Map to Feral Labyrinths and Spirals in the San Francisco Bay Area (and Beyond)

I love map making. And while the San Francisco Ghost Sign Map will always be my main focus, I still enjoy making the occasional silly little map about other physical phenomenon in the Bay Area.

I am very proud of this map to feral labyrinths and spirals in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Inspired by hanging out at the Albany Bulb (which has two labyrinths), it seeks to jump off from the fabulous work done by the Labyrinth Locator. Where that project has a truly encyclopedic listing of what I would call institutional labyrinths — commissioned pieces built in schools, hospitals, and churches — it’s light on the whimsical homemade hippie labyrinths that spring up in parks and along hiking trails. This map seeks to compile a list of all local labyrinths made from natural materials and built in natural places. While there are a handful of institutional labyrinths on this list, every labyrinth included was made from rocks, branches, dirt, and/or plants and has an aesthetic/spiritual grounding in ephemerality.

Map to Feral Labyrinths and Spirals in the San Francisco Bay Area (and Beyond)

San Francisco's Carnation Mush Ghost Signs – The Definitive Guide

Bits and pieces of my Carnation Mush historic research are all over the web, but it’s time to put it all in one place.

This definitive guide to all things Carnation Mush is inspired by the Carnation Mush sign on Market Street, which is one of my favorite ghost signs in the entire Bay Area. Revealed in 2011 when the adjacent building was demolished, I never expected it to still be here going on fifteen years later! That sign has an uncanny ability to survive new development, an ability that most of San Francisco’s ghost signs seem to lack. So if any San Francisco ghost sign deserves a detailed hagiography, it would be this Carnation Mush Sign (and its twin in North Beach).

What Was Carnation Mush

First things first, let’s get some of the backstory out of the way – what is Carnation Mush? Carnation Mush was a subsidiary of Albers Bros Milling Company that sold hot breakfast cereals. You might have seen another Albers Bros ghost sign on the Victoria Theater in the Mission, or next to the Northwest Broadway Bridge in Portland, Oregon if you’re the traveling type.

Albers Bros Milling Company — originally known as Albers & Tuke —was formed in Portland, Oregon in 1893 by German immigrant Bernard Albers. Born to a milling family, when his brothers Henry, William, George, and Frank immigrated to the US they would join in on Bernard business, eventually reincorporating it as Albers Bros Milling Company in 1901. The oldest online references to Carnation Mush I have found are from 1902, so it seems like they launched the sub-brand pretty soon after incorporating as the Albers Bros Milling Company.

With mills in Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Ogden, Albers Bros Milling Company dominated the West Coast market for various kinds of flours, grains, cereals and even lifestock feed; some marketed under the Alber’s name, while others were marketed under sub-brands like Carnation, Peacock, Del Monte, Sunripe, and Violet. With so many mills located in convenient deep water ports, they also did strong business in Asia and up the Canadian/Alaskan coast, making lots of money supplying hay (a grain by-product) to the US Army during the Spanish American War and flours/grains to gold miners during the Klondike Gold Rush.

By the late 1920’s, all five Albers brothers had either passed away (Bernard died in 1908), been arrested for violating the Federal Espionage Act (that would be Henry, who died in 1927), or were nearing retirement age (William, George, and Frank). After years of rivalry and sustained trademark pressures by the Carnation Milk Products Company – who did not appreciate the name of their Carnation line –  they officially acquired the entire Albers Bros Milling Company in 1929. While this was largely done to protect their brand and name, a milk company buying a cereal company does make a lot of sense in a business MBA kinda way.

Carnation Milk would continue to run Alber’s Bros until 1984 when it was sold to Nestle. And Albers Brothers still exists! It’s under the Continental Mills umbrella now, although its offerings have been reduced to yellow corn meal, white corn meal, and quick grits. Carnation Mush, however, does not. The most recent references I have found to it are from 1940. Which means the Carnation Mush brand made it to be about 38 years old and was maintained by Carnation Milk for over a decade after the Albers Bros acquisition. 

Not bad for having  what we’d now consider an atrocious name.

What Were The Three Kinds Of Carnation Mush

There are a lot of inaccuracies about this online, mainly because what “mush” is varies by region, but based on Carnation’s own contemporaneous advertising the three kinds of Carnation Mush are rolled oats, wheat flakes, and granulated wheat. Essentially, hot breakfast cereals akin to Cream Of Wheat.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14762640901/

The Carnation Mush Sign On Market Street

As stated earlier, the Carnation Mush sign on 1586 Market Street was revealed in 2011 when the abandoned building next door was torn down. Known as the Miramar Apartments, 1586 Market was built in 1912, replacing a block of single story storefronts and warehouses built in the immediate aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. The formerly adjacent neighbor had also been part of this post-earthquake construction wave, having been built in 1907 as a furniture showroom. 

