The history beneath your feet

BeforeNow reads where you're standing and tells you what happened right there — the buildings, the people, the forgotten moments — written to read like a great guide, grounded in real sources.

Try the live preview Get notified at launch

Coming soon to Android & iPhone — try the web preview now, or get notified the day it lands.

◷ On this day

April 18, 1906 · San Francisco — at 5:12 a.m. the ground shook for a minute; the fires that followed burned for three days.

See it in action

This is a discovery.

Stand somewhere ordinary and BeforeNow turns it into this — grounded in real records.

◈ 600 Montgomery St · San Francisco

Before the Pyramid, the "Monkey Block."

You're standing at the foot of the Transamerica Pyramid — but for over a century this corner held the Montgomery Block, San Francisco's first fireproof building, raised in 1853 on a raft of redwood logs floated into the bay-mud shoreline.

Cheap top-floor studios filled with writers and artists — Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and later Jack London and Ambrose Bierce among them. The city nicknamed it the "Monkey Block."

It rode out the 1906 earthquake and the fire that leveled everything around it — only to be torn down for a parking lot in 1959. The Pyramid rose here in 1972.

Open BeforeNow for the full timeline, historic photos, and what's nearby →

Sample discoveries — real history, drawn from open archives. Live results come from the app.

What it does

Every place has a past. Now you can hear it.

Point your phone at the ground you're standing on and BeforeNow does the rest.

◈

Instant local history

Your location becomes a story — what stood here, who passed through, what happened on this exact spot.

✦

Tap anywhere to explore

Curious about a place you're not? Tap any point on the map and travel there from your chair.

◷

Timeline & on this day

A dated timeline for your spot, oldest to now — plus what happened right here on today's date.

☾

Then — in photographs

Historic images pinned nearby. See what your street looked like a hundred years ago.

⤳

Guided walking tours

BeforeNow strings the places around you into a walking tour with a narrated arc between stops.

♪

Listen, offline, eight languages

Hands-free narration so you can look up and keep walking — works without a signal, in your language.

Grounded, not guessed

Real history — never invented.

BeforeNow gathers facts from the world's open archives, then a careful narrator weaves them into something worth reading. When the record is thin, it says so — instead of making things up.

Written from cited, verifiable sources
Coverage on ordinary streets, not just landmarks
Heritage & historic sites flagged automatically
Honest about what history doesn't know

An array of antique instruments of discovery

Drawn from the open record

Wikipedia Wikidata OpenStreetMap Wikimedia Commons

Coming soon to Android & iPhone

Stand somewhere.
Discover its past.

BeforeNow lands on Android and iPhone soon. Leave your email and we'll tell you the moment it's live — one message, no spam.

Can't wait? Try the live web preview →