Answer: How did this group of houses get to be here?

As you recall, 

...our SearchResearch Challenge this week was to figure out the history behind this funny group of houses that extends from Lyon Street into the Presidio. 

Here are the 6 houses that have somehow pushed the boundary of the Presidio a bit to the west.
How did this tiny enclave come to be?  (My edits of a Google Maps image.)  

1.  What's the story behind this odd row of six houses that are inset into the natural boundaries of the Presidio?  How did this state of affairs come to be?   

I have to admit that I was a little puzzled about how to even describe this set of six houses.

Is there some term of art that I could use to find a relevant document that would describe this?  Maybe "enclave" would work, but searches like [ Lyon Street enclave San Francisco ] just were NOT working out.  (I had to add the "San Francisco" to the query to miss all of the Lyon streets in other places.)

So, how can I find out about this funny set of houses?

My first thought was to go back and look at a previous SRS post--the one on Who Owns that Piece of Land.  That post recommends first searching for the street addresses, then checking Wikimapia, then checking the county assessor's map.

To find the assessor's web site, I did:

     [ San Francisco county assessor ]

which quickly took me to SF county assessor's web site.  From there, you can enter a street address and get the public data on the property in question.  I chose the southernmost street address, and got this display from the site:

This looks great!  There's even a "parcel history" link.  Alas, when you click it, the history is blank.  Drat.

However, if you scroll to the bottom of that panel, you'll see this (circled with dotted lines):

So we know this house was built in 1922, and when you visit the Assessor's Block Map you can see this:

Know we know that this is Assessor's block 956A, developed in 1922. 

And clicking on the Sanborn map link gives us this excerpt (check out the note on the really steep part of Lyon street--the part to the right of this diagram... "Impassable for teams"--meaning that horse teams couldn't go up this section--that's where the Lyon Steps are today).

We have also figured out that it really IS the Presidio Military Reservation on all sides of the enclave. 

We also have another clue:  this isn't just tract 956A, but in the upper right we see the name "Miranda Tract." 

Interesting.  But what's THAT?

Searching for: 

     [ Miranda tract San Francisco ] 

... leads to a number of low quality results (lots of houses for sale, etc.).  BUT I persevered, and found that the 10th result of the SERP is a link to the book California Ranchos (by Burgess McK Shumway), which tells us that there are two tracts of land granted to someone named Miranda.  One of them would turn out to be the Miranda Tract in San Francisco.  

On page 91 we find that "Ojo de Agua Figueroa" of 100 varas (about 1 acre) in San Francisco was granted to Apolinario Miranda in 1838.  

Meanwhile, on page 119 we learn that "La Purísima Concepción" was a grant in Santa Clara county (a bit south of San Francisco) to Juana Briones de Miranda in 1871.  

What do you suppose the chances are that these are connected somehow? 

Let's start with the Ojo grant.  I searched for: 

     [ "ojo de agua de figueroa" San Francisco ] 

and found multiple hits for this.  Probably the most interesting document was at the Digital Commons collection of Californian historical documents which has a digitized copy of the original map of this grant.  This map, called a diseño marks the boundaries of this property that was granted to Apolinario Miranda.  

(For reference, this map can be found at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library; U.S. District Court. California, Northern District. Land case 401 ND, page 45; land case map D-854. 1854.)  

Here's an image of that diseño: 

But look in the lower right corner.  There's a legend that says "Heirs of Apolinario Miranda.. Sep 29, 1854"  Meanwhile, at the top of the diseño is the text "Plan of a 100 vara lot called the "Ojo de agua de figuera as claimed by Mrs. Bryones and others.  100 varas to the inch."  

Given that spelling was fairly loosey-goosey in these days, do you suppose that "Mrs. Bryones" and "Juana Briones de Miranda" are the same person?  

The map shows that the "Ojo" flows from a cluster of trees.  But is the Ojo near Lyon Street? 

