1939 was a big year for San Francisco, during which it attempted to convince the world that it had fully recovered from the catastrophes of 1906 and was once again a city to be reckoned with. Completion of the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge was punctuated with the International Exhibition on Treasure Island.

For one photographer/photojournalist, that year left a lasting impression.

The photographer's name is Seymour Snaer, and the images were published in 1980 in a book titled, San Francisco 1939: An Intimate Photographic Portrait. Snaer had over 100 rolls of film from that one year, so publisher Bill Owens reprinted select shots from negatives, rescuing them from the bad cropping done by newspapers like the Examiner, who Snaer had worked for.

I've Googled around and not found much mention of the man, nor have I seen any of his images. The (used) book is listed on some sites, but none even have the cover image (above).

I'm including just some of the photos (in low-res format taken with my camera), and the captions that go with them. Additionally, I've excerpted some text from the body of the book. The writing has a raw feel to it; you can tell it was written by someone who doesn't write, but really has something to say.

Some of the highlights: Real fishermen using nets in the Bay; Belt and Southern Pacific trains; view from Twin Peaks; Sally Rand's Nude Ranch (NSFW); ski jumping on Treasure Island; auto polo.

Tip of the hat to Jonathan at Viracocha for gifting the book to me (that was a very kind way to get me to stop bugging you about your fantastic shop).

The above image is from the cover, portraying still and movie photographers capturing President Franklin Roosevelt's motorcade who came to see the Expo before it opened, in '38. Snaer writes:

Two of the guys in the bunch were very famous newsreel cameramen in the '30s, Joe Rucker and Frank Vail. They used hand-crank cameras ... I had big bulbs and all of a sudden - a bulb exploded! Secret Servicemen ran all over the place. It really embarrassed me. [p. 24]

The following images and text are all directly from the book. (Keep in mind that when he says "today," Snaer means 1980.)

Note: I'm pretty sure the copyright, originally reserved by Snaer himself, isn't being actively enforced, but in case it is, I'm only posting low-res images, and will gladly remove them if a rights-holder contacts me.

Page 3

View from Twin Peaks

You can see Treasure Island in the background not as it is today with the Financial District blocking the view. The kid was up there with a kite ... and a beanie ... kids in those days wore beanies.

Page 4

Fishermen at the marina

Many sights you never see anymore ... fishermen caught herring early in the morning on the beach.

Page 5

Southern Pacific electric train across the Bay Bridge

Page 12

Steam train, California Belt line

A steam locomotive, the California Belt Line, fired by coal went around the docks bringing goods from the ships to the old warehouses. They still do it [!], but they don't use that type of engine.

Page 16

Boy in Chinatown

Page 28-29

International Exposition

They were the prettiest girls in Europe. It was the top show in the theatre building. You weren't supposed to take any pictures inside so I made a sneak shot at the end. I had a 1.5 lens on my camera. You had to really work to get a shot like that. It's entirely different with today's fast films, but that was an accomplishment.

Page 32-33

Sally Rand's Nude Ranch

Sally Rand's Nude Ranch

Sally Rand, the queen of the Fan Dancers, was supposed to be the place to go when you went to the Gayway. She was never there - her name was on the marquee outside. The women were on exhibit, pretending to do anything that you would do on the ranch ... frying eggs, twirling a lasso. There was a fence around the stage, which was painted with Western scenes. Later people objected to that kind of thing, and made them cover up. It wasn't Sally Rand's nude ranch anymore. The name was still the same because it was one of those permanent signs out front. But if you went inside, the girls were partly covered.

Page 34

International ski championship

The question would be "Where was the snow?" if you made a bet in a bar about the International Ski Championship held in San Francisco in 1939. They brought in a load of artificial snow and built this whole thing. It was sponsored by the Auburn Ski Club.

Page 36-37

Auto polo

They had mallets and a basketball as a polo ball. The idea was to make the cars roll over ... both guys had to jump out and then the car would go over [at least they have helmets on].

