Antique & Vintage Postcards

From a bird's-eye vantage point, the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum spreads across Golden Gate Park in San Francisco like a Beaux-Arts pleasure palace — its terracotta tower rising against a shimmering bay backdrop, formal garden beds blazing with red flowers, and tiny figures strolling the manicured grounds below. This Curteich linen card captures the museum during its interwar golden age, before the 1989 earthquake damaged the building that was ultimately replaced by the striking Herzog & de Meuron structure opened in 2005. The back bears a postmark of February 28 (year partially legible, consistent with early 1930s) from San Francisco, addressed to a "Miss Jane" in Washington, D.C., at 19 Phelps Place. The message begins with an underlined "congratulations" — perhaps for a graduation or appointment — and is warmly signed, making this a charming social document of Depression-era California correspondence.