Peter M. Field

Author Spotlight

Peter Field has lived in San Francisco since 1970, where he was a longtime homeless psychiatric case manager in the Tenderloin, as well as in other areas. He’s led walking history tours of the neighborhood for City Guides since 2006, and is the author of several articles and a book about the Tenderloin’s history.

He is the author of The Tenderloin District of San Francisco Through Time (Arcadia Publishing, 2019).

Featured Work

The Tenderloin of San Francisco Through Time

How did San Francisco’s Tenderloin—possessed of a reputation for notoriety for almost a century and a half—turn into the mean streets of post-1960s San Francisco? Historian Peter Field provides an answer to that question with a brief but comprehensive history of a neighborhood that began in the 1850s with a few outlying houses scattered among the sand dunes that grew in the 1860s and 1870s into one of the city’s most desirable middle- and upper-class residential districts, including numerous churches, children, and schools. Then, beginning in the area’s southeast corner, it changed over the decades so that the eastern half became a hotel, restaurant, entertainment, and vice district, replacing the original one that developed near the waterfront during the time of the Gold Rush. And so it remained until after World War II, when urban economic deterioration spread across the neighborhood until it became the central city slum that it remains today.

You can purchase your very own copy of The Tenderloin of San Francisco Through Time at Green Apple Books.

Featured Fun

Sunday, September 27, 2020 at 12:00PM – (Virtual) Ask an Author with Peter M. Field

Join us for an informal “Ask an Author” session with Peter M. Field, author of The Tenderloin of San Francisco Through Time (2019). He has lived in San Francisco since 1970, where he was a longtime homeless psychiatric case manager in the Tenderloin, as well as in other areas. He’s led walking history tours of the neighborhood for City Guides since 2006, and is the author of several articles and a book about the Tenderloin’s history.