San Francisco

Introduction
Getting There
Getting Around
People
Neighborhoods
History
Government
Public Safety
Economy
Environment
Shoppping
Education
Health Care
Media
Sports
Parks and Recreation
Performing Arts
Libraries and Museums
Tourism
Holidays and Festivals
Famous Citizens
For Further Study

San Francisco, California, United States of America, North America

Founded: 1776; Incorporated: 1850
Location: The Pacific coast of northern California, United States, North America
Motto: "Gold in Peace and Iron in War"
Flower: Dahlia
Time Zone: 4 am Pacific Standard Time (PST) = noon Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
Ethnic Composition: White, 67%; Black, 11%; American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, 0.5%; Asian and Pacific Islander, 29%; Hispanic origin (may be of any race), 14%
Elevation: 47 m (155 ft)
Latitude and Longitude: 37°77'N, 122°41'W
Coastline: 40–50 km (25–30 mi)
Climate : Mediterranean-type climate with consistent, moderate temperatures. The year is divided into distinct dry and wet seasons, with most precipitation occurring between November and March. A distinguishing climate feature is the fog that rolls in from the Pacific Ocean.
Annual Mean Temperature: 15°C (59°F); January 12°C (53°F); August 18°C (65°F)
Average Annual Precipitation (rainfall and melted snow): 49 cm (19.33 in)
Government: Mayor-council
Weights and Measures: Standard U.S.
Monetary Units: Standard U.S.
Telephone Area Codes: 415
Postal Codes: 94101-88

1. Introduction

Situated on a peninsula separating San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco is a uniquely picturesque city, whose scenic attractions include the largest cultivated urban park in the country, Golden Gate Park. Its notoriously steep streets, traversed by the famous cable cars, are home to a remarkably diverse ethnic population, and the city's reputation for tolerance and diversity is also evident in its history as a mecca for the gay community. Known for sophisticated cultural innovation and experimentation, San Francisco was the gathering place of the "beat" generation in the 1950s and a focal point of the 1960s counterculture, a hotbed of political protest and the birthplace of the "San Francisco Sound." Still known for its cultural attractions, today the Bay Area is also famous for its concentration of cutting-edge high-technology firms, which have drawn even more new residents to this populous region.

2. Getting There

The city of San Francisco is situated at the tip of a peninsula surrounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west, the San Francisco Bay on the east, and the Golden Gate, a narrow marine passageway between San Francisco and Marin County to the north.

Highways

Several interstate highways provide easy access to the city, including U.S.-101 and State Route 1 (the Pacific Coastal Highway). I-5, the north-south highway that runs from Canada to Mexico, reaches San Francisco through Loops 580 and 680. U.S.-50 also passes through the city.

Bus and Railroad Service

Amtrak provides service to San Francisco on the California Zephyr, which runs through Salt Lake City, Denver, and eastward to Chicago, and the Coast Starlight, which runs between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Trains with regional routes through California include the Capitols and the San Joaquins.

Airports

San Francisco International Airport, one of the nation's busiest, handles most domestic and international flights to and from the city. It services flights from about 50 major carriers.

Shipping

With 40 deep-water piers, San Francisco is one of the leading port cities on the Pacific coast, handling about one-third of the country's West Coast trade, amounting to more than 200,000 tons of cargo annually. It has been designated a U.S. Port of Entry and a free trade zone. Freight is also carried to and from the region by a number of major rail carriers and trucking companies, and all major air freight carriers land at San Francisco International Airport.

San Francisco Population Profile

City Proper

Population: 724,000
Area: 122 sq km (47 sq mi)
Ethnic composition: 59.5% white; 29.1% Asian or Pacific Islander; 10.9% black; and 0.5% Native American
Nicknames: The Golden Gate City, Baghdad in the Bay

Metropolitan Area

Population: 4,051,000
Description: San Francisco and surrounding communities
World population rank ¹: 59
Percentage of national population ²: 1.5%
Average yearly growth rate: 1.0%
Ethnic composition: 67% white; 25% Asian or Pacific Islander; 7% black; 1% other

1. The San Francisco metropolitan area's rank among the world's urban areas.
2. The percent of the United States' total population living in the San Francisco metropolitan area.

3. Getting Around

Situated on 40 hills of varying heights—among the highest are Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, and Russian Hill—San Francisco is known for its steep streets, many of which ascend and descend hillsides, the result of insistence by early planners on imposing a strict grid pattern on the city rather than following the natural contours of the land. The two hills of Twin Peaks mark the geographic center of the city, which is divided into a number of distinct neighborhoods, many of whose streets are laid out in grid patterns. Bisecting much of the city from southwest to northeast is Market Street, whose southwestern-most portion is called Portola Drive. The Golden Gate Bridge runs northward across the Golden Gate straight; the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge runs north-eastward across San Francisco Bay.

Bus and Commuter Rail Service

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) provides commuter rail service between the city and 26 stations in the East Bay area. The Municipal Railway System (Muni) operates San Francisco's famed cable cars—popular with both commuters and tourists—and a system of above-and underground light-rail vehicles. There is also ferry service between San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley.

Sightseeing

Many of the sights in downtown San Francisco can be covered on walking tours. Areas for which tours are available include Chinatown and Pacific Heights. Among the tours focusing on specific areas of interest are Victorian homes tour and a Dashiell Hammett tour that covers sites linked to his detective, Sam Spade. The city's restored cable cars—which have been declared a historical landmark—carry visitors over a 16-kilometer (ten-mile) route. Bus tours of San Francisco and the Bay Area are also available, as are scenic cruises of San Francisco Bay, which offer views of the San Francisco skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Alcatraz prison.

4. People

Known for its ethnic diversity, San Francisco has one of the country's highest concentrations of new immigrants. The 1990 census recorded a population of approximately 724,000 in the city of San Francisco, of which 59.5 percent were white, 29.1 percent Asian or Pacific Islander, 10.9 percent black, and 0.5 percent Native American. The surrounding area, designated by the Census Bureau as San Francisco's Primary Statistical Metropolitan Area (PMSA), had a 1990 population of 1.6 million. In 1996 its population was still under 1.7 million, and its racial composition was 67 percent white; 25 percent Asian or Pacific Islander; and seven percent black.

5. Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods in the northern part of San Francisco include the wealthy Pacific Heights district, whose mansions provide dramatic views of the Bay; Nob Hill, site of the "crookedest street in the world" (Lombard Street); North Beach and Chinatown, home to the largest single concentration of Chinese outside of China; the financial district, dominated by the TransAmerica Pyramid and the Bank of America building; and the Western Addition, with its gracious restored Victorian homes. Districts close to the center of the city include Haight-Ashbury, cradle of the 1960s counterculture; the Mission District, site of the historic Mission Dolores and home to the city's largest Hispanic population; the Central area, home of the Castro, for decades a gay and lesbian mecca; and the South of Market district, a heavily commercial area that has attracted many high-technology start-up firms. To the south lie South Bayshore, which combines residential and commercial properties and is also home to the city's produce markets; the largely working-class South Central area; and the pricier Ingleside, near San Francisco State University and San Francisco City College.

6. History

The fog that rolls in off the Pacific Ocean hid the present-day site of San Francisco from Spanish conquistadors for two centuries after they first discovered California. A small party of explorers traveling overland from Mexico toward Canada and led by Sergeant José Ortega first stumbled on the area in 1769, and settlement began in 1776. A small town, called Yerba Buena, was established, but for over half a century it attracted little attention and was populated mostly by missionaries. The United States claimed it in 1846, during the Mexican War, and its population nearly doubled with the arrival of over 200 Mormon settlers.

The town's situation changed dramatically with the discovery of gold in 1848 at Sutters Mill, about 225 kilometers (140 miles) away, and the onset of the California Gold Rush. The Gold Rush brought wealth and expansion to the city as it grew to accommodate the thousands of prospectors arriving to seek their fortunes, many of whom later settled permanently in the area. However, the Gold Rush also created a wave of lawlessness as saloons, gambling joints, and brothels were opened to serve thousands of temporary settlers who considered themselves outside the law. San Francisco was incorporated in 1850, and the city's permanent residents began forming vigilante groups in the 1850s to clean up the town, eventually restoring order.

