The hills got their machines and their houses in the same generation. At four in the morning on August 2, 1873, the London-born inventor Andrew Smith Hallidie took the controls of the Clay Street Hill Railroad and ran the world’s first successful cable car down the Nob Hill grade — a system that still climbs the hills today as the only moving National Historic Landmark in the United States. The Painted Ladies of Alamo Square rose in the 1890s, the Queen Anne row on Steiner Street that has posed for every generation of photographers since, and the 1898 Ferry Building anchored the foot of Market Street.
The earthquake of April 18, 1906 and the four-day fire that followed destroyed eighty percent of the city and killed more than three thousand people; the rebuilt city hosted a world’s fair by 1915.
Why People Visit San Francisco California
San Francisco offers the orange bridge in the fog, a moving landmark for a transit system, an island prison with a harbor view, Victorian rows and mission adobe, and hills that hand you a postcard at every crest. Visitors come for the Golden Gate, the cable cars, Alcatraz, the neighborhoods, the food, and the fog that is part of the architecture. On the Bay since 1776.