So San Francisco gathers a mission and a gold rush, an earthquake and a rebirth, an orange bridge and a moving landmark, a streetcar conductor and a Principal Chief onto one fog-swept peninsula — and our San Francisco designs gather that into wearable form. Whether San Francisco is your hometown, your hill, your fog, or the city you still mean to reach, wear the history. On the Bay since 1776.
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.