Page 46

Mailboat, off the Farallones Islands

Page 48

Flora Snaer and friend

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UPDATE: I found this obituary for him, from this web page:

Mr. Snaer, an only child, was born in Oakland. He received a bachelor's degree from UC-Berkeley in 1933, and worked as a freelance photographer from 1936 to 1943. In 1937, Mr. Snaer took the first natural action shots of a track meet for the New York Mirror, according to Who's Who in California. Mr. Snaer joined the Examiner in 1943 and remained there until his retirement in 1978. In one of his prize-winning photos, titled "I'll be OK, Mom," Mr. Snaer captured a poignant moment in 1952 as a Marine sitting in a wheelchair leaned forward to embrace his mother upon his return from the Korean War. One of his photos, of a terrorist bombing at a San Francisco church in the 1970s, is included in "10,000 Eyes," a book published by the American Society of Media Photographers. Flora Snaer said her husband happened by chance to be in a perfect position to take that picture, after someone shooed him toward the sidewalk. He was there to take photos of a policemen's funeral. When the bomb exploded in the doorway, all the other photographers had to turn away and shelter themselves from the flying debris. Not Seymour. "He got the picture," Flora Snaer said. Mr. Snaer was also known for his Kodachrome color photographers for the 1939 World's Fair, which took place on Treasure Island. Denise Snaer-Gauder, Mr. Snaer's 43-year-old daughter, remembers serving as a "model" in some of her father's staged newspaper photographs when she was young. In one photo, she was the little girl hanging up her Christmas stocking. In another, she was playing in a schoolyard while a suspicious-looking man lurked nearby. Snaer-Gauder said her father was always ready to dash off in an instant to get a photo. He left his police scanner on all night, so he could hear any news bulletins as they were announced, and he always drove around with a couple of cameras in the car. Fran Ortiz, a retired Examiner photographer, said Mr. Snaer befriended him when he joined the staff as a rookie in 1962. Ortiz remembered the days the two photographers covered the Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley in the late 1960s. "It was war on Telegraph Avenue, and there was Seymour, right in the thick of it, getting remarkable images," Ortiz said. Ortiz described Mr. Snaer as a "true professional," someone who used his creativity and talent to make many memorable photographs - on deadline. "He was an inspiration to me," he said. Ortiz also remember Mr. Snaer's keen sense of humor. "In my image of him, Seymour always has a smile on his face and a pipe in his hand," he said.

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A post at the San Francisco Citizen blog finds no credit for the above map in the print version of 7x7's current magazine - and suspects it might have something to do with the fracas over this thing.

Indeed, I couldn't find a version of the map on 7x7's website, which is odd. But I'm gonna give them a pass because this new map is pretty cool on a couple of fronts.

First, it's bizarre enough to be interesting - the descriptions applied to the various parts of town are an exercise in willful non-sequiter.

But best of all is its use of actual phrenological terms (philoprogenitiveness? C'mon!), and the probable inadvertent nod to our new favorite historical eccentric, Frederick Coombs, a.k.a., George Washington the Second.

Even before he went Cocoa for coo-coo puffs, Coombs wrote and self-published a book on phrenology called Popular Phrenology: Exhibiting the Exact Phrenological Admeasurements of Above Fifty Distinguished and Extraordinary Personages, of Both Sexes with Skulls of the Various Nations of the World. You can't do much better than that in the "pseudoscience as prelude to insanity" department.

Note the skulls. Awesome.

So, hats off to 7x7. (They do lose points, however, for the offensive profile of the goateed hippie that defines the edge of the map.)

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George Washington the Second beside a bust of his namesake. (I think he looks more like Ben Franklin.) Image courtesy San Francisco Public Library.

His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I, in addition to being the prototype of Frank Chu, is credited with visions of a suspension bridge across the Golden Gate (some suspect this to have been made up by others later) and a tunnel toward Oakland before those ideas were considered sane.

There were other eccentrics who paraded San Francisco's streets in the 1850s and 60s, but for some reason the only one we still celebrate is Norton. It is a monopoly that he, above all, would have cherished; but just like his attempt to corner the rice market in 1852 which eventually sent him over the rainbow, this monopoly may not last.

Submitted for your approval: Frederick Coombs, a.k.a., "George Washington the Second."

San Francisco's Crackpots

San Francisco from the beginning demanded to be noticed in spite of, even because of, its most outrageous citizens. In an instant metropolis that breathed boom and bust, lusted after gold and silver, and openly worshiped monopoly capitalism, the embrace of stylized mad behavior was perhaps a middle finger raised at the polite societies in other cities of the time.

