The Ramaytush Ohlone fished, gathered, and tended this peninsula for millennia before the Spanish arrived. The 1776 mission and presidio were the northernmost outposts of New Spain. After Mexican independence in 1821, Yerba Buena traded hides and tallow on the cove. The U.S. flag went up in 1846, the Mormon ship Brooklyn tripled the population on July 31, 1846, and the gold cry of 1848 did the rest. By 1849, the Argonauts — the Forty-Niners — were sailing in from every coast, and what had been a sleepy anchorage was a deepwater port of abandoned ships, mud streets, and instant fortunes. The Bear Flag of the short-lived 1846 California Republic became the state flag in 1911. The "1850" stamped under the bear on our retro logo is the year California — and San Francisco — joined the Union.
The cable cars came in 1873 and ran twenty-three lines across fifty-three miles of track by 1890. Wells Fargo had been founded in San Francisco in 1852; Bank of America followed in 1904. The Ferry Building rose at the foot of Market Street in 1898 and survived the quake. The 1906 earthquake and the four-day fire destroyed twenty-eight thousand buildings and killed more than three thousand people, but the rebuild was already underway by the first anniversary. The 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition was the announcement that the city was back. Coit Tower went up in 1933 on the fluted Art Deco design of Arthur Brown Jr. The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, the same decade Alcatraz became the federal prison no inmate ever escaped from. The Bay Bridge had opened six months earlier, on November 12, 1936. The cable cars were saved by Friedel Klussmann's 1947 citizens' campaign and were named a National Historic Landmark in 1964.
Why People Visit San Francisco California
San Francisco offers the Golden Gate Bridge in International Orange against the strait, the 1776 Mission Dolores still standing as the oldest building in the city, the only moving National Historic Landmark in the country still running uphill on Andrew Hallidie's 1873 system, the Painted Ladies of Alamo Square that survived 1906, the 1915 Palace of Fine Arts, Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, Lombard Street's eight switchbacks down Russian Hill, Alcatraz federal-prison rock in the bay, Chinatown — the oldest in North America — rebuilt after the fire, the 1898 Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, the 1912 marble counter at Swan Oyster Depot on Polk Street, forty-nine hills, the western beach at Ocean Beach, and the fog that pours through the Gate every evening from May to September. It is a peninsula city that came back from a magnitude-7.9 earthquake and built the most photographed bridge in the world inside thirty years. On the Bay since 1776.