Which presents an odd dilemma… If the neighboring building was built in 1907, and 1586 Market was built in 1912, and the neighboring building covered up the Carnation Mush sign on 1586 Market, then how was the Carnation Mush sign blocked in, let alone painted?

My assumption – which I am still looking for concrete information on – is that the adjacent neighbor was originally a single story and was remodeled some time after the painting of the Carnation Mush sign, adding an additional two stories of height and covering up the sign. That would explain how the sign was painted and blocked in, as well as why the upper and lower stories on the adjacent neighbor do not match. 

The OTHER Carnation Mush Sign On Market Street

There are no known photos of 1586 Market from 1912-1917. By the time the earliest known photos of the building were taken in April 1917, the formerly adjacent neighbor was a full three stories tall and the Carnation Mush sign is no longer visible. This makes it hard to date the age of the sign using the photographic record. But more on that later…

OpenSFHistory / wnp36.01573.jpg 

However, a different set of photos taken from a different angle in July 1917 reveals an interesting fact – there were once TWO matching Carnation Mush signs painted on 1586 Market. Repeating signs across a wall or building was somewhat common in sign painting of this era. Once the sign painter was hired, the design made, the paints mixed, and the scaffolding put up, it was trivially more expensive to have them paint the ad an additional time or two. You can see this marketing tactic on multiple buildings in San Francisco, including 921 Post (two Owl Cigar signs), 725 Geary (also two Owl Cigar signs) and 555 Eddy (two Coca Cola signs)

By repeating the Carnation Mush sign twice on the building – once close to street level in the front of the building, and once near the roofline in the back of the building – they would have been able to effectively advertise to people both near and far on Market Street. Which of course would have been a great way to impactfully market the product on one of the city’s most vibrant corridors.

https://sfmta.photoshelter.com/search/result/I0000W4paYEsEH3k

Is there any trace of this second Carnation Mush sign left? Yes! If you look up at the main Carnation Mush sign you’ll see that it has a red/orange ground, a thin white border, a thicker green border, and a tiny line of black. When we look towards the back of the building, where much of the wall has been painted in graffiti abatement paint, we can see a tiny sliver of the same red/orange, white, green, and black pattern sticking out. That is all that remains of the second Carnation Mush sign, which would have been painted over some time after July 1981, which is when the photo below was taken.

https://opensfhistory.org/Display/wnp32.2714A.jpg

The Carnation Mush Sign In North Beach

In June of 2026 the Verdi Apartments at the corner of Columbus, Union, and Powell was demolished after being deemed in danger of imminent collapse, During the demolition process, a second Carnation Mush sign was revealed on adjacent 575-579 Columbus. While a slightly different layout (rectangular vs square), it does match the color scheme, general design, and artistic quality of the Market Street sign(s) and was likely painted by the same artist, within roughly the same time period.

While the photographic record of this building is spotty and no historic pictures of the North Beach Carnation Mush sign exist, it is a fairly easy sign to date it based on property information. We know 575-579 Columbus was built in 1912 and the Verdi Apartments in 1914, which would place this sign’s painting date between 1912 and 1913. 

Age Of The San Francisco Carnation Mush Ghost Signs

If we know the North Beach sign was painted in 1912/1913, and the Market Street sign looks like it was painted by the same artist, can we undoubtedly confirm that it was also painted in 1912/1913? Not definitively, but both 575-579 Columbus and 1586 Market were built in 1912, which means both of them would have been available and “on the market” for sign painting in the same time frame. That means it’s possible they were painted at the same time, as part of the same ad campaign. Combined with the stylistic similarities in the two signs, I am 99.99% confident that the Carnation Mush ghost sign on Market Street was painted in 1912/1913, making it 113 to 114 years old at the time of my writing this in June of 2026.

Hillside Letters and Figures of the Greater San Francisco Bay Area

'm writing this post because I miss hills.

Also known as Mountain Monograms, hillside letters are a form of geoglyph involving large letters, numbers, abbreviations, or short messages displayed on hillsides. Generally found in the western US, most online resources state that there’s somewhere between 80 and 90 of them in California, with between 5-7 in the Bay Area proper. However, I know the true number is higher.