Another search for: 

     [ "Ojo de agua" San Francisco Lyon ] 

took me to another book, Juana Briones of Nineteenth Century California (by Jeanne Farr McDonnell), where we read:

"The Ojo de Agua stands out in a city replete with unusual corners.  Its western boundary shows on ordinary San Francisco street maps as a rectangular notch in the otherwise straight Lyon Street border of the Presidio, straight because no claimant other than Juana won suits for title to lands that impinged on the Presidio.  Six tall, elegant residences now grace the indentation that juts into the wall of the former army base and present national park.  In proving up her claim as Apolinario's widow, Juana hired the best attorney in California, Henry Wager Halleck, which assuredly helped." 

That pretty much answers the question.  That notch is the remainder of the old Ojo de Agua diseño that was originally granted to Apolinario Miranda, but then asserted by the widow Juana Briones de Miranda.  

Lyon Street.  OpenStreetMap.org

Lyon Street / Ojo de Agua. Google 3D view.

We achieved our goal and answered our original question about why that notch in the Presidio is there.  But in the process of doing this research,  are two other things have come up that cry out for further investigation.    


1.  Who is Juana Briones de Miranda?   

That book we found earlier ( Juana Briones of Nineteenth Century California) is full of fascinating detail about her life's story.  Obviously, she's the wife (and later, widow) of Apolinario Miranda.  

In 1820, Juana married Apolinario Miranda, a cavalryman stationed at the Presidio.  They settled on their Ojo de Agua de Figueroa location. Apolinario and Juana eventually had eleven children, eight of whom lived to adulthood.  Juana tended sick sailors and converted her attic into a sanctuary for deserting sailors while arranging for their passage to her brother's ranch in the East Bay.

In 1835, Juana’s husband had become abusive and, with the aid of a local bishop and the mayor, she moved to the western foot of Loma Alta (now called Telegraph Hill).  She also managed to somehow get an annulment of her marriage to Apolinario.  At Loma Alta, Juana built a small adobe home—the first private house built between the Presidio and Mission Dolores... and held the title in her own name. Juana sold milk and vegetables to ships' crews and also serving as a nurse and midwife. Without formal medical training, she treated smallpox and scurvy patients, delivered babies, and set broken jaws.

In reading through this text we find that she IS the same Juana Briones who got the grant of "La Purísima Concepción" grant in Santa Clara county, some 40 miles south of the Ojo.  You can see the original plat of the grant from 1863.  

Now this gets personally interesting because this is one of the places I go running quite a bit.  Naturally, I did a search for [ Juana Briones home ] to see if I could find where she lived.  It didn't take long to find the SavingPlaces website for the Briones adobe (dedicated to finding and preserving historic buildings).  And in that site I found that the house was located at 4155 Old Adobe Road (gee... wonder why it was given that name?!).   

I jogged over there, since it's not far from where I live.  Near that address on Old Adobe Road I found this marker: 

When I do research, I always expect to learn interesting things... I just don't expect them to lead practically to my back yard.  

And I didn't expect to learn about an early California wonder-woman who defied expectations and overcame all kinds of limitations of her era.  What a remarkable person!  




2.  What happens to this area of San Francisco (near Lyon Street) over time?  

I ask because I noticed something interesting.  

One of my attempts to figure out what happened was to look for old maps of San Francisco.  Luckily, I happen to know that the Rumsey Maps Collection (at Stanford University, which you could easily discover by doing a search for [ old maps San Francisco ] ).  By searching there for maps of SF, I found a bunch, and it was easy to find maps of the region.  Drawing on those resources, I made some side-by-side comparisons of the greater Lyon Street area with the Ojo de Agua area marked off in a red box. 

Notice that the 1870 map is just plain wrong.  Green Street ends at Lyon, not on Walnut.  Something went serious askew here.  On the other hand, a map from just a few years later gets it right (1876).  

A different kind of error is made in 1882.  In the map on the left, the 1882 map by the Faust company gets the intersection of Green Street all wrong.  I added the box at the place where Green St. hits the edge of the Presidio.  That should be Lyon St., but someone messed up this entire section of the city.  Luckily, the 1894 Faust company map has it fixed up. This is correct, but doesn't show the Miranda Tract.   

