San Francisco's lore is the lore of every place built on a fault line: the dreamers and the schemers, the fog and the foghorns, the ships in Yerba Buena Cove with their masts sticking up out of the mud where they had been pulled ashore and built around. The Italians who settled North Beach. The Chinese who built Chinatown — the oldest in North America, organized in 1848 and rebuilt after the quake. The Danes who opened the Cable Oyster Depot in Polk Gulch in the 1890s and rebuilt it as Swan Oyster Depot at 1517 Polk Street in 1912, where the same Italian marble counter and the same eighteen wooden stools are still in place after a century, now run by the third generation of the Sancimino family who bought it in 1946. The Beats who read poetry at City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Avenue from 1953 forward. The fog horns of Lime Point and Mile Rocks. The smell of sourdough on the Embarcadero. The clang of a cable car bell rising up Powell Street at six in the morning.
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.
