Another nugget from the Muybridge exhibition, this one from his vast 1878 panorama of San Francisco. This is Charles Crocker’s Spite Fence:

The history of this bizarre construction is probably well-known to locals – and there are several (slightly divergent) accounts on the web – but here’s the short version for the rest of us.

Railroad baron Charles Crocker wanted to build a suitably grandiose pile on top of Nob Hill, next to all his Scrooge McDuck-ish chums. (Nob Hill was well named, given the slang “nob” for rich man, possibly derived from “nabob” – a quick surf suggests the name is not just a coincidence, but I’m not entirely sure about that.) He wanted his mansion to occupy an entire city block – but that ambition was thwarted by an undertaker called Nicholas Yung, who owned a cottage on a critical plot of land and refused to sell up.

Depending on your sympathies and the version of the story you choose to believe, you might consider Crocker to be a plutocratic bully or Yung to be an opportunistic extortioner. But either way, it was stalemate. The vengeful Crocker built a 40-foot tall fence around three sides of Yung’s property, meaning that it only got daylight for a couple of hours a day. Yung was forced to move to another of his properties – but still refused to sell up. Nor would his widow, after his death in 1880. Crocker’s heirs, for their part, refused to remove the fence either. The feud persisted until 1904, when the families set aside their differences, the lot finally changed hands, the fence was dismantled and Crocker’s vision was finally realised. For all of two years. Then the San Francisco Earthquake flattened it.

According to this site, you can still see two granite stripes in the sidewalk where the Spite Fence used to stand, just to the west of the corner of Taylor and Sacramento Streets behind Grace Cathedral. There does seem to be something there on Street View, although it’s difficult to be entirely sure that it’s not just a different type of paving. The crossover on the corner is confusing too:

There’s more that I wanted to say about spite fences, but I think I’ll pause here for a moment just to marvel at how far we’ve come in 130-odd years. It took Muybridge an entire day to take one pictures of this spot for his panorama, on a huge and unwieldy glass negative that had to be developed carefully but quickly with noxious chemicals. Now I can sit at home eight-and-a-half-thousand kilometres away and check out the same location at my leisure – in full colour, in far more detail and from a huge number of angles. I know I ought to be blasé about this by now, but I’m not. It’s fucking amazing living in the future.