So how many of them and where are they? Because I love a good map I’ve created a guide to them all. Note that the map also contains hillside figures (crosses, hearts, smiley faces, and peace signs are all common hillside figures) and some “flat plain” figures meant to be viewed by aircrafts.

Am I missing any? Email me at kasey@kaseysmith.net if you have any contributions to make.

Check out the Hillside Letters and Figures Map here

MJB Coffee Signs of the San Francisco Bay Area

Why?

It’s an iconic — and intriguing — advertising tagline. MJB Coffee is a San Francisco institution, dating back to 1881 and the same coffee import scene that spawned Folgers Coffee and Hills Bros. Coffee. Twelve of their signs remain in the Bay Area, eleven of which sport the Why? tagline. I've made a new, separate map just showing the locations of the Bay Area's MJB Coffee Co ghost signs. Happy sign hunting and coffee drinking!

CHECK OUT THE MJB COFFEE MAP HERE 

Introducting San Jose -- Our First South Bay Ghost Signs Have Been Added To The Map!

I just did a massive update to the San Francisco Bay Area Ghost Sign Map -- including adding 30 odd pins in San Jose! The first in the South Bay! Now bear with me — this is a very, very cursory start to mapping the South Bay but I had to start somewhere. So here we are!

Do you know San Jose history or geography? Can you help me build out the pins in this city? Email me at kasey@kaseysmith.net with any help and/or info you can provide.

Secret Owl Cigar Signs of San Francisco

Owl Cigar signs are everywhere in San Francisco, even if most aren't visible from street level.

To my current knowledge, there are seven Owl Cigar signs remaining in San Francisco, spread across five buildings, all of which are in the Tenderloin, Lower Nob Hill, and Nob Hill.

• 921 Post - one visible sign, one mostly hidden sign

• 124 Turk - hidden sign

• 128 Jones - hidden sign

• 725 Geary (facing Hyde) - hidden sign

• 725 Geary (facing Leavenworth) - hidden sign 

• 698 Bush - hidden sign

So what are Owl Cigars and why are there so many Owl Cigar signs in San Francisco and what do we know about these particular signs?

History of Owl Cigars, as far as I can tell…

Cigar company histories are complicated and convoluted. Both the distributors and the brands shift names, fold, and reform, at an IMPRESSIVE rate and not all of this has been well tracked on the internet. Also, it's not my geek speciality so this is me researching outside my field here. That means if I get something wrong, let me know in the comments and I will amend the post.

What we think of as a cigar today— a rolled bundle of dried and fermented tobacco leaves made to be smoked — came into popularity in the early 1800's, challenging the supremacy of the previously dominant tobacco form, the pipe. By the time the gold rush had come and gone in San Francisco, cigar smoking was quite popular and throughout much of that era cigars were mainly made by small, regional manufacturers or tobacco stores who hand rolled their product. In this post-gold rush, pre-earthquake era you would have seen many small regional cigar brands advertised for sale in San Francisco.

Starting in the late 1800’s, you also would have seen the emergence, and dominance, of national cigar brands. For instance, signs for Kerbs, Wertheim & Schiffer’s General Arthur Cigars are all over the city’s pre-earthquake photographic record - 1, 2, 3, 4, -  with at least one sign remaining in Chinatown.

Another early national cigar company was the Straiton & Storm Company. Founded in 1861, it was run by John Straiton and George Storm with offices and factories in New York City and tobacco plantations in Florida. Straiton left the business in 1897 and it was reformed and renamed the Owl Cigar Company in 1890.

How cute is this early trading card of theirs! Note the obsolete spelling of “segars” which went out of vogue not long after the company’s founding.

Owl Cigars were a force to be reckoned with, with 1,500 “rollers” producing 1,500,000 cigars per week for national distribution. Part of the Owl Cigar Company strategy for growing their market share beyond the New York region involved the aggressive use of sign painters to put up “Owl Cigar - Just 5 cents” signs throughout the country. I’ve seen it stated online, but could not confirm a source myself, that their two-person crews were paid $5 to $10 per sign and painted one sign per day - with the total number painted potentially numbering in the thousands. Considering how many still exist, no really, there are a lot, I am inclined to believe this number.

And this is where things get soft in my cigar research.  By the 1910’s-1920’s, cigarettes had eclipsed cigars to become the nation’s favored form of tobacco, shaking up the industry in advance of the Great Depression. During this time period, you also start seeing Owl Cigars and White Owl advertised in print side by side, with White Owl being the slightly more expensive cigar option. You also see Owl Cigars raised from five to six cents each around 1918ish.

