From the San Francisco Chronicle (Sept. 6, 2010):
A giant museum-quality three-dimensional relief map of San Francisco as it appeared 70 years ago has turned up in a UC Berkeley warehouse, stored in 17 wooden cases.
“It is like a colossal jigsaw puzzle,” said Gray Brechin, a UC scholar who helped recover the map.
The raised map, which was stashed and forgotten in dusty UC warehouses, is now a bit of an orphan. Brechin says the university needs the space and wants to find a permanent home for the boxed city so the public can view it.
If assembled, the relief map would be 41 feet long by 37 feet wide and would show the whole city from the bay to the ocean, the Golden Gate to the San Mateo County line. It’s an exact-scale model of San Francisco as it looked in 1940.
The model is carefully detailed, showing every street, and every building, all of them hand-painted. There are even tiny trees in the backyards and the parks.
Read more: https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/06/BA5K1F8C87.DTL#ixzz0zFXlSFx1