From the day
Perspective: The Future Historian · Sight
Gadzooks, the morning glare off those new telegraph wires is blinding, cutting sharp silhouettes of men in stiff wool frock coats against the dusty street. I watched a laborer crumple his newspaper in a fit of pique—the bold ink shouting that the **San Francisco Ironworkers Lose** their strike—while a woman nearby adjusted her corset, distracted by the vibrant, impossible hues of an Autochrome plate in a shop window. Everything feels transitional, caught between the heavy soot of the steam age and this dawning, synthetic glow of Bakelite and electricity. It is a capital moment of fracture, where the rigid lines of the old world begin to melt into the neon-pulse of the future.