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.
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.
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.
