San Francisco

San Francisco. Archaeological evidence dates settlement in present‐day San Francisco, California, to 3100 B.C.; some 500 Native Americans lived on the site when a Spanish mission and presidio (military garrison) were established in 1776. American conquest took place in 1846, and the first American mayor changed the name of the village from Yerba Buena to San Francisco in 1847. An influx of newcomers following the discovery of gold near Sacramento in 1848 pushed the population from 1,000 to 25,000 and propelled San Francisco into the front rank of the nation's cities. It remained the Pacific coast's premier financial, commercial, and manufacturing city until World War I. Subsequently, the city thrived on tourism and the provision of financial, business, and personal services to Bay Area, regional, and transpacific customers. Despite the 1906 earthquake and fire, which killed more than 3,000 people, the population increased gradually until World War II. That conflict and the subsequent Cold War created a “second gold rush” that pushed the population to 775,400 by 1950. It stabilized thereafter and in 2000 stood at around 750,000, with 6.5 million in the larger metropolitan area.

San Francisco has always had large numbers of Asians as well as a diverse array of Euro‐American residents; its Chinatown was long the nation's largest. Its Mediterranean climate, cosmopolitan ambience, and reputation for cultural bohemianism and political radicalism attracted a large and influential gay and lesbian population after World War II. San Francisco was a mecca of the Beat literary movement in the 1950s, and its Haight‐Ashbury district flourished as a center of the 1960s counterculture.

Hyperbole abounds in the mythology of “the cool, grey city of love,” as poet George Sterling called it, and its Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars are international tourist icons. San Francisco allusions abound in American popular culture, including Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1958 film Vertigo and the 1968 ballad “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Writers from Bret Harte and Samuel L. Clemens to Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City, 1978) have drawn inspiration from the city.

At the same time, San Francisco has a deserved reputation for philanthropy and social reform. San Francisco women played key roles in the national woman suffrage and kindergarten movements in the late nineteenth century. The Sierra Club was founded there in 1892, and environmentalism remains a high priority. San Franciscans were the first to limit freeway construction in the 1950s and downtown high‐rise construction in the 1980s. City residents also took the lead in the national response to the AIDS epidemic.
See also Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome; Asian Americans; Gold Rushes; Indian History and Culture: Migration and Pre‐Columbian Era; Literature: Since World War I; San Francisco Earthquake and Fire; Sixties, The; Spanish Settlements in North America.

Bibliography

William Issel and and Robert W. Cherny , San Francisco 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development, 1986.
Richard Edward DeLeon , Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975–1991, 1992.

William Issel