How do you capture the life of a city that’s constantly in flux? If you’re Ron Henggeler, you put it in a jar. Actually, thousands of them. 

For nearly half a century, Henggeler worked as a waiter at some of San Francisco’s most storied restaurants: Ernie’s, notable for its crepes suzette and appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”; the Franciscan, famous for tiered seating and panoramic bay views; and the Big 4 at the base of the Huntington Hotel, where he also served as in-house historian and decorator. 

All those landmarks are gone. 

But pieces of them live on — in Henggeler’s vast collection of glass jars. Tea labels and fruit pits from bygone meals, claws from crabs he served to diners 40 years ago, broken wine glasses — all are lovingly captured in oversize jars that once held maraschino cherries and martini olives, lifted from the restaurants where he worked. Jars upon jars line every surface of his five-level Queen Anne Victorian near Alamo Square. They’re organized by color, by texture and shape, or by theme and content. 

“It’s a three-dimensional page out of my journal of everyday life,” he said. 

Yet Henggeler’s jars are more than a personal record; they’re an alternative history of San Francisco, made up of literal pieces of a past lost to redevelopment and time. In the collection are debris from Nob Hill’s Huntington mansion, destroyed in 1906; glass from the Sutro Baths; and burned canvas from the pink triangle flag vandalized in 2009. There are Gold Rush artifacts and remnants of a World War II military installation from the Land’s End labyrinth. Most objects were harvested from unusual places; some arrived through dangerous means.

Henggeler, 71, doesn’t want to put his body at risk to do the kind of collecting he once did, like scaling a 10-foot fence and scraping his leg at Hotaling Alley to collect sand from the original shoreline of San Francisco, Yerba Buena Cove.  

“The days of hunting for stuff like that are over,” he said. “There’s too many homeless people or tweakers that are out to pull copper wire out of lampposts.” 

All of Henggeler’s jars bear meticulous labels he produces on an Underwood typewriter from the turret of his 1896 manse, which he purchased with five artist friends in 1996. Only Henggeler and one other remain from the original group; they live with the artist’s partner and three cats: Sandy, Ocean, and Beach. 

In the 2000s, Henggeler spent six years documenting the restoration of the Murphy Windmill in Golden Gate Park, meeting the contractor and befriending the crew. A jar of wood from the front porch of the 1903 Millwright’s Cottage stands in memory of that experience.

His “worst people in the world” series of jars includes one dedicated to Donald Trump, in which he has stored broken glass, cat poop, and used Q-tips. 

His ability to see the extraordinary in the everyday has allowed him to make surprising discoveries, like uncovering not one but two hidden spaces in his own home, the larger of which he calls “the lost room” and is crowded with, yes, empty jars ready to be filled. 

Henggeler traces his fascination with jars to an experience house-sitting at a friend’s apartment in the 1970s. He was in college in Lawrence, Kansas, and “saw these rows and rows of glass gallon jars of figs and dates and oats,” he said. “And I realized the way you’re framing it, you’re making a statement.” The self-described hippie studied art at the University of Nebraska and cites Joseph Cornell’s famed boxes as an influence. 

Henggeler has kept his collection private over the years. But recently, thanks to the encouragement of other local artists, he allowed members of the San Francisco Arts Commission to tour his home for a potential exhibition at SFO. “I’ve always done this stuff for myself,” he said. “When I start thinking there’s an outside audience I’m doing it for, it changes the whole picture of the thing.” 

The work of gathering things and sorting them is a type of meditation for Henggeler. “I’m an empty head, the tool putting it together,” he said. “That’s magical for me.” He collects his finds in shopping bags and throws them in the back of his Toyota van. He never breaks items apart — just like he never uses flash for his photography — preferring to preserve them exactly as they are.

Some jars take hours to fill; others take years. He likens the process to working at a restaurant, where servers juggle groups of varying sizes and at various stages of a meal. “I’m never working just one table,” he said. “I’m working my whole station.”  

Henggeler said the process of assembling the memory jars has opened up the meaning of life — akin to the feeling he had when he first dropped acid as a junior in high school. 

“Life is miraculous, but we lose sense of that, because we have so many toys that distract us,” he said. The spry septuagenarian hasn’t thought much about what will become of his jars when he’s gone. “It’s right in front of me,” he said, acknowledging his own mortality. “But who cares?” 

While the outside world may be chaotic, inside the realm of the glass containers, there is structure, repetition, and story.

“Every once in a while you get this inner glimpse of just how special everything is,” Henggeler said. “My jars are that.”