George Washington Coombs in the Pied Piper

Norton is the most famous of these characters. However, within the Palace Hotel's Pied Piper Bar & Grill hang two paintings. If you go into the lounge, past the eponymous Maxfield Parrish above the bar, and inside the restaurant, you'll find them (they are not Parrishes). The one on the left features Emperor Norton and the one on the right, a rival figure holding a placard that reads:

The Spirit of Washington still lives like a California pioneer. He lived like a beggar to give like a prince.

Washington the Second was a contemporary of Norton's, and in many ways his opposite, even though their stories have many similarities.

Emperor vs. President

Washington's first and most obvious departure from Norton was in title. One honored the nation's first president, the other embodied imperialism. San Franciscans must have seen in Coombs an alien quaintness.

Like Coombs, "Emperor" Norton was penniless and English by birth. But Norton's megalomania appears to have been linked to his loss of fortune. The roots of Coombs's intense patriotism and eccentricity were more complex and obscure. ¹

Washington the Second in costume; image courtesy San Francisco Public Library

Norton must have been more familiar - brash, monarchic, a true child of California gold and its excess. On the other hand, an article in the Daily Alta California from Nov. 16th, 1864, describes Washington the Second:

The old gent is quite the reverse of "Emp." (Emperor Norton). His eye is mild and void of the sacred fire of majesty which burns with such latent power in that of "Nort." (Emperor Norton). He is less dignified, and mixes more with common clay than does his colleague... He is also supposed to be void of sense, or in plain terms, "cracked;" but in his case, as in "Nort's," we think his head is clear. ²

Both Norton and Washington were venerated despite suspicions they might be faking their conditions, as if by embracing not only eccentricity, but even the pretense of it, San Francisco's residents created a bulwark against the city's prudish critics. It's little surprise Norton has dominated the historical accounts versus his contemporaries. Gold Rush San Francisco yearned for dominion that would rival history's most sprawling empires, such that only an Emperor would do.

Those who joined the gold rush had called themselves Argonauts and imagined themselves to be reliving a classical legend... They never tired of telling outsiders and one another that their city by the Golden Gate was the Mistress of the Pacific, the Queen City on her seven - or hundred - hills, looking westward to a destiny proportionately greater than that of imperial Rome. ³

Norton amplified this sentiment, Washington did not. Recall the grandiosity and narcissism of Norton's most recognizable proclamation:

At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, ... declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U. S.

It's not hard to understand how that would ring truer to San Franciscans in the 1860s, as the city itself was deflating after the gold rush, than something like this from Washington:

If all the rich were to marry all the poor, would not this realize a beautiful equality so long dreamed of by Poets and Philosophers?

Similarities and Differences

Like Norton, Washington tempered his madness with inventive thinking. Before assuming his presidential title, Washington succeeded in business by inventing a ditch-digging machine for farmers in Napa Valley. He developed a train propulsion system that used electromagnetism and even demonstrated it on a small scale. Most notably, he built a working telegraph in 1840, just months before Samuel Morse scored the patent.

But Washington should not be denied his eccentric's cred, either:

• He wrote a book on the pseudoscience of phrenology, which attempted to assess people's personalities based on the contours of their skulls (one of his "clients" was Vice President Richard Johnson).
• He went on an expedition to Chicago (his home-town) to lure women to San Francisco, crossing the Isthmus of Panama on foot with a traveling museum of live animals and gold showcasing California's assets.
• He billed the U.S. Congress $17,733,000,000,000,000 for expenses he supposedly incurred while contributing to the well-being of the nation.
• He self-published his own autobiography, titled, The Dawn of the Millenium! Splendid Discovery! A Beautiful Plan to Give Every Man (and Woman Also) a Nice House and Lot, And a Nice Little Wife or a Husband for All.

But his differences from Norton were perhaps more relevant to discovering why we should raise Washington's stature:

• Emperor Norton was against women's rights while Washington went to Sacramento and lectured for them.
• Washington/Coombs once demonstrated for the rights of Irish immigrants in New York.
• Washington once held up pro-Union banners in front an angry secessionist crowd in a San Francisco theater until he was pelted off stage, where Norton remained neutral in the North/South debate.

