1978 McCaffry Pictorial View of the United States from San Francisco

This is James McCaffry's 1978 large-format pictorial bird's-eye view of the United States (and beyond), viewed from downtown San Francisco. It is a direct response to Saul Steinberg's iconic illustration, 'The World from 9th Avenue,' which appeared on a 1976 cover of The New Yorker.

A Closer Look

The view looks eastward from the intersection of Taylor and Geary Streets near Union Square in downtown San Francisco. Simplifying the cityscape to match Steinberg's view, McCaffry eliminates most of the streets between Taylor and the waterfront. However, he includes the recognizable Ferry Building (and the much-maligned, since-removed Embarcadero Freeway, frequently referred to with terms such as 'hideous' and 'monstrosity,' though a part of the skyline at the time nonetheless). The Bay Bridge connects the city to a thinly noted Berkeley and Oakland, and beyond lies a mostly flat nothingness with only a few features, such as 'Tahoe' and 'Texas' (in reality, even on the clearest day, one would be unable to see much past Oakland as a range of hills and mountains obscures features further to the east).

The World from the Golden Gate

This view is a riff off of Saul Steinberg's famous drawing 'The World from 9th Avenue', which in 1976 was featured on the cover of The New Yorker magazine. Similar to somewhat earlier 'brags' maps (see California-ornearnold-1947, NewYorker-wallingford-1939-2, and TexasBrags-randolph-1948-4, all recently listed by us), in a genre sometimes known as perception cartography, Steinberg's view humorously exaggerates a New Yorker's perspective of the world as diminutive and unimportant compared to New York City, depicting Manhattan's 9th Avenue in great detail in the foreground, while the rest of the United States and the world appear as a simplified, distant landscape with only a few labels (such as 'China,' 'Japan,' and 'Russia') far off on the horizon. It plays with scale and perception, emphasizing New Yorkers' tendency to see their city as the center of everything, with the rest of the world as an afterthought. Steinberg's view spawned many imitators, and, in the tradition of 'brags' maps, other cities produced their own (mostly) good-natured responses, ribbing New York City in return.

Here, New York City makes no appearance, as San Francisco had not in Steinberg's view, and where Steinberg had quietly noted Las Vegas, McCaffry similarly includes Atlantic City. Mirroring Steinberg's original, here Taylor and Mason Streets have taken the place of New York's 9th and 10th Avenues, and San Francisco Bay is drawn as a strip to mirror Steinberg's Hudson River. Among the many imitators and respondents to Steinberg, McCaffry's is among the very closest in terms of style and presentation, hewing very closely to the original to the extent that, at a glance, a viewer might think they are the same view.

Publication History and Census

This view was drawn by James McCaffry, a San Francisco-based artist and photographer. It was published in 1978 by Arts and Leisure Publications, a division of the Hagen Group. We were unable to locate the view in any institutional collections, though it does come to market from time to time.