San Francisco is the city the Gold Rush built and the 1906 earthquake rebuilt. The Ramaytush Ohlone have been the original peoples of this seven-by-seven-mile peninsula for at least ten thousand years. On March 28, 1776, Juan Bautista de Anza planted a cross at the tip of the peninsula above what is now Fort Point and selected the sites of a presidio and a mission; on June 29, 1776 — five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed across the continent — Father Francisco Palóu and Father Pedro Cambón celebrated the first mass at Mission San Francisco de Asís, and on October 9 they formally dedicated the mission. Lieutenant José Joaquín Moraga founded the Presidio of San Francisco on September 17, 1776. The adobe chapel completed in 1791, known as Mission Dolores for the nearby Arroyo de los Dolores, still stands and is the oldest intact building in the city. A small Mexican-era village called Yerba Buena grew up along the cove. The U.S. Navy took it without a shot in July 1846, and on January 30, 1847, Lieutenant Washington Bartlett renamed the place San Francisco. A year later, on January 24, 1848, James Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill on the American River; on May 12 of that year, a Mormon merchant named Sam Brannan walked San Francisco's streets with a vial of gold flakes shouting Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River! Brannan had already bought every pick, shovel, and pan he could find. By the end of 1848 the town of fewer than a thousand was a city of twenty-five thousand. San Francisco incorporated on April 15, 1850, the same year California became the thirty-first state. 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 first cable car down the Nob Hill grade — the world's first successful cable railway, and today, with the Powell-Hyde, Powell-Mason, and California Street lines, the only moving National Historic Landmark in the United States. The Painted Ladies of Alamo Square — the Queen Anne row at 710-720 Steiner Street, built between 1892 and 1896 by the developer Matthew Kavanaugh — were a generation old when, at five-twelve 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. Eighty percent of San Francisco was destroyed. The city rebuilt fast enough to throw a world's fair in 1915 — the Panama-Pacific International Exposition on the Marina — and Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts still stands from it. Coit Tower went up on Telegraph Hill in 1933. Alcatraz Island was the federal penitentiary from 1934 to 1963. Joseph B. Strauss broke ground for the Golden Gate Bridge on January 5, 1933, and at six in the morning on May 27, 1937, two hundred thousand people walked across the new four-thousand-two-hundred-foot Art Deco span — Irving Morrow's International Orange against the fog and the strait. Lombard Street still bends eight times down Russian Hill. The Painted Ladies are still on Steiner. The fog still pours through the Gate every evening from May to September. On the Bay since 1776.
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
- Walk or bike across the Golden Gate Bridge — the 1.7-mile Art Deco suspension span that opened May 27, 1937, designed by Joseph Strauss with Charles Ellis and Leon Moisseiff, in Irving Morrow's International Orange against the strait and the fog.
- Ride the Powell-Hyde, Powell-Mason, or California Street cable car — the only moving National Historic Landmark in the country, running on Andrew Hallidie's 1873 system out of the Cable Car Museum and powerhouse at Washington and Mason.
- Visit Mission Dolores at 16th and Dolores — the 1791 adobe chapel, founded 1776, the oldest intact building in San Francisco.
- Walk the Presidio — the Spanish presidio of 1776, the U.S. Army post from 1846 to 1994, now a national park at the south anchor of the Golden Gate Bridge — including Fort Point underneath the bridge approach and the 1794 site of the Castillo de San Joaquin.
- See the Painted Ladies of Alamo Square — the Steiner Street row at 710-720, Queen Anne Victorians built 1892-1896 by Matthew Kavanaugh — from the top of the park lawn with the downtown skyline behind.
- Climb Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill — the 1933 Art Deco fluted column with WPA murals inside and the best three-sixty view of the bay.
- Visit the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina — Bernard Maybeck's 1915 Beaux-Arts rotunda built for the Panama-Pacific Exposition and rebuilt to last in 1965.
- Drive the eight switchbacks of Lombard Street between Hyde and Leavenworth — the "crookedest street in the world."
- Take the ferry from Pier 33 to Alcatraz Island — the 1934-1963 federal penitentiary and now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, with the oldest lighthouse on the West Coast at its summit.
- Walk Golden Gate Park west to Ocean Beach — 1,017 acres of conserved park including the de Young Museum, the Japanese Tea Garden, and the Conservatory of Flowers.
- Walk the Embarcadero from the 1898 Ferry Building south to the ballpark and north to Pier 39, with the Bay Bridge (opened November 12, 1936) overhead at the Embarcadero Center.
- Walk Grant Avenue through Chinatown — the oldest Chinatown in North America, organized in 1848, rebuilt after 1906, gateways and lantern-lit streets between Bush and Broadway.
- Walk Columbus Avenue through North Beach — the historic Italian neighborhood, with the 1953 City Lights Bookstore at Columbus and Broadway.
- Stop at Swan Oyster Depot at 1517 Polk Street — the Danish-founded Cable Oyster Depot of the 1890s rebuilt as Swan in 1912 after the earthquake, with the same Italian marble counter and the same eighteen wooden stools in place ever since, now in its third Sancimino-family generation since 1946.
- Hike Lands End from the Cliff House to the Sutro Baths ruins — the western edge of the city, where the Pacific meets the Golden Gate.
- Catch the view from Twin Peaks at the geographic center of the seven-by-seven peninsula — Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, Pacific Heights, and Potrero Hill arranged around it.
- Drive past Oracle Park on the Embarcadero, Chase Center in Mission Bay, and the former Candlestick Point and Kezar Stadium sites — the ballpark and arena footprints of the modern city.
- Take the Larkspur or Sausalito ferry from the Ferry Building for the classic seaward view of the skyline, Alcatraz, and the Bridge.
