What’s with the Streetcar Conductor? In 1944, a sixteen-year-old from the Fillmore decided she wanted the job everyone told her she could not have. Maya Angelou — then Marguerite Johnson, come of age in wartime San Francisco — kept returning to the streetcar company office until they relented, and became the first Black woman streetcar conductor in San Francisco, working the cars in her tailored uniform while still in high school. The city stayed in her story as she became one of America’s defining memoirists and poets, a voice of the century honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2022 the nation put that story in every pocket: the United States Mint issued the Maya Angelou quarter — the very first coin of the American Women Quarters Program — its reverse showing her with arms uplifted, a bird in flight and a rising sun behind her.
What’s with the Orange Bridge? The Golden Gate Bridge was very nearly a striped one. When chief engineer Joseph B. Strauss’s great span went up across the strait in the 1930s, the Navy lobbied to paint it black with yellow stripes so ships could see it in the fog; the Army Air Corps preferred red and white. But the consulting architect, Irving Morrow, had watched the steel arrive from the East coated in a red-lead primer that glowed against the headlands, and he fought to keep something close to it — a color called International Orange. He won. When two hundred thousand people walked across the new bridge on opening day, May 27, 1937, it was already the color the world knows: the warm orange that burns through the gray when the fog pours in, chosen precisely because the fog was coming. And the name is older than the gold: John C. Frémont named the strait Chrysopylae — Greek for Golden Gate — in 1846, two years before anyone found a nugget. The gold, like everything else here, arrived after the name was ready for it.
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.