In 1906, there's a small shadow showing the Miranda Tract, although nothing has been built there. And in 1926, the first official map that recognizes the Miranda Tract with the Lyon Street enclave is seen.  

The enclave is marked correctly in the 1929 map by But the houses disappear again in 1938 from the Thomas Brothers map.  (They're still there, the mapmakers just decided to not mark them down.)  

However, look at this map from 1963.  Notice anything really different?  The houses are still not marked, but there's another, even bigger difference.  

The greater Lyon Street area, 1963.  We seem to be missing the Laurel Hill cemetery. 

Look near the bottom of the map, just to the left of Pine, Bush, and Sutter.  See what's NOT there? Compare with this current map of the area.  

That big tilted box at the bottom is the location of the former Laurel Hill Cemetery. 

A quick search for: 

     [ Laurel Hill San Francisco cemetery history ] 

quickly takes us to a multitude of articles that all say the same thing (example: Mercury News or San Francisco Curbed history site).  After years of filling up the western side of San Francisco, the city supervisors realized that they needed to remove the cemeteries from the city, and forced the cemeteries (of which there were many--including one for the Catholics, one for the Masons, one for the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, etc.) to remove the bodies from the city.  

Laurel Hill, one of the larger cemeteries, was set up in 1892.  But when the order in the early 1930s came to exhume the bodies and relocate them to points farther south, Laurel Hill (and others) fought back.  But it's hard to fight City Hall, and by 1937, the city election forced the issue and the entire dead population of San Francisco was forced to retire to the next city to the south, Colma.  

Starting in 1940, organized disinterment began, with around 2,500 bodies being moved each month.  Even so, it took years to move the dead. Every day, a parade of hearses left San Francisco for Colma with new refugees from the northern necropoli.

The 35,000 former inhabitants of Laurel Hill are now all in Colma, merged into a subterranean crypt now called the Laurel Hill Mound.  

But, to this day, occasional gravesites are still found in San Francisco.  The former cemetery is now the Laurel Hill campus of the University of California, San Francisco.  

I guess it's true what they say, "the dead shall be raised"  ... if the City wants the land.  

Search Lessons 

A couple of things leapt out at me as I did this Challenge... 

1.  Expect the unexpected.  Keep your powers of observation sharp!   This Challenge took me a while because I kept finding new and ever more interesting things about early San Francisco.  

2.  Even small clues can have a big impact on your search process.  In this Challenge, finding the words "Miranda Tract" on the County Assessor's map of Lyon Street opened up the search process tremendously.  I was having trouble figuring out how to search for this odd grouping of houses.  But when I found the Assessor's map, and noticed those words on the plat--I could use those terms to track down everything else.  It was the key that unlocked the whole Challenge.  Pay attention as you find things!  


Hope you enjoyed this Challenge as much as I did!  

In the spirit of Juana Briones, Happy International Women's Day!  



Search On!   

SearchResearch Challenge (2/28/18): How did this group of houses get to be here?

You know San Francisco is full of hills... 

... consequently, it's also full of stairs.  Some are ordinary, but some are wonderful and beautiful.  Here's one of my favorite places in SF, not just for the view, but also for the cherry trees that bloom in the spring, the steepness of the steps, and the freshness of the breeze off the Bay, all of which makes for a great morning run.  

Running down the Lyon St steps, cherry trees in bloom, the Bay in the distance, and the dome of the
Palace of Fine Arts gleaming in the upper center.

Lyon Street marks the eastern edge of the Presidio, the old fort in the heart of the city.  It's the best repurposing of a former military base that I've ever seen.  

The Presidio, in the northern part of San Francisco, with the Golden Gate bridge at the top left, and a
 mysterious set of houses marked off in the lower right.  

As a former military base, the perimeter of the base either follows natural boundaries (e.g., the edge of Lobos Creek in the lower left), or is an arrow straight line.  

So it was a huge surprise to see this as I jogged up Lyon Street: 

A Streetview image looking south on Lyon Street, towards houses that are inset into the edge of the Presidio.
At 37.795282, -122.446829 

See those houses on the right side of the street?  Why are they there?  