And finally, whereas Norton was a crude speculating capitalist, Coombs, before he became Washington the Second, was a hard-working businessman who nonetheless maintained a sense of charity.

In his early years, Coombs generally shared his money with poor daguerreotypists [of which he was one], needy friends, and destitute women. The press warmly recognized him as a philanthropist. ⁴

Today, we're living through the consequences of an economic system that sacrificed long-term viability for the sake of delusional short-term riches. On a global scale, capitalism should be re-assessing itself, criticizing itself - for its own sake. To the degree that the gold rush was an instance of the same get-rich-quick ethic we suffer from today, perhaps we owe it to our beloved city and to ourselves to reconsider the "majesty" of our "Emperor," and instead honor another figure who, in a quite different way, channeled the essence of San Francisco by transgressing the limits of sanity.

Washington the Second with skulls; image courtesy San Francisco Public Library

Vote for your favorite San Francisco crackpot in the comments.

1. San Francisco Magazine, Dec. 1985, p. 22
2. Daily Alta California, Nov. 16th, 1864
3. Imperial San Francisco, Gray Brechin, p. 14-15
4. San Francisco magazine, Dec. 1985, p. 24

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A. Acaccia & Sons has got all your leafy-wartime needs covered.

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On Thursday, I attended the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association's 60th birthday bash. I'm a new member, and so I'm just beginning to learn about this little gem, and the maritime history of SF.

The park includes that bad-ass ship you see at Hyde Street Pier (in the photo at the bottom of this post), a submarine you can go into, and a museum in the art deco building at Aquatic Park with jaw-dropping ship models and other miniaturizations.

The inside and outside of the Aquatic Park Bathhouse Building are covered with awesome WPA-era murals and mosaics.

Learn all about the association and the park here.

Beware: Polar Bears often swim in adjacent Aquatic Park, so if you're sensitive to seeing half-naked old guys who like to maximize "shrinkage," look away - ooh, what a pretty ship!

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This beauty of a machine is shown cleaning the street at Dolores Park, which apparently even back then was regularly trashed by hordes of Missionites. (If anyone knows the origins of this photograph please drop it in the comments so I can properly attribute. I found it here.)

You can buy a vintage ad for the Austin-Western "Model 40" on eBay (and, really, why not?):

Here's the ad copy:

On any street, there are many things the operator of a sweeper has to watch, and with the model "40" he sees them all. Only with this sweeper does he have unobstructed view of everything around him. There are no "blind" spots for the man behind the wheel of a model "40."

Children don't always watch where they're going. Thanks to front steer and rear-mounted hopper, the model "40" operator can do the watching for them, because he sits in the natural place "up front" where he can see what's going on.

And there's another important angle... Not only can he operate Model "40" safely but efficiently as well, because it's the only sweeper with gutter brooms visible at all times.

Yes, for efficiency's sake as well as safety's sake... GET A MODEL "40."

Let the "hipster-proof" jokes commence...

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It's one of the most famous San Francisco images, seen on postcards galore. I never realized what an epic story is attached to it and the photographer who is believed to have shot it. (Also, it's not lightning, nor a storm, as is commonly held.)

According to this Cliff House book project site, on the back of the original print is the following inscription (neither dated nor verified):

A Japanese boy, noticing the approach of lightning and thunder storm, took the last car for the Cliff House at 10:30 p.m.

The night was dark. He took up his position with his camera on the beach, and patiently waiting until 2 o'clock a.m., was able by leaving his camera open to obtain this picture, the "flashlight" being Nature's own--the bright strokes of lightning at the moment. The patience of the "Oriental," together with his keen preception of the opportunity, give us this photographic rarity, thunder storms and lightning being a rare occurance in the "glorious climate of California." --Copyrighted.

There's more. The "Alamo Square Neighborhood Association Newsletter" from February 2000 identifies (via his son, "Ted") the Japanese boy as Tsunekichi Imai.

Scan courtesy of Winston Montgomery

The following story is included in a detailed account of Imai's life:

Tsunekichi Imai was working in his Polk Street studio when the 1906 earthquake struck, and he described to his family how the pictures hanging from his shop walls shook and gyrated wildly, many tumbling to the ground. In the days that followed, the rapidly spreading fire which followed the quake overwhelmed firefighters and threatened to destroy the entire city. To stop the fire by depriving it of fuel, officials decided to create a firebreak by dynamiting a swath of buildings east of Van Ness Avenue. The Imai studio was located in one of these buildings.