San Francisco continued to grow in the latter half of the nineteenth century, receiving a major boost from the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869, as well as a silver boom in Nevada. By the turn of the century, it was home to about a third-of-a-million people. The new century, however, soon brought disaster in the form of the great earthquake of April 18, 1906, in which over 500 people perished. Ten square kilometers (four square miles) of the city were destroyed as fires raged out of control for three days. However, the people of San Francisco forged ahead in the face of tragedy and rebuilt their city, with the help of donations that poured in from many quarters following the disaster. By 1915 the city triumphantly hosted its first world's fair, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in honor of the completion of the Panama Canal.

The first half of the twentieth century was a period of continued growth spearheaded by the completion of major buildings and infrastructure projects, including the damming of the Tuoloumne River at the Hetch Hetchy Canyon and the construction of two great bridges completed within a year of each other: the San Francisco-Oak-land Bay Bridge (1936) and the Golden Gate Bridge (1937). With the growth of industry came the development of an active labor movement, which became one of the dominant powers in the city. The longshoremen's strike in 1930 was the largest in U.S. history. World War II (1939–45) further boosted industrial production in the city, although the period was marred by the forced relocation of thousands of Bay Area Japanese Americans and their detention in internment camps for the duration of the war.

The postwar period has seen continued economic growth and civic expansion, but the city has also had to confront problems typical of major urban areas, including flight to the surrounding suburbs, and the blight and decay of downtown areas. Urban renewal began in the 1960s and 1970s; the downtown area was redeveloped, and the Rapid Transit System was introduced to make the central city more accessible to those on the periphery. During this period, the Bay Area became a focal point of the youth counterculture that was sweeping the nation, and a center for student protest against the Vietnam War (1945–1973) and other types of activism, including the struggle for gay rights. The 1970s ended on a somber note with the 1979 assassination of Mayor George Moscone and the city's first openly gay city supervisor, Harvey Milk. That same year San Francisco elected its first woman mayor, Dianne Feinstein.

In 1989 San Francisco experienced another major earthquake. However, the city moved forward in the following decade. Its city hall was refurbished, and important new facilities were built, including a museum of modern art, a new main library, and an arts center.

7. Government

San Francisco, which is both a city and a county, has a mayor-council form of government. The mayor, who serves as the chief executive, is elected to a four-year term, as are the 11 members of the city council. The city administrator and controller are appointed by the mayor. Elected officials include the city assessor, public defender, district attorney, sheriff, and attorney. In 1995 San Francisco's municipal government employed 26,000 persons.

8. Public Safety

In 1995 San Francisco had a total crime index figure of 8,190 crimes reported to police per 100,000 residents. A total of 1,737 reports were violent crimes (murder, 17; rape, 69; robbery, 653; and aggravated assault, 998), and 6,713 were property crimes (burglary, 965; larceny, 4,625; and motor vehicle theft, 1,123).

In May 1999, the city of San Francisco, together with three other California municipalities and two counties, sued gun manufacturers for promoting the illegal sale of guns that are ultimately used to commit crimes. Three industry trade associations and 28 gun makers were named in the suit, which charged them with creating an illegal secondary market for guns and deliberately producing enough guns to perpetuate it; designing guns to make them attractive to criminals; falsely advertising the safety of their products; evading state and federal gun control laws; and selling defective and unsafe weapons. The gun-industry suit follows the precedent set in 1996 when San Francisco became the first city in the United States to sue the tobacco industry, also under California's unfair business practices law. Under the terms of the 1998 settlement of that suit, California became the only state in which cities were to receive direct compensation from the tobacco industry.

9. Economy

San Francisco's coastal location and natural harbor have made it an important shipping center throughout its history, and it is still one of the major port cities on the West Coast, although today most shipping activity actually occurs in nearby Oakland.

Since the nineteenth century, San Francisco has been known as a financial center. Today it is home to leading banks (Wells Fargo) and insurance companies (TransAmerica, Fireman's Fund) and the site of the Pacific Stock Exchange, as well as branches of the Federal Reserve and United States Mint. Some 500 Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in the city, including Charles Schwab & Co., Bechtel Engineering, Chevron Oil, and Levi Strauss & Co.

San Francisco's newest growth areas are computers and electronics, and biotechnology. The city's history of involvement in defense-related industries and its location near such high-tech centers as Stanford University and the famed Silicon Valley have created a boom in computers, scientific instrument, and other electronics fields. Home of the pioneering Genentech firm, founded in the 1970s, San Francisco is also on the cutting edge of the biotechnology industry, with some 500 companies in the area specializing in pharmaceuticals, medical electronics, bionics, and related areas.

The cost of living in the Bay Area is substantially higher than the national average. In 1996 the median sale price for a single-family home was $319,985, well above the national average, and apartments rent from $550 per month for a one-room studio to $1,500 for two-and three-bedroom apartments or houses. However, the income of the area's residents is also above average—their wages and salaries are among the highest in the nation, partly as a result of their relatively high level of education and the concentration of jobs in well-paid areas, including high-technology fields and the professions.

10. Environment

San Francisco is situated on a peninsula that forms the western boundary of the 1,285-square-kilometer (496-square-mile) San Francisco Bay. Its hilly terrain is part of the Coast Ranges, which extend from Oregon southward to Santa Barbara County. Among the highest peaks in the region are Mount Tamalpais (784 meters/2,571 feet) and Mount Diablo (1,173 meters/3,849 feet).

Other than its harbor, the outstanding natural feature of the Bay Area—and the one with the greatest potential to affect the lives of its residents—is the region's location on top of a network of fault lines, which has led to two major earthquakes in this century, in 1906 and 1989. The San Andreas is the best known of these tectonic faults, where portions of the earth's crust slide past each other. Normally these motions amount to an imperceptible five centimeters (two inches) per year; occasionally, however, excess pressure builds up against these plates, and when it is released, an earthquake occurs.

In 1994 the city inaugurated a 50-year plan to dispose of the millions of tons of sediment that wash into San Francisco Bay annually, threatening shipping and other activities.

11. Shopping

San Francisco offers a varied and eclectic shopping experience. Union Square, in the northeastern part of the city, is the major shopping district and home to most of the city's department stores, including Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Gump's, and Nordstrom, which anchors the huge San Francisco Shopping Centre, site of over 100 stores and restaurants. The Embarcadero Center, located in the financial district, is a four-hectare (ten-acre) commercial complex of shops and restaurants. Also located in the financial district is the exclusive Crocker Galleria, featuring designer clothing and specialty shops. The Jackson Square Historic District offers over 20 antique stores.

In addition to souvenir shops and specialty museums, Fisherman's Wharf offers four major retail complexes: Ghirardelli Square, anchored by a chocolate factory, the Cannery (a converted canning factory), Pier 39, and the Anchorage. For the budget-minded, the South of Market neighborhood offers a variety of bargain outlets and secondhand shops. San Francisco's ethnic neighborhoods provide a colorful shopping experience: goods from throughout Latin America can be found in the heavily Hispanic Mission District, and Chinatown offers all types of Asian goods, some in open-air markets. San Francisco is also widely known as a bookstore lover's paradise.

12. Education

The San Francisco Unified School District has approximately 105 public schools covering kindergarten through grade 12, with an average daily attendance of 63,900. The city's private and parochial schools, numbering about 140, enroll an additional 23,600 students.

Altogether, there are more than 35 colleges and universities located in the Bay Area, including the University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco State University, the University of San Francisco, Golden Gate University, and the University of California at Berkeley. Specialized educational facilities include the Hastings College of Law, the California School of Professional Psychology, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

13. Health Care

San Francisco offers state-of-the-art health-care facilities. The San Francisco metropolitan statistical area had 5,209 office-based physicians in 1995 when its 23 community hospitals had 4,999 beds. San Francisco's largest hospital is San Francisco General Medical Center, with 550 beds and a highly respected emergency and trauma center. The hospital was also the site of the first specialized AIDS unit in the country. In 1996– 97, it had 23,764 admissions, 391,661 outpatient visits, and employed 3,239 people. Other health-care facilities include the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, St. Francis Memorial Hospital, and Seton Medical Center.

