To reconstruct the history of its neighborhood, one particularly prone to turnover, San Francisco’s Tenderloin Museum has undertaken what it calls the “Tenderloin Historical Ephemera Project,” collecting and exhibiting objects which speak to and resummon some facets of the area’s past.

Some [matchbooks] were beautiful; all of them were disposable. And here’s the irony: Sometimes they’re all we have left of a place, sometimes the thing we thought would be permanent — the business or the bar — was more ephemeral than the ephemera.