At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, a magnitude-7.9 earthquake on the San Andreas Fault ran for forty-five seconds and toppled the city; the fire that followed burned for four days, destroyed eighty percent of San Francisco, and killed more than three thousand people. It remains the city’s defining catastrophe — and its defining recovery. San Francisco rebuilt fast enough to host a world’s fair nine years later, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, whose Palace of Fine Arts by Bernard Maybeck still stands on the Marina. Coit Tower added its fluted column to Telegraph Hill in 1933, and Alcatraz Island served as the federal penitentiary from 1934 to 1963.
Our San Francisco retro logo carries the California Bear and star of the Bear Flag tradition, with "1850" stamped beneath — the year of California statehood and San Francisco’s incorporation. The black-and-white styling is retro, in the visual vocabulary of WPA posters, crate labels, and the wayfinding of the rebuilt city. The bear and star, paired with the date, place the design in the founding generation of the state — and the city that came back from 1906, built the Bridge, and ran the cable cars every day in between.
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.