14. Media

San Francisco has two major daily newspapers: the San Francisco Chronicle (morning) and the San Francisco Examiner (evening); both papers jointly publish the Sunday paper, the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle. Neighborhood publications include the Richmond Review, San Francisco Downtown, the Haight Ashbury Free Press, and the New Mission News. San Francisco Business magazine is published by the city's chamber of commerce, while San Francisco Focus is a regional-interest magazine. San Francisco is also the book publishing capital of the West Coast. The major commercial networks, public television, and foreign-language stations are all represented among the city's nine television stations, and there are 33 am and FM radio stations.

15. Sports

The Bay Area is home to major league teams in all the major spectator sports. In baseball, there are the National League's San Francisco Giants and the American League's Oakland Athletics ("Oakland A's"). Teams from both San Francisco and Oakland also play in the National Football League (NFL): the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders. In basketball, Oakland's Golden State Warriors play in the National Basketball Association (NBA). All the San Francisco teams play in 3Com Park (formerly Candlestick Park); the Oakland teams play at the Oakland Coliseum. Also in the Bay Area are the National Hockey League's San Jose Sharks.

San Francisco is also home to the nation's third-largest marathon, the San Francisco Marathon, held annually in July. Other spectator sports include horse racing at Golden Gate Fields and Bay Meadows and auto racing at Baylands Raceway Park and other venues.

16. Parks and Recreation

Golden Gate Park, stretching five kilometers (three miles) inland from Ocean Beach toward the heart of the city, is the nation's largest cultivated urban park. Covering a total area of over 405 hectares (1,000 acres), it has 43 kilometers (27 miles) of footpaths and 12 kilometers (seven-and-a-half miles) of equestrian trails. Its varied landscape includes gardens and woods, as well as man-made lakes and waterfalls. San Franciscans use the park for everything from quiet strolls and picnics to outdoor sports. Located within its boundaries are an arboretum, a glass flower conservatory housing over 20,000 species of rare plants, a Japanese tea garden, an eight-hectare (20-acre) rhododendron garden, and a children's playground.

Situated on both sides of the Golden Gate waterway between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, and connected by the Golden Gate Bridge, is the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the world's largest urban park. Covering a total of 28,329 hectares (70,000 acres), it offers hiking trails, beaches, campgrounds, nature preserves, and scenic lookouts over both the ocean and the bay.

Outdoor activities available in San Francisco year round include hiking, camping, bicycling, horseback riding, hang gliding, and golf. Popular water sports include swimming, fishing, boating, water skiing, and surfing.

17. Performing Arts

San Francisco is known for its rich and varied cultural scene, which embraces both European (Western) and non-Western traditions in the performing arts. Its flagship musical institution is the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1911. Appointed in 1995, music director Michael Tilson Thomas has expanded the group's repertoire to include a greater number of twentieth-century works, as well as the standard classical and Romantic offerings. Other well-known musical ensembles founded in San Francisco include the Kronos Quartet and the male choir Chanticleer. The San Francisco Opera, widely considered the leading opera company in the western United States, was founded in 1923, making it one of the nation's oldest opera companies. Jazz has flourished in the Bay Area since the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of area native Dave Brubeck (b. 1920). The 1960s made San Francisco one of the nation's rock capitals, birthplace of the "San Francisco Sound," exemplified by the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin's band, Big Brother and the Holding Company.

The San Francisco Ballet, the country's oldest resident ballet company, has a wide repertoire of works by both classical and twentieth-century choreographers, and the Oakland Ballet has also made a name for itself in the region. San Francisco's modern dance troupes include Contraband.

San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre is considered one of the country's leading regional theaters and also runs a highly regarded drama school. The San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded 40 years ago, is still popular with local audiences and tours widely.

18. Libraries and Museums

The San Francisco Public Library, founded in 1878, serves a population of nearly 800,000 from a main building and 26 branches. With almost two-anda-half million book volumes, it has an annual circulation of close to five-anda-half million. The library has special collections in the areas of Chinese language, calligraphy, gay and lesbian history, science fiction, and humor.

San Francisco's premier art museum is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, located in a striking modern building designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta (b. 1943), opposite the Yerba Buena Gardens, after moving from its longtime site in the Civic Center. The museum, which houses more than 17,000 pieces of art, is known locally as "Sf-MOMA." Other major art collections are found at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, which features European paintings; it is located in Golden Gate Park, where it shares a building with the Asian Art Museum. San Francisco is also home to an eclectic array of specialty museums, including the American Carousel Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the San Francisco International Toy Museum, the Old Mint, the Telephone Museum, the San Francisco Fire Department Museum, the Chinese Culture Center Museum, and the San Francisco Crafts and Folk Art Museum.

19. Tourism

San Francisco's natural beauty, mild weather, and cultural attractions have made tourism one of the city's leading industries, and there are some 30,000 hotel rooms available for visitors. In addition to vacationers and sightseers, about one-and-a-half million visitors to the city attend conventions and trade shows in the city every year. They are served by an outstanding array of meeting facilities, including the Civic Auditorium, which seats nearly 8,000 people; the Brooks Exhibit Hall, which provides 8,361 square meters (90,000 square feet) of exhibition space; and the 55,740-square-meter (600,000-square-foot) Moscone Center, undergoing an expansion slated for completion in 2000.

In 1995 San Francisco attracted two-and-a-half million foreign visitors, the fourth-highest number of any city in the United States.

20. Holidays and Festivals

January
Chinese New Year celebration
Sports & Boat Show

February
Arts of the Pacific Asian Show
Pacific Orchid Exposition

March
Bouquets to Art
Contemporary Crafts Market
International Asian Film Festival
Tulipmania
St. Patrick's Day Parade
San Francisco Garden Show

March-April
Easter Parade and Hat Promenade

April
Cherry Blossom Festival
Macy's Flower Show

Late April-early May
San Francisco International Film Festival

May
Carnaval
Cinco de Mayo Celebrations
Traditional Music and Dance Festival
Spring Festival Arts & Crafts Fair
San Francisco Examiner Bay to Breakers Race
Norway Day Festival

June
Ethnic Dance Festival
Union Street Festival
Street Performers Festival
North Beach Festival

Mid-June to Mid-August
Stern Grove Midsummer Music Festival

Late June-July
San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival

July
Fillmore Street Festival
Fourth of July Waterfront Festival
Jazz and All That Art
Jazz and Wine at Embarcadero Center
San Francisco Marathon

July-early October
San Francisco Shakespeare Festival

August
A la Carte A la Park
Nihonmachi Street Fair

September
Festival of the Culinary Arts
Ghirardelli Square Chocolate Festival
San Francisco Fringe Theater Festival
San Francisco Blues Festival

October
Fleet Week
Great Halloween and Pumpkin Festival
Viva Mexico

Late October-early November
San Francisco Jazz Festival

November
Polka Festival Weekend (Thanksgiving Weekend) and Polka Hall of Fame Induction

21. Famous Citizens

Ansel Adams (1902–84), photographer.

The "Beat" writers who were based in San Francisco in the 1950s, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1920), Jack Kerouac (1922–69), and Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926).

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914), satirist.

Herb Caen (1916–97), columnist.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth (1906–71), inventor of the first all-electronic television.

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (b. 1933).

Jerry Garcia (1942–95), leader of the rock group the Grateful Dead.

Bill Graham (b. 1931), rock and roll promoter.

Bret Harte (1836–1902), local-color author.

William Randoph Hearst (1863–1951), founder of a newspaper empire.

Jack London (1876–1916), adventure writer.

John Muir (1838–1914), naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club.

Frank Norris (1870–1902), naturalist.

Randy Shilts (1951–1994), journalist, author, and AIDS activist.

Leland Stanford (1824–93), businessman and philanthropist.

Amy Tan (b. 1952), author.

22. For Further Study

Websites

Cityguide Online. [Online] Available http://www.ctguide.com/. (accessed October 14, 1999).

