San Francisco: the back story

About San Francisco: the back story

By the ULTIMATE San Francisco Editorial Team

San Francisco is a young city with a big story. In less than two hundred years it has gone from a Spanish mission and a sandy cove to a Gold Rush boomtown, a city rebuilt after the earthquake of 1906, the home of the Beat poets and the Summer of Love, and the capital of a technology age. Here is that story, and where you can still see it.

The first people

For thousands of years before Europeans arrived, the land around the Golden Gate was home to the Ohlone peoples; the Yelamu lived on the tip of the peninsula, fishing the Bay and gathering shellfish and acorns. Their story is told at Mission Dolores and in the city’s museums.

1776

In 1776 Spanish soldiers and Franciscan friars founded the Presidio, a fort above the Golden Gate, and the Mission San Francisco de Asís, known as Mission Dolores. Its little adobe chapel, completed in 1791 by Native American labourers, survived the 1906 earthquake and is the oldest intact building in the city. The small port settlement on the cove was called Yerba Buena until 1847, when it was renamed San Francisco.

In less than two centuries, a sandy cove became one of the world’s most famous cities.

Gold

Gold was found in the Sierra foothills in January 1848, and within two years San Francisco had become a boomtown. Ships arrived from all over the world, and many were abandoned in the cove as their crews ran for the goldfields; some were used as stores and lodgings, and the remains of several now lie under the landfill of the Financial District. The city’s sourdough bread, its Chinatown, the oldest in North America, and fortunes such as Ghirardelli’s chocolate (1852) all date from these years.

Hills and cables

Climbing the city’s hills by horse-drawn tram was hard and dangerous. In 1873 Andrew Hallidie ran the first cable car up Clay Street, pulled by a moving cable beneath the street. Today three lines survive: they are the world’s last manually operated cable car system, and in 1964 they became a National Historic Landmark that moves. The Cable Car Museum on Washington Street lets you watch the great winding wheels at work.

1906

Early on 18 April 1906 a great earthquake struck, and the fires that followed burned for days and destroyed much of the city. San Francisco rebuilt at astonishing speed, and in 1915 it celebrated its recovery with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in the Marina. Its one survivor, Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts, was rebuilt in permanent materials in the 1960s and still reflects in its lagoon.

The Rock

From 1934 to 1963 Alcatraz Island was a federal penitentiary, the most famous prison in America. Today it is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the ferry from Pier 33 is one of the great trips of the city; book well ahead.

Beats and flowers

In 1953 the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin opened City Lights bookshop in North Beach, and in 1955 Allen Ginsberg first read his poem Howl at the Six Gallery. The Beat Generation made North Beach its home. A decade later, in 1967, the Summer of Love drew tens of thousands of young people to Haight-Ashbury, and San Francisco became the capital of the counterculture.

San Francisco today

The technology age has reshaped the skyline: the Salesforce Tower and the Salesforce Transit Center, with its rooftop park, opened in 2018, the Chase Center arena in 2019, and in 2022 the Presidio Tunnel Tops turned the roof of a highway tunnel into parkland with views of the Golden Gate. The city’s old landmarks, from the Ferry Building to the cable cars, are lovingly kept.

Legends

San Francisco loves a good origin story. The Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park is said to be where the fortune cookie was first served in America; the claim is disputed, but the tea is excellent. And PIER 39’s famous sea lions moved in on their own, in January 1990, a few months after the 1989 earthquake.

Our advice: start at Mission Dolores, ride a cable car to the Cable Car Museum, walk down through Chinatown to North Beach and City Lights, and end at the Ferry Building at sunset. Two and a half centuries in a day.

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