The neighborhoods carry the rest of the story. Chinatown, the oldest in North America, runs lantern-lit behind the Dragon Gate — its story reaching back through Angel Island, the immigration station in the bay, and the old dream of Gold Mountain; North Beach keeps the espresso and the memory of the Beat Generation, whose poets gathered at the City Lights bookstore from 1953; the Mission holds the old adobe church, the murals, and the burrito that bears its name; the Castro became a symbol of gay life in America — Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California, served the city from here before his assassination in 1978; and Haight-Ashbury hosted the Summer of Love in 1967. The fog pours through the Gate on schedule every evening in summer, the 415 answers the phone, and the tech era writes the newest chapter on the same seven-by-seven grid the Yelamu knew first.
Gold made the instant city. On January 24, 1848, James Marshall found gold on the American River, and that May the merchant Sam Brannan — who had quietly bought every pick, shovel, and pan in town — walked the streets shouting the news with a vial of flakes in his fist. By the end of 1849 a village of fewer than a thousand held twenty-five thousand people; ships arrived faster than crews would stay, and the cove filled with an armada of abandoned hulls. San Francisco incorporated on April 15, 1850, the same year California became the thirty-first state, and the Argonauts of 1849 gave the city its founding character: improvised, polyglot, and certain the impossible was a scheduling problem — a city confident enough, a decade on, to humor Joshua Norton, the ruined merchant who proclaimed himself Emperor Norton I of the United States and was mourned by thousands when he died.
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.