Convention and Visitors Bureau. [Online] Available http://www.sfvisitor.org. (accessed October 14, 1999).

San Francisco Guide. [Online] Available http://www.sfguide.com/. (accessed October 14, 1999).

San Francisco home page. [Online] Available http://www.wco.com/chldress/sfhome/ (accessed October 14, 1999).

Government Offices

City Hall
401 Van Ness Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 554-4000

Mayor's Office
401 Van Ness Avenue, Rm. 336
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 554-6141

San Francisco Planning Commission
1660 Mission St. 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103
(415) 558-6414

Tourist and Convention Bureaus

San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau
Convention Plaza
201 Third Street, Suite 900
San Francisco, CA 94103
(415) 974-6900

Publications

Golden State
R.H.L./Golden State Inc.
555 Nineteenth St.
San Francisco, CA 94107

San Francisco Business Times Magazine
275 Battery St., Suite 940
San Francisco, CA 94111

San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA 94103-2988

San Francisco Examiner
110 Fifth St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

Books

Barrett, Liz. Frommer's Irreverent Guide to San Francisco. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan Travel, 1998.

Benton, Lisa M. The Presidio: From Army Post to National Park. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

Caen, Herb. Baghdad by the Bay. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949.

Chester, Carole. San Francisco. New York: Longmeadow Press, 1994.

Doss, Margot Patterson. The New San Francisco at Your Feet: Best Walks in a Walker's City. 3rd ed. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

Fong-Torres, Shirley. San Francisco Chinatown: A Walking Tour. San Francisco: China Books & Periodicals, 1991.

Gold, Herbert. Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love, and Strong Coffee Meet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

O'Reilly, James, Larry Habegger, and Sean O'Reilly . Travelers' Tales San Francisco. 1st ed. San Francisco: Travelers' Tales, Inc., 1996.

Twain, Mark. Mark Twain's San Francisco. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.

Videorecordings

Jaffe Productions in association with Hearst Entertainment Television. Golden Gate Bridge. [videorecording]. New York, NY: A&E Home Video, 1995. 50-min videocassette.

Going Places. San Francisco. James Avery, host. MPI Home Video, 1998.

San Francisco: Recreation

Sightseeing

San Francisco contains so many interesting attractions in such a small area that visitors find something unique on almost any street. Most points of interest are within walking distance or a short ride away. The ride itself can be an attraction when taken on one of the city's famous cable cars, the nation's only moving historical landmarks, now restored and servicing a 10-mile route in the heart of the city.

Historic and scenic beauty is evident all over the city. The original mission and the Presidio, both built in 1776 out of simple adobe brick, can still be toured. Jackson Square, the former Barbary Coast, and Portsmouth Square, the original center of the early town, are both in renovated areas that highlight different periods of the city's history. Many of the residential sections that surround the downtown district were spared destruction in the earthquake and fire of 1906, and they offer examples of Victorian architecture. Displayed in hillside vistas, the colorful houses give the city a Mediterranean look. The downtown area also contains a number of striking modern structures like the pyramidal Transamerica Building, and the impressive Civic Center complex, including the domed City Hall.

Perhaps the most unique features of San Francisco are its clusters of distinct ethnic neighborhoods. The most famous is Chinatown, the largest Chinese district outside of Asia, a 24-block area of authentic bazaars, temples, restaurants, and distinctive Oriental architecture. Recent additions to the area include a two-level gateway to the district, ornately carved by Taiwanese craftsmen, and the Chinese Cultural Center. Next to Chinatown is the North Beach area, once home to the "beatnik" culture. Filled with Italian influences—cafes, gelato parlors, delicatessens, cappuccino houses, and restaurants—the area also contains a number of jazz clubs, art galleries, and theaters. The Mission District, a business and residential area of colorful Victorian buildings, is home to a predominantly Spanish-speaking population and the original Levi Strauss clothing factory, still in operation. A five-tiered pagoda welcomes visitors to Nihonmachi, a section of sushi bars, theaters, shops, restaurants, and hotels that reflect the Japanese culture.

Golden Gate Park, just west of the downtown area, is more than 1,000 acres of landscaped greenery that was once a barren area of windswept sand dunes. The park was created in 1846 and houses flowered meadows, an arboretum and botanical garden containing more than 6,000 plant species, and a 5-acre Japanese tea garden. Also located in the park are the Conservatory of Flowers, a children's playground with an antique carousel, and a small herd of bison, a tradition since 1890.

The city's waterfront offers a variety of entertainments. Several islands in the bay provide scenic picnic areas. Alcatraz Island, home of "The Rock," the former escape-proof federal prison, is now open for tours; advance reservations are suggested. Ocean Beach, on the Pacific side of the peninsula, provides a view of Seal Rocks, a small island occupied by a colony of sea lions. At the northern end of Ocean Beach is the San Francisco Zoo, one of the top ten in the nation. More than 1,000 animals inhabit the exhibits, including snow leopards, a rare white tiger, and a colony of koala bears. The zoo also features the computer-designed Primate Discovery Center, Gorilla World, the world's largest natural gorilla habitat, and a children's zoo.

Golden Gate National Recreation Area, one of the largest urban parks in the world and host to more than 16 million visitors each year, is located on both sides of the Golden Gate, the entrance to San Francisco Bay. Its 75,398 acres contain stunning cliff-top views of the bay and the ocean, a network of hiking trails, valleys, and beaches, and the Fort Point National Historic Site, a brick fort built in 1861. The Golden Gate Bridge, with its pedestrian walkway, connects the two sides of the park.

Arts and Culture

San Francisco enjoys a cultural scene as varied as its population. Theater, music, and dance can be found in a multitude of outlets. The heart of the city's cultural life is located in the area around the Civic Center Plaza, where the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center blends in with the neighboring civic buildings. The Center includes the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, home of the San Francisco Symphony, a world-class orchestra that is one of the oldest in the United States. The newly renovated War Memorial Opera House is home to the internationally acclaimed San Francisco Opera and the equally renowned San Francisco Ballet.

Visitors and residents enjoy Broadway shows, improvisational comedy, musical revues, and dramatic theater throughout the city. Situated on San Francisco's Union Square is TIX Bay Area, a half-price ticket booth that has day-of tickets to performances at many of the large and smaller houses. Within walking distance are American Conservatory Theater, Cable Car Theater, Curran Theater, Mason Street Theater, and Theater on the Square.

Museums in San Francisco are varied and plentiful. Located on the waterfront is the National Maritime Museum, a collection of ship models, relics, photographs, and paintings, as well as several restored vessels docked at the adjacent pier. The American Carousel Museum features a collection of hand-carved antique carousel figures. Other area museums include the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society, the Museum of the California Historical Society, and the Wells Fargo History Museum.

The California Academy of Sciences, formerly in Golden Gate Park, is now in a new location downtown and consists of an aquarium, a planetarium, and a natural history museum. The Steinhart Aquarium houses more than 14,000 aquatic specimens including penguins, dolphins, seals, crocodiles, and rare Australian lungfish. The Morrison Planetarium will reopen with modern features in a brand new facility. The Natural History Museum houses many exhibits of natural science including the Earth and Space Hall with its simulated earthquake and the Gem and Mineral Hall.

The park also contains two art museums. The M. H. de Young Museum houses a diverse collection, including galleries tracing the history of art, as well as displays of American art, pre-Columbian gold work, and works by masters such as El Greco and Rembrandt. In October 2005, the museum will reopen in its brand new home, a state-of-the-art, 293,000 square foot facility. The nearby Asian Art Museum houses the Avery Brundage Collection, which contains more than 500 examples of Chinese art in addition to art of the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia.

At the heart of San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens, situated south of Market Street near the Financial District, is a bustling center for arts and culture that includes the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to twentieth-century art. The Jewish Museum and Mexican Museum are two of the many organizations in the process of building their new facilities nearby. Other area art museums include the San Francisco Crafts and Folk Art Museum, the Chinese Culture Center Museum, the Galeria de la Raza, the Mexican Museum of San Francisco, the Ansel Adams Center for Photography, Cartoon Art Museum, and the Museo Italo Americano.