The thing that struck me was that the low wall is the edge of the Presidio.  If that's the edge of the base, why would there be six civilian houses here.  When you look at a closeup of the map, it becomes even stranger: 

Those red-roofed buildings on the left are (former) military houses.  The buildings on the right of Lyon Street are all civilian.  But so are those six houses that somehow managed to sneak inside the boundary of the base.  

Huh?  How? 

The Presidio has been here for a LOONG time.  There's been a military fort in this location since 1776, when the first Spanish set it up as a forward base in Alta California.  

This odd set of houses has troubled me for years.  Can you help me figure out what's going on?  (It took me a while to get to the answer.  How long will it take you?) 

Today's Challenge: 

1.  What's the story behind this odd row of six houses that are inset into the natural boundaries of the Presidio?  How did this state of affairs come to be?   

I'll tell you now, once I figured this out, several pieces of history all suddenly linked together in ways I hadn't ever expected.  (Even more mysteriously, two of my favorite runs suddenly had a deep connection that I'd never known about.)  

Can you figure it out?  

Let us know!  (And let us know how you figured this out.) 


Search on! 

Answer: How much did this menu item cost?

What's "normal" changes with time.   

Despite our sense that something as personal as what food you eat is permanent, in fact, our collective tastes have changed significantly over time.  I'm not even talking about national preferences (do you have mayonnaise, sriracha or ketchup on your deep-fried potatoes), but just about how what you buy in a local cafe has shifted over time.  

Moo.  "Eat more vegetables and not my head," says Bossie.  

As I said, I hadn't appreciated how much our commonplace and customary dishes have changed over the past 60 years.  My kids grew up eating edamame and nori snacks, but that's the influence of local Asian culture--I had no idea what those things were when I was growing up in a time of PB&J sandwiches, Tang orange drink, and Cheez Whiz.  

In my reading, I found that several popular dishes from the 1950s were seemed a bit over the top and a bit surprising.   

This week's Challenge was:  

1.  If you were in New York City in the mid-1950s, how much would you expect to pay for a good meal of broiled liver pudding or boiled calf's head with brain sauce?  

2. (Open ended)  WRT the place you live, can you find something that was commonplace to eat in the 1950s or 1960s, that is very rare now?  Or vice-versa (something common now that was rare back then)?  

The research question here is really "how can I find prices for such odd meals?"  

Off hand, I can only think of one place to find the costs of prepared meals in the 1950s, and that's to find a menu.  So my first query was: 

     [ menu 1950..1960 "broiled liver pudding" ] 

In this query, I'm searching for a menu that was created sometime in the range between 1950 and 1960 with the quoted phrase "broiled liver pudding" on it.  

As it turns out, that's a lucky guess, because one of the highest results is a link to the New York Public Library's collection of archival restaurant menus!   (I can't tell you how happy this makes me.  Someone actually took the time and effort to collect, scan, and curate this collection. It's a little window back into the culture of the time.  Their collection has menus going back to the New York Hotel's 1859 menu (when boiled tongue and stewed kidneys were popular).  

But in our case, the search brings us to several menus with "broiled liver pudding."  The first one I saw was the Restaurant Haussner's 1955 menu, which lists this delicacy for $1.50 (along with your choice of 2 vegetables).  

Menu from Restaurant Haussner, 1950.
Courtesy New York Public Library. Link

If you then search in the NYPL menu archive, it's pretty simple to find our second delicacy of the week:  calf's head with brain sauce.  It was in the Hazeltine's menu of 1914 at $0.25 per portion.   

Interestingly, although I could find broiled liver pudding on a menu in the 1950s, I wasn't able to find calf's head with brain sauce on menus in that time span.  

I went to the Newspapers.com web site to see if I could find anything in the '50s.  By searching over their entire corpus between the years 1842 to 1970, you can see that there was a real plethora of this dish in the years 1924 - 1926.  