The structures to be exploded were evacuated hurriedly and Tsunekichi Imai thought that all his equipment and furniture had been lost. Someone suggested that he go up to Lafayette Park at Washington and Laguna streets, and there he discovered stacks of personal possessions and household furnishings covered by tarpaulins that firemen and other volunteers must have rescued from the doomed buildings. He found most of the things from his shop piled together and even labeled with his name. Ironically many of the photographs and other personal affects that survived the earthquake and fire were lost during the period that the Imai family was interned during W.W. II at Camp Topaz in Utah.

Tsunekichi Imai took a number of photographs in the earthquake’s aftermath, the most notable, according to his son, Ted, showed a man trapped on the upper balcony of a burning building pleading for help as the flames engulfed him. The picture was taken just as soldiers on the ground shot the man with their rifles to put him out of his misery. Ted says his father was fearful of the possible legal implications of taking this photo or even witnessing this event, and eventually destroyed it.

Read the whole thing.

Tons more photos of Cliff House here.

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Yerba Buena settlement in the early 1840s, from the Society of California Pioneers

I'm kind of a big Carl Jung guy. Not so much because I think he was right about stuff in the scientific sense, but more due to an aesthetic attachment. I like that he went up against Freud (although I like that dude, too) and was willing to face ejection from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for it. Synchronicity. Archetypes. Individuation. Meyers-Briggs. Maybe I like these things because they're not scientific.

And even though I never really bought into his idea of the collective unconscious, I was nonetheless intrigued by the stated thesis of Charles A Fracchia's new book about San Francisco history, When the Water Came Up to Montgomery Street. He had me invested from the introduction:

I have maintained for some years that San Francisco's history - to our present time - is compounded from the Gold Rush experience, that its distinctive - one might say unique - urban response is situated in what Jung called the collective consciousness... A city that prides itself in its cosmopolitan features, its tolerance, and its penchant for inclusivity, San Francisco continues to operate based on an ethos that was created during the Gold Rush, when the city was composed of a melange of races and nationalities who had simultaneously arrived in the city, producing a melting pot of customs, religious practices, socio-economic and regional differences, and forcing, more or less, a "live-and-let-live" environment.

The difficulties involved in being a resident of San Francisco during the Gold Rush were no less than a birth trauma as Fracchia puts it, an experience that, while not remembered by the matured being, nonetheless is a form of distress as formative as any other in explaining the being's development.

I don't know if Fracchia is familiar with another of Freud's ultimately purged peers, Otto Rank, but his theory of the birth trauma would have been an even better metaphor for explaining "San Francisco values" than Jung's collective unconscious.

In any case, the book doesn't really attempt to use the concretes of the Gold Rush to support the thesis Fracchia clearly states in the introduction. I don't think there is any further mention of the thesis, in fact, and instead his histories all point to the suddenness of SF's transformation from a trading outpost to a metropolis. I suspect this is related to his statement at the end of the introduction that his thesis isn't "empirically provable." Don't get me wrong, it's a great read, and the photos and illustrations are fantastic. But the book leaves Jung, the collective consciousness, and the birth trauma on the roadside early on, and I wish it hadn't.

The Bartlett Map of San Francisco, from the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University

The dominant impression the book left on me is one implied in its title. The focus on Yerba Buena Cove, and especially the multiplicity of images of the original eastern edge of the peninsula, has given me the feeling that I know how that part of the city has changed since it was called "Yerba Buena." Do I really? That's impossible to prove empirically.

Low-res images in this post were scanned from Charles A. Fracchia's When the Water Came Up to Montgomery Street.

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On the recommendation of Haighteration blog, I took the ThinkWalks walking tour of the Wiggle on Thursday evening.

Guide Joel Pomerantz was bursting with knowledge about the history of the bike route, going all the way back to pre-colonial times (no, the Ohlones didn't have bikes, but they supposedly followed the same route when walking), and also is an expert on San Francisco generally. Notably, he charmed a random anarchist on a BMX who tried to sieze control of the crowd at one point - the kid ended up sitting and listening for a bit, before bumping fists with Joel, screaming, "Anarchy in the USA!" and riding off.