Festivals and Holidays

San Francisco is known for its celebratory spirit, which is reflected in the calendar of festivals and special events. One of the biggest celebrations occurs in February with the week-long Chinese New Year festival, an exotic blend of parades, outdoor festivals, and other cultural programs in America's largest Chinese community. March brings the seven-day St. Patrick's Day Celebration. The attention shifts to the Japanese district for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival in April, consisting of cultural programs, exhibitions, and a parade of dancers and costumed performers.

For almost a century, thousands of runners have flocked to San Francisco in May for the annual Bay to Breakers, which is part fundraiser for a variety of charities and part celebration of the city's diversity. June brings the two-day San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Parade, the world's largest gay pride event. The San Francisco Waterfront Festival is an Independence Day party that unfailingly delivers brilliant fireworks over the Bay. Also in July is the North Beach Jazz Festival, which underscores the rich history of the San Francisco jazz scene. This 5-day celebration of the Soul of San Francisco begins on Wednesday when more than 40 bars and clubs along Grant Street host local and national jazz talent. In September, people can sample the sinful fruits of chocolatiers at the Ghirardelli Square Chocolate Festival. The Holiday Festival of Lights in December takes place at Fisherman's Wharf and launches the Bay Area holiday season in style.

Sports for the Spectator

The Bay Area is home to two Major League Baseball franchises, the American League Oakland A's and the National League San Francisco Giants, as well as to the National Basketball Association's Golden State Warriors, the National Hockey League's San Jose Sharks, and the pro-soccer league's San Jose Clash. The National Football Leagues' San Francisco 49ers was the first professional sports franchise on the West Coast, and have made several trips to the Super Bowl. During the past 16 seasons, San Francisco's football team has won more than 70 percent of its games and posted an NFL record of 13 straight seasons with 10 or more victories. Thoroughbred racing can be enjoyed at Golden Gate Fields or Bay Meadows, two of America's premier horse racing facilities. The Laguna Seca Raceway and the Infineon Raceway provide a variety of motor sports nearby. The city annually sponsors one of the largest marathons in the country, the San Francisco Marathon, as well as several other running events throughout the year. Area colleges and universities also field teams in most sports and maintain extensive spectator facilities.

Sports for the Participant

San Francisco offers a wide array of choices for those who are sports minded. Aquatic sports are especially popular because of the city's proximity to water. Yachting, boating, swimming, water skiing, boardsailing, surfing, fishing, and hang gliding from cliffs are among the favorite activities. The 75,398-acre Golden Gate Recreation Area is filled with hiking and bicycling trails, campgrounds, and wildlife preserves. The San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department administers and maintains more than 200 parks, playgrounds, and open spaces throughout the city, including two outside the city limits: Sharp Park in Pacifica and Camp Mather in the High Sierras. The system also includes 15 large, full-complex recreation centers; 9 swimming pools; 5 golf courses; and hundreds of tennis courts, ball diamonds, athletic fields, and basketball courts. The department is also responsible for the Marina Yacht Harbor, Candlestick Park, the San Francisco Zoo, and the Lake Merced Complex, which is operated for recreational purposes under the San Francisco Water Department.

Shopping and Dining

San Francisco offers some of the best shopping in the world, so it is no wonder that tourists and serious shopaholics alike want to spend some time and money in San Francisco's varied shopping centers, districts and malls. Union Square, Hayes Valley, upper Fillmore, the Mission, Sacramento Street, Chinatown and downtown's San Francisco Shopping Center offer a unique style with one-of-a-kind shops; each mall and neighborhood offers a distinctive feel suited to any shopper's mood. Other major shopping districts include Ghirardelli Square, which is a group of stores built around the Ghirardelli chocolate factory, and the Cannery, a lavishly remodeled former produce processing plant. Other popular shopping destinations are the Anchorage at Fisher-man's Wharf, and downtown's Embarcadero Center. In addition, each ethnic neighborhood supports its own distinctive section of shops, open-air markets, and restaurants. San Francisco is famous for its vast and varied assortment of bookstores.

San Francisco has been called "the weight watcher's Waterloo" because of its tempting restaurants, many holding international reputations. Nearly 4,000 restaurants in the city are geographically concentrated at the rate of about 95 per square mile. Dining styles and venues include supper clubs, American grills, California-Asian hybrids, haute vegetarian, modest bistros, and fine-dining destinations.

Seafood fresh off the boat can be obtained at restaurants along Fisherman's Wharf; farmland, vineyards, and cattle ranches in the surrounding area provide an abundance of other fresh ingredients. Sourdough bread is a San Francisco specialty. Many international restaurants, serving dishes from around the world and prepared with exact authenticity, are scattered throughout the city's numerous ethnic neighborhoods.

Visitor Information: San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, Convention Plaza, 201 Third Street, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94103; telephone (415)391-2000; fax (415)362-7323.

San Francisco , city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden Gate; inc. 1850. The city is the heart of the San Francisco Bay region and with Oakland and San Jose comprises the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States.

Economy

Tourism is the economic mainstay, with service industries supporting the large number of annual visitors. For most of its history, San Francisco was the financial center of the West Coast, but in the late 20th cent. the city began to compete with Los Angeles for this distinction. Finance remains one of the most important activities; the city is still headquarters to two of the country's largest commercial banks as well as a Federal Reserve bank and the Pacific Stock Exchange. Many insurance companies are based there. Printing and publishing, food processing, and oil refining are important, and the city's manufactures include textiles and apparel, computers, chemicals, communications equipment, and machinery.

San Francisco is also the marketplace for a large agricultural and mining region and the focus of many transportation routes. Along with the busy port of Richmond across the bay, San Francisco and the Bay Area form one of the largest ports on the West Coast and are a major center of trade with East Asia, Hawaii, and Alaska. The area's transportation needs are served by an extensive highway and rail network and the interurban Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system.

Landmarks and Institutions

The city is renowned for its all-encompassing fogs; soaring bridges; cable cars; busy Market St., with its department stores and office buildings; the Embarcadero, crowded with docks, ships, and cargoes as well as the restored Ferry Building; Fisherman's Wharf, with its seafood restaurants and the center of the city's seafood industry; Chinatown, with its Asian architecture, tearooms, and temples and one of the largest communities of Chinese in the United States; Telegraph Hill; Russian Hill; and Nob Hill, the home of millionaires. Other points of interest are Mission Dolores (1782; at first called San Francisco de Asís); many old mansions built by railroad and mining kings; the Cliff House on Point Lobos, overlooking the Pacific and the rocks, 100 ft (30.5 m) offshore, inhabited by sea lions; and the civic center, with a distinctive Renaissance-style city hall, a modern public library completed in 1996, and the municipally owned opera house, where performances of the symphony orchestra and ballet and opera companies are held. The Presidio, formerly the largest (1,542 acres/624 hectares) military encampment in an American city and now part of the national park system, was headquarters of the Sixth Army and is the site of a national military cemetery; a Disney museum is there.

In Golden Gate Park the California Academy of Sciences building includes a natural history museum, an aquarium, and a planetarium; the city also has a well-known zoo. Art museums include the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor), the Asian Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The city also has an arts and garden complex, the Yerba Buena Gardens. Institutions of higher learning in the city include two branches of the Univ. of California (the medical campus at Parnassus Heights and Hastings College of the Law), San Francisco State Univ., the Univ. of San Francisco, and several theological seminaries. The city's professional sports teams are the Giants (National League baseball) and 49ers (National Football League).

History

The city was founded in 1776, when a Spanish presidio and a mission were established at a location chosen by Juan Bautista de Anza. The little settlement called Yerba Buena was still a village when the Mexican War broke out and a naval force under Commodore John D. Sloat took it (1846) in the name of the United States. It was then named San Francisco.

When gold was discovered in California in 1848, San Francisco had a population of c.800; two years later it was incorporated with a population of c.25,000. The rush of gold seekers, adventurers, and settlers brought a period of lawlessness, when the Barbary Coast flourished and the vigilantes were organized to keep peace. The city took on a cosmopolitan air, with newcomers arriving from all over the world. In this period the first Chinese settled in the city. In the years after the gold rush, San Francisco continued to grow as California became linked overland with the East, by the pony express in 1860 and by the transcontinental railroad in 1869.