A search for "calf's head with brain sauce" run on Newspapers.com with the results restricted to 1842 - 1970

If you look at the blue bar chart, you'll see that my cursor is hovering over the two-year period 1924-1926.  That number (22) next to the year span shows the number of articles published with this search string ("calf's head with brain sauce").  Here's one from the Manchester Guardian (UK) where the price is listed at 1/4.  (Which I learned from my British friends is... "1/4 was one shilling and four pence, in other words, 16 pence, hence 16/240 pounds...  this then comes out as 0.0666 pounds or 6.666 new pennies - as they were called in 1971 when we converted our currency to a decimal basis."  In other words,  6.666 pence.  I'll let you figure out if that was a fair price or not...)

Calf's head and Brain Sauce for sale in Manchester, UK at the Waldorf Restaurant. (Newspapers.com)

I found this recipe mentioned in the 1903 Buffalo Sunday Morning News, but not mentioned with a price.  Apparently, it had fallen out of favor sometime between the 1920s and the 1950s... at least in the US.  

But with the query: 

     [ site:menus.nypl.org calfs head brain sauce   ]  

without the quotes gives many more results, but with this query, you CAN find sautéed calf brains at theThe Blue Spruce Inn for $2.75 (1955) and "Calf's Head and Bacon, Brain Sauce" onboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth (1957).  


WRT our second Challenge ("can you find something that was commonplace to eat in the 1950s or 1960s, that is very rare now?  Or vice-versa (something common now that was rare back then)?"), I liked Jon's example query: 

     [ popular foods after 1950 ] 

which leads quickly to a very detailed outline of foods popular in each decade since 1900! In each section (salads, mains, desserts, popular foods, snack fare), a fairly complete list is given.  

For the 1950s, tuna casserole, three bean salad, and Chex Mix were all popular.  While you can still find them, these dishes are much more rare than they used to be.  

Of course, with the Newspapers.com collection (or any collection of online newspapers) you can do similar searches and see what recipes were popular at the time.  

Or, on Google Books you could do a search like this: 

 And learn all about the wonders of meals and recipes in each of the decades you want to know.  

I for one, am happy with my edamame, nori, and quinoa; and I'm pleased to have left pigs in blankets and Jello salads (Thanks, Debra) back in the dim dark days of the 1960s. 



Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (2/14/18): How much did this menu item cost?

Far be it from me to critique... 

... the food choices of different people at different times and places.  After all, I've eaten roasted grasshoppers (chapulines) in Oaxaca, smoked eel (rauchen aal) and blood sausage (blutwurst) in Germany, along with haggis in Scotland.  

Moo.  "Eat more fish," says Bossie.  

But I hadn't appreciated how much our commonplace and customary dishes have changed over the past 60 years.  Haven't we always been a land of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?  I recognize that it's very common to eat boiled soybeans (edamame) these days, and it's easy to find sushi in your local grocery store.  That's a big shift over the past couple of decades.  

So I was surprised when I happened to discover that a few popular dishes from the 1950s were broiled liver pudding and boiled calf's head with brain sauce, which seem a bit over the top.  (Although I do admit that my father enjoyed scrambled eggs and brains, so go figure. I didn't inherit that dietary preference.) 

Fascinating.  And this leads to today's Search Challenge:  

1.  If you were in New York City in the mid-1950s, how much would you expect to pay for a good meal of broiled liver pudding or boiled calf's head with brain sauce?  

2. (Open ended)  WRT the place you live, can you find something that was commonplace to eat in the 1950s or 1960s, that is very rare now?  Or vice-versa (something common now that was rare back then)?  

In all cases, you have to tell us (A) how you found the prices, and (B) some evidence that a food item was rare (or common) in the time-frames we're interested in.  (For instance, evidence might be an advertisement in a newspaper from 1959 in your locale.)  

Search on! 

-->

Answer: What's going on in these photos?

The key is asking good questions. 

But you knew that.  

This week, we tried to figure out what's going on with a couple of  decontextualized images.  In this case, these were pictures that I'd taken and recently re-found.  I also found myself puzzling about what they were... (Why, I asked myself, did I take this picture??)  

