The hills got their machines and their houses in the same generation. At four in the morning on August 2, 1873, the Scottish-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.
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.
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.