On the morning of Apr. 18, 1906, the great San Andreas fault, which extends up and down the California coast, shifted violently, and San Francisco was shaken by an earthquake that, together with the sweeping three-day fire that followed, all but destroyed the city. Earthquakes have since continued to plague the city and its environs.

The opening of the Panama Canal, a boon to the city's trade, was celebrated by the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. The spectacular San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge was opened in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. By the time of the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939–40) the whole San Francisco Bay area was heavily industrialized; it had become the leading commercial center of the West Coast. During World War II, San Francisco was the major mainland supply point and port of embarkation for the war in the Pacific. The United Nations Charter (1945) was drafted at San Francisco, and the Japanese Peace Treaty (1951) was signed there.

San Francisco's natural beauty and mild climate have made it attractive as a residential city, but it is increasingly split between areas of wealth and of urban impoverishment. Among the more well-known contemporary neighborhoods are Haight-Ashbury, famous in the 1960s and 70s for its youth ( "flower children" ), music, and drug cultures; and a large homosexual community that has principally grown around Castro Street.

George Moscone, the city's mayor, and Harvey Milk , the first openly gay city supervisor, were assassinated in 1978. A severe earthquake hit the Bay Area in Oct., 1989,; the Marina district was the site of the most severe damage in San Francisco. In 1995 the city elected its first African-American mayor, Willie Brown, Jr., a former speaker of the state assembly.

Bibliography

See S. Dickson, San Francisco Profiles (3 vol., 1947–55); Federal Writers' Project, San Francisco (rev. ed. 1973); J. H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (1983); M. Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area (2d ed. 1985); M. Gordon, Once Upon a City (1988).

San Francisco: Education and Research

Elementary and Secondary Schools

Founded in 1851, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) was the first public school district established in California. The SFUSD is a multicultural, multilingual, major urban public school system in which ethnic and racial diversity is considered a strength. English is the second language of nearly one-third of SFUSD students. The student body is currently 10.3 percent white, 21.3 percent Latino/Latina, 15.2 percent African American, 30.5 percent Chinese, 1 percent Japanese, 0.9 percent Korean, .06 percent Native American, 6.7 percent Filipino, and 11.9 percent other non-white ethnicities. The SFUSD encompasses all of San Francisco County, making it one of the largest in the state of California. The school board consists of seven partisan members who appoint the superintendent. The San Francisco school system provides a rigorous curriculum that develops student curiosity and creativity while preparing them for success at college and in careers.

The following is a summary of data regarding San Francisco public schools as of the 2003–2004 school year.

Total enrollment: 58,566

Number of facilities elementary schools: 78

middle schools: 17

senior high schools: 21

other: 39 children's centers

Student/teacher ratio: varies by school, subject, and grade level

Teacher salaries (2001-2002)

minimum: $38,000

maximum: $64,326

Funding per pupil: Figure available on a per-school basis only

A number of private and parochial schools provide alternative forms of education in the San Francisco area.

Public Schools Information: San Francisco Unified School District, 555 Franklin Street, San Francisco, CA 94102; telephone (415)241-6000

Colleges and Universities

San Francisco has many fully accredited colleges and universities, including San Francisco State University (enrollment 28,804); the University of California, San Francisco (enrollment 2,800); Golden Gate University (enrollment 3,092); the University of San Francisco (enrollment 6,415); City College of San Francisco (17,819); the Hastings College of the Law; and the Academy of Art College. These and other area institutions offer graduate and professional degrees in more than 100 fields of specialization. Nearby Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, two schools with international reputations, provide still more opportunities for educational pursuits.

Libraries and Research Centers

The San Francisco Public Library consists of the main library and 26 other branches throughout the city, providing a total of more than 2 million volumes, as well as films, videotapes, CDs, recordings, art reproductions, and extensive services for the hearing impaired. The library's special collections include material on calligraphy, the history of printing, Panama Canal manuscripts, science fiction and fantasy, San Francisco history, gay and lesbian history, and a document department featuring United Nations, federal, state, and local documents. By the year 2010, the Main's collection is projected to hold 1.3 million books, 6 million microfiche and microfilm items, and 340,000 bound periodicals. In November 2000, a $129 million bond measure passed that will provide the public with seismically safe, accessible, code compliant branch libraries in every neighborhood of San Francisco. Combined with other state and local, public and private fund sources, this program will allow the renovation of 19 branches, replace four leased facilities with city-owned branches, and construct a new branch in Mission Bay; in 2005 several projects were completed, with construction or preliminary assessments underway at other branches and new building sites. A variety of other professional, scholastic, and special interest libraries serve the metropolitan area.

The city's proximity to Silicon Valley produces a large amount of research activity. Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley are world-class research institutions specializing in a variety of fields. Other important research centers include the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, which conducts extensive bio-genetic research, and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, which works with high-energy lasers and weapons research. The California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute conducts clinical trials and research programs in a variety of medical subjects, including pain, cancer, AIDS, cardiovascular disease, hepatitis, and others.

Public Library Information: San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94102; telephone (415)557-4400

San Francisco, situated on one of the world's largest bays, on the central California coast, had a population in 1990 of approximately 750,000. The bay may have been sighted by Drake (1579), but the discoverer of the city's site is usually considered to be Portola, whose expedition arrived in 1770. Anza founded the mission and presidio (1776), which, under the administration of Serra, was the beginning of the pueblo Yerba Buena, the present San Francisco. The region became Mexican territory (1821), but a local insurrection, the Bear Flag War (1846), resulted in the establishment of a temporary republic, and a month later California was taken by the U.S. The gold rush of the forty‐niners caused San Francisco's mushroom growth into a busy, lawless frontier town, whose most notorious area was the Barbary Coast. The city's port flourished, with trade and immigration from the Orient, around Cape Horn, and across Panama. Overland communication with the East was established in 1860 by the pony express, and in 1869 by railroad, so that, until the rise of Los Angeles, San Francisco was the key city of the business and culture of the Far West. The discovery of the Comstock Lode created a second boom period, but later the city settled into a more conservative way of life, which has caused it to be characterized as the most Eastern of the Western cities.

On April 18, 1906, occurred the San Francisco earthquake, followed by a disastrous four‐day fire that could not be controlled, because the water mains were destroyed. The events resulted in the loss of some 500 lives, the demolition of a large part of the city's central business district and residential sections, and a loss of property estimated at between $500,000,000 and $1,000,000,000. The city emerged from the disaster with a better plan and more permanent buildings, but still retains its romantic cosmopolitan character, marked by its large Chinatown and Italian district. It is connected with the East Bay cities of Oakland and Berkeley by an eight‐mile suspension bridge, and with suburban and rural Marin County by a bridge across the Golden Gate, the mouth of the harbor. Two famous expositions have been held in San Francisco, one celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal (1915), and another the building of the two bay bridges (1939–40). The University of California⧫ is located in Berkeley, and on the peninsula south of the city is Stanford University⧫.

The period of Mexican occupation is described in R.H. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and the city's literary flowering occurred during the post‐gold‐rush period (c.1850–70), when its authors included Bret Harte, Clemens, Joaquin Miller, Bierce, C.W. Stoddard, Alonzo Delano, G.H. Derby, Prentice Mulford, Ina Coolbrith, H.H. Bancroft, E.R. Sill, John Muir, Clarence King, and Henry George, many of whom contributed to the Overland Monthly and The Golden Era. Among the most prominent of the many visitors to write about the area was Robert Louis Stevenson. Later writers more permanently associated with the city and its environs included Frank Norris, Jack London, Gertrude Atherton, Edwin Markham, George Sterling, and the bohemian group Les Jeunes, led by Gelett Burgess, which published The Lark. Writers who later lived to the south respectively in Carmel and the Salinas Valley included Jeffers and Steinbeck. Authors associated with the city and its environs include Oscar Lewis, Evan Connell, Herbert Gold, Alice Adams, and Ella Leffland, and Saroyan lived there for a time. In the mid‐ to late 1950s the Beat movement was so centered there that it was also called the San Francisco Renaissance. Its authors included Kenneth Rexroth, as an elder figure, and Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure. Also related were Richard Brautigan, James Broughton, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and John Wieners. At Big Sur, south of Carmel, Henry Miller lived, and to the town's north, in Santa Cruz, William Everson settled after a period, as Brother Antoninus, in the East Bay. Authors on nearby university faculties have included Kay Boyle and Wright Morris at San Francisco State University; Yvor Winters, Wallace Stegner, Albert Guerard, and Al Young at Stanford; and Josephine Miles, Ishmael Reed, Mark Schorer, and George R. Stewart at the University of California, Berkeley.