1.  What's up with these railroad tracks?  They see very odd, yet familiar.  Why are there three rails?  (I'll spare you the metadata extraction task.  This image was taken at:  38.908711, -77.068983)  

Link to original

As many Regular Readers quickly figured out, that lat/long is at the corner of P Street NW and 35th Street NW in Georgetown, Washington, DC.  

If you jump there using Streetview, you'll see more-or-less the same image I show above, confirming that the image is recent and in the correct location.  The map also tells us that this is in the Washington DC neighborhood.  

Since I know that trains that run through small side-streets are typically called streetcars, I started with the search: 

     [ streetcar Georgetown ] 

and quickly found the Wikipedia article about Streetcars in Washington, D.C.  I did a quick Control-F text-search in that article and found that there are several mentions of P Street in the article.  Apparently, there have been streetcars running to Georgetown down P Street since 1876. A few years later, in1895, Congress authorized the Rock Creek Company to purchase the Washington and Georgetown Railroad Company, producing the Capital Traction Company.  In the article there's a comment that "Tracks are still visible on 3200 to 3400 blocks of O St NW and P St NW..."   Checking the Google Map, that's correct.  (Just to be obsessive, I also checked Streetview on O St. and found that it's true: O Street also has old streetcar tracks with cobblestones.)  

Interestingly, a bit later in the the Wikipedia it goes on to say that "...The region's only remaining visible tracks and conduit are in the center of the cobblestone 3200 through 3400 blocks of P Street NW and O Street NW..."  

That's fine, and it's consistent with what we already learned... but I don't know what a conduit is in this sense.  By clicking on the link that's offered, I land on the DC Streetcar Tracks and Structures web page.  There, I learned that the "conduit" is the slot in the center which acts like a third rail, supplying power to the streetcar.  Reading the Streetcars in Washington, D.C.  Wiki article carefully, I see that the 3200 - 3400 blocks of P Street have the only remaining tracks and conduit that are visible in Georgetown and DC.  

Still a little uncertain about what a conduit was, I did another Image search for: 

     [ streetcar conduit diagram ] 

and found this page from the US patent application: 

And another diagram, showing how the conduit connects for power to the streetcar: 

And why would this look familiar to me?  What else does it look like?  

This is a tricky question.  How do I figure out something that's familiar to me??  

The only way I know to do this is to do a bit of visual scanning.  I wasn't sure where to start, so I did a few searches for images using queries like [ streetcar conduit ] or [ streetcar conduit rails ], looking for something that would trigger an ah ha moment.  Unfortunately, these weren't working for me.  

My next query hit paydirt.  I thought I'd try looking for images of the original Georgetown railway, so I did an Image search for: 

     [ Capital Traction Company ] 

and found this for my results page: 

That's when it hit me.  Those streetcars look a great deal like the cable cars I've seen in San Francisco.  What's more, cable cars also have a groove in the center of the street that looks like a conduit! 

Although, unlike the Georgetown streetcars conduit there's a cable down there, rather than an energized electrical cable.  The cable car gripman pulls back on a long lever, closing the jaws of the grip around the cable, which is constantly moving just under the street.  (Yes, it sounds unlikely--the cable is really, really long, and run in a continuous loop under the street.)  

But the cable car slot is NOT a conduit.  It just looks a lot like one, which is why it seemed so familiar!  

2.  Here's another picture I got from a friend, obviously taken late at night at the Googleplex back in December, 2013.  What's the backstory on the dinosaur?  Why pink flamingos? And what's with all the yarn??    (Extra credit:  What's the dinosaur's name?)  

Link to original 

I was there, but obviously don't remember much about this incident with the dinosaur in the night.  Can you fill me in on the yarn, flamingos, and dinosaur?  

This was a fun Challenge.  It's not hard... a simple search with the uncommon terms from the Challenge statement works well:  

     [ Googleplex dinosaur ] 

leads to all kinds of fun pictures. Here's one from the first day flamingos appeared with the T-rex.  I remember walking into the building that day and being impressed that someone went to all the trouble to buy dozens of flamingos for a practical joke.  (This was not long after the T-rex was first installed.)  

