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How the Titanic Would Look If It Stood in Market Street

Titanic photo overlaid on picture of San Francisco's Market St. to give sense of the size of the vessel

The April 17, 1912 edition of The San Francisco Examiner featured a front-page photograph to illustrate the sheer size of the sunken Titanic.

A drawing of the ship was superimposed over a view of San Francisco’s Market Street. The Titanic is shown at the intersection of Powell Street, with the familiar James Flood Building in the background to give a sense of scale to the illustration .

The James Flood Building stands 186 feet high, and the photograph illustrates that it is slightly taller than the distance between the keel of the Titanic and its funnel–175 feet.

The Titanic’s length, as calculated in this photograph, is 882 feet, 6 inches, or the distance “from the Hearst Building to 4th and Market st.”

The artist also drew in an approximation of the iceberg which sank the Titanic, to show it was 250 feet from the water’s surface to the tip of the iceberg.


Go to Dr. Dodge’s eyewitness account.