This pricing did not last long, because by the early 1920’s you see them lowered back to five cents each, automatically (and perhaps purposefully) updating all their old signage in the process.

And then… you just don’t hear anymore from them after around 1921 or 1922.

San Francisco Examiner, November 1921

Some sources state that in order to refresh their branding, Owl Cigars changed their name to White Owl - minus the cigar - in the 1920’s to “clean up” and modernize their image. However, White Owl  is a distinct brand formed in Alabama in 1887 so it’s less likely that they updated names, and more likely that they were folded into this existing brand and retired by their distributor. Either way, if you look through newspapers of the time you will see a lot of Owl Cigar print ads up to the late teens, declining through 1921/1922, after which you will see just White Owls. One brand ascendant and one brand declining.

San Francisco Examiner, October 1921

And White Owl still exists! They specialize in cigarillos and you can hear them name dropped in rap songs by Nas and Method Man amongst others.

Owl Cigars and San Francisco

So what can we learn about San Francisco’s Owl Cigar signs from this information?

Owl Cigar’s national sign campaign started in the 1890’s. The oldest local newspaper reference I could find was from 1897, the oldest local newspaper ad was from 1901, and the oldest local photo was from 1904.

Newspaper clippings are from the San Francisco Examiner. Photo is of 6th and Market in 1904, and comes from OpenSFHistory OpenSFHistory / wnp37.02237.jpg.

From these reference points, we know that Owl Cigars were being actively sold and advertised in San Francisco starting in the late 1890’s, which maps with general information on the brand. So are any of our seven remaining signs from that early era of Owl Cigar advertising?

HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HA

Check out the map on Google here.

Without even looking at property records I can tell that none of these signs are older than 1906. Why? From this map, you can see that all known surviving Owl Cigar signs are clustered in the Tenderloin or Lower Nob Hill, an area heavily decimated by the 1906 earthquake and fire. In fact, thanks to a robust photographic record of the earthquake, we can compare the locations of our remaining signs with what the areas looked like immediately after that fateful day. And for fun, let’s contrast those photos with the dates when the buildings were finally rebuilt.

• 921 Post - Rebuilt 1920

• 124 Turk - Rebuilt 1907

• 128 Jones - Rebuilt 1908

• 725 Geary  - Rebuilt 1907

• 698 Bush - Rebuilt 1907

Notice those early reconstruction dates. Is it even wonder why so many of these Owl Cigar signs are “secret” signs - blocked in by newer construction and no longer visible from street level. A great example of this is 725 Geary. This building with it's double signs once looked upon an empty block, but was slowly encroached upon by new construction. The side facing Hyde was entirely blocked in by its neighbors around 1921. The side facing Leavenworth by 1924. 

Construction dates of buildings surrounding 725 Geary

So how old are these signs? With its 1920 construction date, 921 Post just barely squeaked by before the Great Owl Cigar Die-Off/White Owl Rebranding of the 1920’s. I would wager that the 725 Geary signs could be of a similar vintage. They were certainly still partially visible then. Also, there is profound layering on the side that faces towards Hyde, which could mean our Owl cigar sign was a late addition to a well-used palimpsest. 

 I’d say the signs on the eastern wall of 124 Turk and 128 Jones were likely painted well before the 1920's, potentially even when the buildings first went up in 1907 and 1908. I’d wager this due to a lack of layering (such as I can tell), as well as the fact that their neighbors were constructed in fairly short order. There wouldn't have been a reason to paint these signs in the 1910's-1920's since they would have very constrained visibility. And with 698 Bush we are lucky enough to have not one, but two photos - one from 1909 and another from 1911 - helping us to definitively date the sign's era.

Eastern wall of 124 Turk, sure doesn’t seem to be a lot of layering and overpainting on this particular wall.

So all things considered, I feel we can approximately date these seven Owl Cigar signs like so:

• 921 Post, both walls - 1920-1922 (construction date - last citations for the brand found online)

• 124 Turk, eastern wall - 1907-1910 (construction date - date adjacent neighbor was constructed)

• 128 Jones - 1908-1910 (construction date - date adjacent neighbor was constructed)

• 725 Geary (Hyde side)  - 1907-1921 (construction date - construction of neighbors)*

• 725 Geary (Leavenworth side) - 1907-1922) (construction date - last citations for the brand found online AND construction of neighbors)

• 698 Bush - Definitely 1909-1911 but possibly painted as early as 1907.