It's also fairly easy to find multiple sources (e.g. Business Insider) telling us that the T-rex's name is Stan. (And no, I don't know why "Stan.") 

The yarn thing is a bit harder--the key insight here is to search for the idea: 

     [ yarn statutes ]    or 

     [ yarn covering statues ] 

to discover that knitting yarn-based coverings for statues is called yarn-bombing, which is often a gentle act that is often about reclaiming and personalizing sterile or cold public places. It's also often quite funny, as the artists sometimes do quite elaborate yarn constructions to annotate or comment on public art.  (See:  R2D2, benches, or the Wall Street bull covered in yarn).   

So in some sense, the flamingos are, like yarnbombs, easily removable commentary on the underlying structure.  

You might enjoy knowing that perhaps the cleverest "easily removable commentary" on Stan-the-T-rex happened a few weeks after the flamingos first appeared.  They slowly disappeared over time.  Two went missing the first night, four vanished the next night, etc.  Until after about two weeks, they were all gone.  All that was left was this, below the tail end of Stan... 

Use your imagination! 

Search Lessons 

1. Searching for familiar things that you don't have words for often requires a bit of browsing.  In this case, hunting for "something that looks like a triple streetcar track" took a bit of doing.  We started by trying to figure out what those tracks were in Georgetown, then we had to pull out a little bit and start looking at images of the Capital Traction Company before we found an image that reminded me of the target--San Francisco cable cars!   The skill here is to get to a topic area that's close to what you seek... then browse a bit.  

2. Searching for a concept is often choosing a query that describes the concept, rather than just searching for the thing itself.  Here, it wasn't obvious how to search for information behind the yarn on the statue... until we searched for the concept expressed in the simplest possible form.  THEN we learned that there was a general concept of yarnbombing, which then gave us what we needed to know.  

Search on! 

Image searches with chip control!

You might have noticed... 

... that the Image search now has a set of colored rectangles just below the query area.  Here's an example with a simple query.  See those rectangles?  They're called "chips," and they modify the image query.  

If, for instance, you click on the blue "watercolor" chip, you get nothing but images of roses that are done in watercolors.  Notice that the selected chip is moved to the far left of the chip-row, and made grayish.  This indicates that the [rose] query is being modified by the "watercolor" chip selector.  

In a sense, the chips are suggestions for extending or modifying the original query.  

NOTE:  The color of the chips has nothing to do with the color of the image or how the query will be modified.  The chip color is just to separate the queries, putting them into handy categories.  (e.g., "watercolor"  "glitter" and "pastel" are all conceptually related, so they all share the same background color--but they're not searches for blue roses) 

Both Google and Bing offer the same user interface (see the Bing [rose] query below).  As you can see, the suggested chips are a little different between Bing and Google, but it's the same basic idea.   

And, if you click one of the Bing chips, you see that they CHANGE the query to the text in the chip.  

Google's chip also modifies the query.  As you can see, clicking on two chips gives you 99% the same results as adding those terms to the query itself.  See the two SERPs below shown side-by-side.  They're pretty similar: the one on the left is with the terms from the chips added into the query, while the SERP on the right has the two chips selected.  

The chips are there to accelerate your exploration of the space of images.  You can click them on/off rapidly to see what's available near this query.  (This is incredibly handy when you're exploring some ideas for design purposes, or if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for and need to poke around a bit.) 

Notice that the Bing image search also has an additional set of suggestions after the 4th row of images.  These are completely different queries (not just modifications of the original query), but sometimes also useful if you're not certain what you're looking for... 

Search Lesson 

When you're actively exploring / searching for images, notice the chips--they can sometimes help you with fast and furious searching!  

And... a more subtle point:  Notice that the chips user-interface idiom is becoming much more common.  You'll see chips in many places, a probably even more frequently in the future.  Here's an example from my Android, when I was searching for a cast iron skillet.  There are specific chips showing different brands of iron skillets--as with the image chips, these modify the query.  If I tap on the chip with the Le Creuset skillet, the query will become [Le Creuset cast iron skillet] 

Enjoy your new search method!  

Search on, visually!