From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Today, we are going to have electricity put in our house. Grandmother has been begging for it for ever so long so at last Grandfather said, “Auch recht.” Grandmother is very smart and she knows that if she bothers Grandfather long enough, at the end he will always say “Auch recht.”
The streets of San Francisco were lit with electric lights before the 1906 earthquake. According to an article about the electric light system by the National Park Service, although electric lights were brought to parts of Manhattan as early as the late 1800s, “[o]nly in 1925 did half of all homes in the U.S. have electric power.”
Below are a few photos of nighttime San Francisco that Hilda might have seen.
Photo circa 1911 courtesy of OpenSFHistory / wnp37.02750
Photo courtesy of OpenSFHistory / wnp15.742
Photo courtesy OpenSFHistory / wnp26.2123