What’s with the Streetcar Conductor? In 1944, a sixteen-year-old from the Fillmore decided she wanted the job everyone told her she could not have. Maya Angelou — then Marguerite Johnson, come of age in wartime San Francisco — kept returning to the streetcar company office until they relented, and became the first Black woman streetcar conductor in San Francisco, working the cars in her tailored uniform while still in high school. The city stayed in her story as she became one of America’s defining memoirists and poets, a voice of the century honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2022 the nation put that story in every pocket: the United States Mint issued the Maya Angelou quarter — the very first coin of the American Women Quarters Program — its reverse showing her with arms uplifted, a bird in flight and a rising sun behind her.
The peninsula was home long before the bridge or the gold. The Yelamu, a Ramaytush Ohlone people, lived on these seven miles by seven miles for thousands of years. The Spanish arrived in 1776: Fathers Francisco Palóu and Pedro Cambón celebrated the first mass at Mission San Francisco de Asís that June — five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed across the continent — and the Presidio followed in September. The mission era devastated the Yelamu, a loss the city’s story owes its first honesty to. The 1791 adobe chapel, Mission Dolores, still stands as the oldest intact building in San Francisco, and a Mexican-era village called Yerba Buena grew along the cove until 1847, when it took the name San Francisco.
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.