Brief Description

This “San Francisco” map is a companion to Destin Jenkins’, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021). That project offers a postwar social history of municipal bond traders operating in and beyond the San Francisco Bay Area.

Whereas The Bonds of Inequality focused mostly on traders working for Bank of America, this map identifies other firms, banking personnel, their professional titles, membership in the Investment Bankers Association of America, and, in some case, branch office locations and area of specialization, during the years between 1941 and 1981-82. The dataset helps to visualize a small, but deeply consequential network of municipal bondmen.

How to use

The map plots firms listed in the decennial Directories on a city-level map. Each year is represented by a specific color, and each colored dot represents one existing or operating firm during that particular time. (Note: Because some firms had the same address, i.e. 555 California Street, across an extended time period, some dots are layered atop and thus indistinguishable). Users may use the pop-up window to scroll through firm information.

What this Map reveals 

The visualization confirms suspicions that the business of municipal of debt occurred in the commercial office buildings of San Francisco’s downtown financial district. This was anything but preordained. That postwar San Francisco’s municipal bond traders operated largely along California and Montgomery streets was prefigured by the emergence of the city’s financial district during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and by a vision offered by the city’s planning department to dislocate other economic activities and further concentrate Finance, Insurance, and the Real Estate industry in the same area.

And as with the “Mapping Collapse” page, this map identifies the actual bankers on whom the city, and California more generally, depended for many of its infrastructural projects.