SAN FRANCISCO

SAN FRANCISCO. Located on a forty-nine-square-mile peninsula in northern California, San Francisco grew from a small Spanish mission and military garrison (presidio) into one of the world's leading financial, technological, and cultural centers. The city's beauty, accentuated by its ocean and bay views, and Mediterranean climate have turned it into a beacon for tourists from all over the world. San Francisco's thriving economy, now based heavily on technology and finance, brings countless new arrivals into the city in search of their slice of the American pie.

Gaspar de Portolá discovered San Francisco Bay in 1769 on a journey north from San Diego. By 1776, Spanish settlers occupied San Francisco and set up a mission and military station. When Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, California became Mexican territory.

In 1835, the small trading settlement of Yerba Buena was established, which became San Francisco in 1848. The United States took over in 1846 during the Mexican-American War and two years later, the gold rush turned the city into a burgeoning metropolis. San Francisco was incorporated as a city in 1850.

After the gold rush, San Francisco changed from a lawless frontier station into a financial, industrial, and commercial center. In 1906, an earthquake and fire leveled much of the city, killing more than 3,000 and leaving 250,000 homeless. Once rebuilt, though, San Francisco grew in financial prominence. The completion of the Panama Canal ensured that it would be closely tied to the money on the East Coast. Throughout the twentieth century, the city remained a hub for Pacific Rim finance, backed by Bank of America founder A. P. Giannini and the establishment of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Bank of America financed the building of numerous businesses in the Bay area and major infrastructure developments, including the Golden Gate Bridge.

Culturally, San Francisco is well known for its progressiveness, diversity, and acceptance of a variety of political viewpoints, sexual preferences, and ethnicities. Since the mid-1800s, the city has had a large Asian and Pacific Island population, and now has a growing Hispanic community. Of San Francisco's 750,000 citizens, whites comprise only about 50 percent of the population, while African Americans make up about 10 to 15 percent. The Bay area has also become a budding center for Middle Eastern and Indian immigrants.

San Francisco is known as a hotbed of liberalism—from its long history of labor unrest, exemplified by the general strike of 1934, to its place at the center of the 1960s counterculture, and today's large gay and lesbian communities, which make up about 20 percent of the population. The Democratic Party has dominated city politics since the early 1960s. San Francisco's challenges include finding a way to deal with rampant homelessness and striking the right balance between industrialism and tourism as the basis for the city's economy. The Bay area also has unusually high housing costs and the influx of people moving to the region has clogged its infrastructure.

Tourism remains a key facet of the San Francisco economy. Tourists flock to attractions such as Fisherman's Wharf, Chinatown, the cable cars, and a diverse mix of museums and sporting events. With its steep hills, water views, and historic landmarks, such as Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, the city has been the setting for numerous motion pictures, television shows, and novels.

Fueled by cowboy lore and the gold rush in the mid-nineteenth century, the city has long drawn the adventurous and courageous. Modern San Francisco still retains some of the old lure of the West. During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, thousands of technologists poured into the city in search of untold wealth brought on by the Information Age. Despite the implosion of the dot-com bubble, San Francisco and Silicon Valley remain centers for technological innovation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Issel, William and Robert W. Cherny. San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Kurzman, Dan. Disaster!: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. New York: William Morrow, 2001.

Richards, Rand. Historic San Francisco: A Concise History and Guide. San Francisco: Heritage House, 2001.

BobBatchelor

See alsoCounterculture ; Gold Rush, California ; Golden Gate Bridge andvol. 9:Gentlemen's Agreement ; Constitution of the Committee of Vigilantes of 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

San Francisco: Communications

Newspapers and Magazines

San Francisco is prominent in the publishing industry on both the regional and national levels. The city is served by two major daily newspapers, the morning San Francisco Chronicle and the evening San Francisco Examiner. A number of weekly special interest, alternative, foreign-language, and neighborhood papers are also printed. Several nationally distributed magazines are based in the city, as are many trade, industry, and technical journals. Among the many local and national publications are San Francisco, Mother Jones, and MacWorld. A variety of scholarly, medical, and professional journals are published in San Francisco.

Television and Radio

Fifteen television stations provide viewing choices from the commercial networks, public television, and foreign-language stations. Additional channels are available through cable service. Thirty-one AM and FM radio stations broadcast in San Francisco, offering a range of music, news, and information programming.

Media Information: San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-2988; telephone (415)777-1111. San Francisco Examiner, 110 Fifth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103; telephone (415)777-5700

San Francisco Online

California Historical Society. Available www.californiahistoricalsociety.org

City of San Francisco Home Page. Available www.ci.sf.ca.us

San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Available www.sfchamber.com

San Francisco Chronicle. Available www.sfgate.com/chronicle

San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau (for information on events, activities, transportation, and lodging reservations). Available www.sfvisitor.org

San Francisco Examiner. Available www.examiner.com

San Francisco Partnership's. Available www.sfp.org

San Francisco Public Library. Available www.sfpl.lib.ca.us

San Francisco Unified School District. Available www.sfusd.k12.ca.us

Selected Bibliography

Caen, Herb, Baghdad by the Bay (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949)

Gold, Herbert, Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love, and Strong Coffee Meet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993)

Lewis, Oscar, San Francisco: Mission to Metropolis (San Diego: Howell-North Books, 1980)

Twain, Mark, Mark Twain's San Francisco (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963)

Twain, Mark, Roughing it in California (Kentfield, CA: L-D Allen Press, 1953)

Twain, Mark, The Washoe Giant in San Francisco (San Francisco: G. Fields, 1938)

Wheeler, Richard S., Aftershocks (New York: Forge, 1999)

San Francisco: Population Profile

Metropolitan Area Residents (PMSA) 1980: 1,489,000

1990: 1,603,678

2000: 1,731,183

Percent change, 1990–2000: 7.8%

U.S. rank in 1980: 5th (CMSA)

U.S. rank in 1990: 4th (CMSA)

U.S. rank in 2000: 5th (CMSA)

City Residents

1980: 678,974

1990: 723,959

2000: 776,733

2003 estimate: 745,774

Percent change, 1990–2000: 3.0%

U.S. rank in 1980: 13th

U.S. rank in 1990: 14th

U.S. rank in 2000: 18th (State rank: 4th)

Density: 16,634.4 people per square mile (2000)

Racial and ethnic characteristics (2000)

White: 385,728

Black or African American: 60,515

American Indian and Alaska Native: 3,458

Asian: 239,565

Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander: 3,844

Hispanic or Latino (may be of any race): 109,504

Other: 50,368

Percent of residents born in state: 51.2% (2000)

Age characteristics (2000)

Population under 5 years old: 31,633

Population 5 to 9 years old: 31,564

Population 10 to 14 years old: 30,813

Population 15 to 19 years old: 33,334

Population 20 to 24 years old: 56,054

Population 25 to 34 years old: 180,418

Population 35 to 44 years old: 133,804

Population 45 to 54 years old: 107,718

Population 55 to 59 years old: 35,026

Population 60 to 64 years old: 30,258

Population 65 to 74 years old: 53,955

Population 75 to 84 years old: 37,929

Population 85 years and over: 14,227

Median age: 36.5 years

Births (2001)

Total number: 8,210

Deaths (2001)

Total number: 8,138 (of which, 57 were infants under the age of 1 year)

Money income (1999)

Per capita income: $34,556 (2000)

Median household income: $55,221

Total households: 328,850

Number of households with income of . . .

less than $10,000: 32,261

$10,000 to $14,999: 16,394

$15,000 to $24,999: 28,142

$25,000 to $34,999: 29,596

$35,000 to $49,999: 43,784

$50,000 to $74,999: 58,297

$75,000 to $99,999: 39,969

$100,000 to $149,999: 43,534

$150,000 to $199,999: 17,613

$200,000 or more: 20,260

Percent of families below poverty level: 7.8% (32.2% of which were female householder families with related children under 5 years)

2002 FBI Crime Index Total: 42,671

San Francisco: Geography and Climate

San Francisco occupies the tip of a peninsula halfway up the coast of northern California, surrounded on three sides by bodies of water: the Pacific Ocean, the Golden Gate strait, and the San Francisco Bay. The city is laid out in a grid over some 40 hills, reaching heights of nearly 1,000 feet; this sometimes causes wide variations in temperature and sky conditions in different areas of town. The Pacific air keeps the temperatures generally moderate, rarely ranging above 75 degrees or below 45 degrees, leading San Francisco to be called "the air-conditioned city." The climate is very similar to coastal areas on the Mediterranean.

