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.