Richard Monaco

The following text is an excerpt from an interview with Richard (Dick) Monaco. His grandfather, J.B. Monaco, was the famous North Beach photographer who documented, through his dramatic images, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

INTERVIEWER: I understand there is a wonderful story about your having unearthed, from behind a wall in the basement of your family home, an historical treasure.

DICK: Yes. Let me think about this for a second. Sometime between 1948 and 1950, which was 10 years or so after my grandfather died, I noticed these cases in the upstairs front room of the family house at 2434 Leavenworth. At one time this room had been the master bedroom, but it had not been used for anything but a storage area for many years.

It was sometime in the late 1940s when I was on a summer break from college that I decided this would make a neat bedroom for myself. My friend Jim Walsh and I proceeded to clean up the room and repaint it. The first step was to get rid of the accumulated "junk". Included in the assortment of old stuff were five or six metal cases. I took a quick look in them and although I wasn't really interested in their contents I did notice that there were many old photographs. I didn't have the heart to throw them out, so I carried the cases downstairs and stored them under the house in the lower cellar, and forgot about them. God knows what else we threw out that might have been valuable.

INTERVIEWER: What size were these cases?

DICK: Two feet, at least two feet by a foot and a half deep and a foot and a half wide, maybe. They were all in there. I just moved the boxes from the front bedroom of the house to underneath the house.

INTERVIEWER: When you say under the house, was it an enclosed basement?

DICK: It was enclosed, yes, and the only access to this specific area, since the house was built on a hill, was a door into this basement. And subsequently my father had built the wall that enclosed it.

INTERVIEWER: So some time later the room had been finished off?

DICK: That's right. The sheet rock was put up there.

It was many years later that I found those boxes again. Around 1970 my wife and I decided to do a family wall at home. So I was scrounging around for pictures and such. My father mentioned, "You know, your grandfather had a lot of really great pictures, even some pictures of the earthquake and fire." He said, "I don't know what happened to them." I said, "Well, I have an idea." [Laughs]. So I went down with my son Rob, who w as about 8 years old at the time, and I kicked in the wall and sent him back there with a flashlight. The first thing he handed out was an old violin, and then he said, "I can't move it." So I got in there with him and saw the five or six metal cases and hauled them all out.

When I got into this, I just couldn't believe it. I built a darkroom in my house and bought myself an enlarger. (There was none of this digital stuff in those days.) I still remember the feeling as I developed the prints: I was seeing San Francisco history emerge before my eyes.

Dante and Katherine Monaco (Dick's father and grandmother) huddled on Telegraph Hill after the fire

Would you like to read this interview in its entirety, or any others from our collection? The full transcripts are available at the North Beach Branch of the San Francisco Public Library and at the San Francisco History Center, Main Branch. They are also available at the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley. Or, if you are a member of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, you are welcome to borrow any of the transcripts from our own Oral History Lending Library. Call Audrey Tomaselli at 391-1792.