In the history of the tour, Steven Meikle from Edinburgh is pretty damn famous — he saved for something like five or six years so he could haul in to San Francisco and take the Hammett Tour that fell closest to the 100th anniversary of Hammett’s birth. Hammett was born May 27, 1894, so in May 1994 Steven was merrily prowling the mean streets.
And he had a camera along to prove it. If you want to see what things looked like 21 years ago, Steven has opened a Flickr page documenting the experience. Put your cursor over the images to get an ID tag. “The descriptions in quotation marks,” Steven tells me, “are what I had written on the reverse of the photographs.”
You know, back when people printed up photos.
The inset shot of me above is from the Steven session — standing under the street sign (just out of frame) for Dashiell Hammett Street, top of the block at the corner of Pine.
At that point, Monroe Street had been renamed Dashiell Hammett Street for only six years.
