place in the history of the world. He never got to swim in it. Officially, nobody has since 1945.

This is what is wrong with San Francisco. Bilal Mahmood has the most drug ravaged district in the city. Arguably the most drug ravaged district in the entire country. It is where more drugs are sold and more drugs are consumed in public than anywhere else here. It is San Francisco's containment zone for drugs. People die here every single day. 621 people overdosed and died in this city last year, and the deadliest ground in San Francisco is his district. School children have to walk past addicts daily, many of them exposed and worse, just to get to school. Rather than fight to deport the illegals selling the drugs that are literally KILLING his district, Bilal is busy celebrating a new Muslim state holiday for Eid with his lame duck guv buddy Gavin Newsom. I guess it means some public schools can close if they want on a Muslim holiday that moves around based on the moon. It is mostly a symbolic, pro-Muslim thing. Photo ops with the hijabs. Virtue signaling instead of real governing. Maybe next month they will decree that restaurants are allowed to not sell pork in California if they don't want to. Meanwhile, every single day, more dead Americans in his district. Real lives. Sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends and family members, gone and not coming back.

Sometimes it is not the whole collection. Sometimes it is one slide. Found Ektachrome. August 1972. A woman in profile, looking down at a yellow flower in her hands. She is not posing. She may not even know the camera is there. The light comes across her face and everything behind her goes soft and green. White bangles. Red nail polish. A thin gold chain. That is all the slide gives you. Whoever took it got in close, shot wide open, and never asked her to smile. That is why it works. Nobody is performing in this frame. She is just somewhere else for a second, and the camera caught it. She would be in her seventies now. Who was she?

And all 84 are right back out on the street again dealing more drugs, because that’s what San Francisco does. It’s called catch and release. This is why two people a day die of overdoses in San Francisco and why our ineffective mayor can’t shut down the open air, fentanyl drug markets in our city. This is why Sann San Francisco has the cheapest fentanyl in the entire country. Most of these 84 arrested are illegals. If we’d turned them over to @ICEgov that would’ve made a difference. Releasing them right back out on the street to continue selling drugs does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Honduran drug dealers poisoning our city deserve no sanctuary. Daniel Lurie. All talk no action. Daniel Lurie. All hat no cattle. Bla, bla, bla, bla… There is no accountability. There is no plan.