I enjoyed Joel's thoughts on SF's hidden waterways (an ongoing obsession of this blog), and especially his warnings that when the 100-year storm hits, the MUNI tunnel, tubes, and grates in the Duboce/Church/Market St corridor will quickly submerge, forming an underground river that will rush across the Bay and produce a geyser on the other end in Oakland! Great stuff.

There was an impressively low median age on the free tour, and it was almost all locals. (Hey, passers-by who snickered, "tourists" under your breath - suck it, joke's on you.)

We met up at the Wiggle mural on the backside of Safeway, and there I became fixated with the fantastic diversity of traffic that converges at the Church/Duboce intersection. I've lived in this neighborhood and walked through this spot millions of times, but you get a totally different feel for it when you linger in this spot for a bit, especially at rush hour.

Bonus time lapse video below:

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Not long ago it was a post-apocalyptic den of drug abuse, blood sport, and murder. Now, it has been re-made as a virtual Valhalla by The Mad Viking himself, Peter Vaernet, and is a tribute to the past figures who battled to make something noble out of the parcel of land atop Merced Heights.

Today, Brooks Park is a model for creative land stewardship, urban gardening, and community pride.

Peter Vaernet is a cyclone of positive energy, and has swept folks like gardener John Herbert into the storm. Together they've completed the park's dramatic adventure from its auspicious beginnings with the Brooks family in the 1930s, through its 1970s and 80s descent, to its glorious present rebound.

We took our camera into the fog to Brooks Park last weekend while they were building a temporary tomato greenhouse in the garden, and met Peter and John:

Victory of the Mad Viking, San Francisco from Spots Unknown on Vimeo.

More after the jump...

Here are excerpts from Woody Labounty's full history of the park:

Certainly the Ohlone Indians who camped along Lake Merced's shores took in the ocean breezes from this same hill...

One hundred years ago, the Merced Heights ridgeline appeared almost bald. The grasses and low plants amidst the rocky outcrops seasonally shifted, like on most California hills, from green to brown...

In the 1910s and 1920s streets and sidewalks followed the train and streetcar lines west and south, and the larger developments began encroaching on what locals called "Pansy Hill", "Poppy Hill" or "Kite Hill"...

In 1936, Jesse and Helen Brooks bought the peak of the far western hilltop "because it was out in the country...

Helen Brooks recognized the beauty and usefulness of the native plants and to these she added flowers, a vegetable garden, trees, and a bee hive. She recycled and composted years before most people knew those words existed. She taught local kids gardening and offered her "spare" plants and flowers to any community event that asked for them. In the house she had a loom and made her children's clothing...

In the mid-1960s, Helen and Jesse decided to retire to a more rural setting on the Peninsula, and explored selling the house and land, which amounted to some 14 city lots. The City of San Francisco became interested in having the magnificent plot as a public park, and the Brooks were initially very excited about the idea. Neighborhood groups became thrilled that the home could be a community center and Helen's gardens a recreational spot and learning lab for children at Jose Ortega Elementary School next door. Helen was particularly hopeful that her gardens would live on, rather than being paved over for development.

The Brooks' enthusiasm soured as the city reneged on its initial price and bid far below other offers and independent appraisals. After some threats to take the land by eminent domain, the city forced the Brooks' hand and purchased its newest park for $70,000 in 1966...

As most of the community fought to make Brooks Park a welcoming garden spot for families and neighbors, some other part wanted it to remain a ground for crime and violence...

The 1980s brought crack cocaine, and Brooks Park became a haven for drug dealing. At least two bodies were dumped up on the hill until the old driveway was blocked off. In the early 1990s came the new "sport" of illegal pit bull fighting. Neighbors saw the shadowy figures leading the animals into the park at night, and in the morning often found the carcasses of losing dogs. Seriously wounded pit bulls, bred to be aggressive and dangerous, wandered bleeding around the streets.

These days there is a multitude of programs for area schoolchildren to learn about things like native plants, urban gardening, and mindfulness.

And it's not there only for area kids - Peter encourages everyone to visit and use the park's picnic areas, sweeping vistas, and nature paths. And for those with the motivation, they always need volunteers to keep things maintained.

View Spots Unknown Map in a larger map

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