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SAN FRANCISCO proper occupies just
48 hilly square miles at the tip of a slender peninsula, almost
perfectly centered along the California coast. Arguably the most
beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in the US, it remains
true to itself: a funky, individualistic, surprisingly small city
whose people pride themselves on being the cultured counterparts
to their cousins in LA the last bastion of civilization on the
lunatic fringe of America. It's a compact and approachable place,
where downtown streets rise on impossible gradients to reveal
stunning views of the city, the bay and beyond, and blanket fogs
roll in unexpectedly to envelop the city in mist. This is not
the California of mono-tonous blue skies and slothful warmth the
temperatures rarely exceed the seventies, and even during summer
can drop much lower.
The original inhabitants of this area, the Ohlone
Indians , were all but wiped out within a few years of
the establishment in 1776 of the Mission Dolores
, the sixth in the chain of Spanish Catholic missions that ran
the length of California. Two years after the Americans replaced
the Mexicans in 1846, the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills
precipitated the rip-roaring Gold Rush . Within
a year fifty thousand pioneers had traveled west, and east from
China, turning San Francisco from a muddy village and wasteland
of sand dunes into a thriving supply center and transit town.
By the time the transcontinental railroad was
completed in 1869, San Francisco was a lawless, rowdy boomtown
of bordellos and drinking dens, something the moneyed elite who
hit it big on the much more dependable silver Comstock Load worked
hard to mend, constructing wide boulevards, parks, a cable car
system and elaborate Victorian redwood mansions.
In the midst of the city's golden age, however,
a massive earthquake , followed by three days
of fire, wiped out most of the town in 1906. Rebuilding began
immediately, resulting in a city more magnificent than before;
in the decades that followed, writers like Dashiell Hammett and
Jack London lived and worked here. Many of the city's landmarks,
including Coit Tower and both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges,
were built in the 1920s and 1930s. By World War II San Francisco
had been eclipsed by Los Angeles as the main west coast city,
but it achieved a new cultural eminence with the emergence of
the Beats in the Fifties and the hippies in the Sixties, when
the fusion of music, protest, rebellion and, of course, drugs
that characterized 1967's "Summer of Love" took over
the Haight-Ashbury district.
In a conservative America, San Francisco's reputation
as a liberal oasis continues to grow, attracting waves of resettlers
from all over the US. It is estimated that over half the city's
population originates from somewhere else. It is a city in a constant
state of evolution, fast gentrifying itself into one of the most
high-end towns on earth thanks, in part, to the disposable incomes
pumped into its coffers from its sizeable singles and gay contingents.
Gay capital of the world, San Francisco has also been the scene
of the dot.com revolution's rise and fall. The resultant wealth
at one time made housing prices skyrocket often at the expense
of the city's middle and lower classes but the closure of hundreds
of start-up IT companies has brought real-estate prices back down
to (almost) reasonable levels. Despite the city's current economic
ebbs and flows, your impression of the city likely won't be altered
it remains one of the most proudly distinct places to be found
anywhere.