Although temperatures remain relatively constant, there are two definite seasons—wet and dry—with more than 80 percent of annual precipitation taking place between November and March. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the local climate is the banks of fog that can roll in off the ocean, quickly covering various areas of the city, and then disappear just as quickly. The fog is most common on summer mornings, coming off the cooler ocean and backing up against the hills, but it also comes from the colder inland areas during the winter. The fog affects different elevations in varying amounts, covering the city in complex patterns of fog and sunshine.

Area: 47 square miles (2000)

Elevation: 155 feet above sea level

Average Temperatures: January, 52.3° F; August, 62.4° F; annual average, 58.6° F

Average Annual Precipitation: 22.1 inches

San Francisco

The City in Brief

Founded: 1776 (incorporated, 1850)

Head Official: Mayor Gavin Newsom (D) (since 2004)

City Population

1980: 678,974

1990: 723,959

2000: 776,733

2003 estimate: 751,682

Percent change, 1990–2000: 7.3%

U.S. rank in 1980: 13th

U.S. rank in 1990: 14th

U.S. rank in 2000: 18th

Metropolitan Area Population (PMSA)

1980: 1,489,000

1990: 1,603,678

2000: 1,731,183

Percent change, 1990–2000: 7.8%

U.S. rank in 1980: 5th (CMSA)

U.S. rank in 1990: 4th (CMSA)

U.S. rank in 2000: 5th (CMSA)

Area: 47 square miles (2000)

Elevation: 155 feet above sea level

Average Annual Temperature: 58.3° F

Average Annual Precipitation: 22.1 inches

Major Economic Sectors: Services; trade; finance, insurance, and real estate; government

Unemployment Rate: 3.6% (December 2004)

Per Capita Income: $34,556 (2000)

2002 FBI Crime Index Total: 42,671

Major Colleges and Universities: San Francisco State University; University of California, San Francisco; University of San Francisco; Golden Gate University

Daily Newspapers: San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner

San Francisco (California). While the city did not join the theatrical ranks until relatively late, it soon became an exciting and major center. Shortly after the 1849 gold rush, eccentric impresarios such as David “Doc” Robinson came to the fore, but they were quickly replaced by more durable figures: Thomas Maguire was a major manager; Mrs. Judah a popular actress. Lawrence Barrett and John McCullough also spent significant portions of their careers there, while David Belasco received his earliest training in the city's playhouses. Among the famous theatres were the raffish Bella Union, the Tivoli Opera House, the Baldwin, and the California. New theatres were quickly built after the 1906 earthquake. Among the important figures and organizations to emerge were Homer Curran, Edwin Lester, and their San Francisco Light Opera Company. After World War II the city saw the rise of the Actor's Workshop and the American Conservatory Theatre as well as numerous interesting Off‐Broadway style groups, including the Magic Theatre, Inc., Eureka Theatre Company, New Conservatory Theatre Center, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Theatre Rhinoceros, the traveling Jewish Theatre, and nearby Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. San Francisco is still an active touring center, with road shows playing in the Orpheum, Golden Gate, and Curran Theatres.

San Francisco: Convention Facilities

The city of San Francisco hosts more than a million meeting, convention, and trade show delegates annually. Convention planners come to San Francisco not only because of the attractions in the Bay Area, but also for the excellent facilities. The city's Civic Center, called "the grandest Civic Center in the country" by architectural critics, houses extensive meeting facilities. The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium seats 7,000 people, with two adjoining halls that seat another 900 people. Underneath the auditorium is the Brooks Exhibit Hall, a 90,000-square-foot open exhibition area. The Moscone Center offers 600,000 square feet; a 300,000-square-foot expansion was completed in 2003.

The city has nearly 32,719 hotel rooms available. All the rooms are within easy traveling distance of the main convention sites. Most of the major hotels in the area provide ample meeting space, ballrooms, registration lobbies, and exhibit areas.

Convention Information: San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, Convention Plaza, 201 Third Street, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94103; telephone (415)391-2000; fax (415)362-7323.

San Francisco: Introduction

The term "melting pot" is used to describe many American cities and towns. This is indeed true for San Francisco, one of the few truly international cities in the United States. The neighborhoods are varied, yet each features a cohesiveness as unique as its inhabitants. Rows of elegant houses, the famous cable cars, clusters of ethnic neighborhoods, and the colorful waterfront all add to the distinctive international flavor of the city. Nearly half of those who live in the Bay Area were born outside of the United States or have at least one nonnative parent. The city's well-known hills offer stunning views of the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, and feature a wide array of shops, restaurants, and cosmopolitan nightlife. In addition to its diversity and charm, San Francisco is a major financial and insurance center, an international port, and the gateway to Silicon Valley, America's premier high-technology center. The consistently spring-like weather and unique atmosphere attract corporations as well as visitors, and the solid economic base keeps them there.

San Francisco: Health Care

The major public facility is the San Francisco General Hospital, a 580-bed acute care center that also serves as a regional teaching hospital. It is the largest acute inpatient and rehabilitation hospital for psychiatric patients in the city. The 23-acre hospital complex contains an internationally-recognized emergency and trauma center, psychiatric services, the nation's first AIDS unit, the Alternative Birth Center, and the innovative Women's Health Center. In 2003 the Avon Comprehensive Breast Center was opened, which planned to increase the number of underserved women who receive mammograms by 5,000 annually. Because of legislation passed in 1996 requiring that all California acute care hospitals meet upgraded seismic safety standards by either retrofitting existing buildings or constructing new facilities, San Francisco General Hospital is currently exploring options for rebuilding and relocating patients to a new campus by 2013.

San Francisco City and port in w California, USA, on a peninsula bounded by the Pacific Ocean (w) and San Francisco Bay (e), which are connected by the Golden Gate Strait. Founded by the Spanish in 1776, it was captured (1846) by the USA in the Mexican War. A gold rush (1848) swelled the town's population. The Pony Express and the completion of the railroad (1869) brought more settlers, and saw the emergence of Chinatown. Devastated by an earthquake and fire in 1906, it was quickly rebuilt and prospered with the opening of the Panama Canal. Industry developed rapidly and San Francisco became the leading commerical city on the West Coast. It was a major supply port for the war in the Pacific. Its mild climate and cosmopolitan air make it a major tourist centre. Other industries: finance, shipbuilding, food processing, oil refining, aircraft, fishing, printing and publishing. Pop. (2000) 776,733.

San Francisco: Municipal Government

The governments of the city and county of San Francisco are consolidated into one unit. San Francisco adopted a mayor-council form of government in 1932, with eleven council members elected at large to four-year terms. The mayor is directly elected to a four-year term but is not a member of the council, which is known as the board of supervisors.

Head Official: Mayor Gavin Newsom (D) (since 2004; current term expires 2008)

Total Number of City Employees: 28,732 (2003)

City Information: City Hall, telephone (415)337-4701

San Francisco, see AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATRE.

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