Two albumen photographs by I.W. Taber of San Francisco are mounted recto and verso on a single album page, each bearing Taber's printed imprint and catalog number within the image border. The front view, cataloged B 2145, captures Market Street from an elevated vantage, showing a busy thoroughfare lined with multi-story commercial buildings, cable car tracks, horse-drawn vehicles, pedestrians, awnings, and utility poles receding into a hazy cityscape. The reverse, cataloged B 1802, presents a sweeping bird's-eye panorama toward the Palace Hotel and Nob Hill, with the massive seven-story Palace Hotel dominating the middle distance above a dense foreground of Victorian cottages, commercial storefronts, and mixed residential rooftops.

Isiah West Taber operated his San Francisco studio from 1871 onward and became one of the most prolific commercial photographers of the American West, producing large numbered series of city views widely sold as souvenirs and distributed through albums. The Palace Hotel, visible in the B 1802 view, opened in 1875, placing both images within Taber's active production years of the late 1870s to 1880s.

The images are mounted on a single oversized album leaf with the photographs secured to front and back; imprints read "Taber Photo., San Francisco" on both. The album page measures 8 1/2 by 12 1/4 inches, with each image approximately 4 3/4 by 7 1/4 inches.

From the collection of James Lee Soffer