The Finding and Founding of San Francisco
Miwok Indians to the north and the Ohlones to the south lived a peaceful existence before the coming of Europeans. The Kule Loklo Miwok village, re-created near the Bear Valley Visitors Center at Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County, provides an insight into their daily life.
With an overland expedition by Don Gaspar de Portola, Europeans first laid eyes on the Bay in 1770. In March 1776, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza founded the Presidio and Mission of as-yet unnamed San Francisco. The Spanish presence at the Mission San Francisco de Asis (now Mission Dolores-completed in 1791; the oldest building in the city) and at the Presidio, three miles away, did not amount to much over the succeeding years. The Mexican revolution of 1821 led to the Secularization Act of 1833, ending the Mission Period. Mission Dolores fell into disrepair. Conversion and disease had done much to destroy the culture of the Miwoks and Ohlones; by the early 19th century, native tribes had effectively ceased to exist.
In 1792, British explorer George Vancouver, visiting San Francisco Bay, discovered a protected anchorage east of the Presidio, called Yerba Buena by the Spanish after the sweet smelling grasses growing around the base of what is now Telegraph Hill. Vancouver pitched and left a tent there, creating the nucleus of what became Yerba Buena, a small English-speaking community outside Spanish and Mexican authority. In 1846, with the Mexican- American war, the Presidio and Yerba Buena came under American control.
The Gold Rush
In 1847, Yerba Buena, with a population of about 1,000, changed its name to San Francisco. The next January, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, which created only a minor stir. It was left to newspaper publisher and merchant Sam Brannan, trying to drum up trade for his Sacramento Street hardware store, to really trigger the Gold Rush. He brandished a bottle of gold pellets in Portsmouth Square and shouted: “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” Within a year or two, Brannan was a millionaire. One hundred thousand “forty-niners” came to San Francisco from all over the world within the next year. Brannan’s announcement practically emptied San Francisco of its citizenry in 1848, and most forty-niners stayed only long enough to get picks and shovels before they were off to the hills.
Boom Years and the Barbary Coast
By 1854, the gold fields had been exhausted, and San Francisco sank into an economic depression from which it would not emerge until the early 1860s with the discovery of the Comstock silver lode in western Nevada. It was this boom, richer and longer-lived than the California Gold Rush, which began to make a real city out of San Francisco, and millionaires out of some of its citizens. Comstock “bonanza kings” like James Flood, whose home is now the elegant Pacific Union Club, built mansions on Nob Hill. Fabric merchant Levi Strauss created a clothing empire by sewing pants for miners out of his leftover tent canvas.
The wild and wooly Barbary Coast roared through the ups and downs of San Francisco. The city gained a justly deserved reputation for vice of every sort. Brothels, gambling halls, and Chinese opium dens were everywhere on the city’s eastern waterfront, and unwitting patrons were frequently “shanghaied” into service as sailors. The remnants of the Barbary Coast’s scandalous “dance” revues can be seen in the slowly declining strip joints along Broadway in North Beach.
The Chinese, who came to California first to work the gold fields and later to help build the railroad, accounted for 20 percent of San Francisco’s working population in 1875. The Chinese faced discrimination and oppressive laws, and, in the late 1870s and 1880s, mob assaults like William T. Coleman’s “Pickhandle Brigade.” Anti-Chinese demagogue Denis Kearney wielded great power during this period. The 1882 federal Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943.
The Earthquake and Fire of 1906
Early in the morning of April 18, 1906, an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter Scale ripped through San Francisco, destroying hundreds of buildings. As gas mains ruptured, a fire spread through the city, causing far greater damage than the quake itself. Only 500 or so were killed, but an estimated 100,000, left homeless, either fled in ferries and watched their city burn from the Oakland hills, or joined a tent city of 20,000 in what is now Golden Gate Park.
The city quickly rebuilt itself after the earthquake and fire, like the phoenix that rises from the ashes on the San Francisco flag. Celebrating civic triumph over adversity, San Francisco hosted the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, a glittering architectural fantasy built on 635 acres of what is now the Marina District. A great success, the Exposition’s steel-reinforced plaster buildings were bulldozed shortly after it closed, leaving only the domed pavilion of the Palace of Fine Arts (site of the Exploratorium).
Throughout the 1920s, plans were put forward for bridges to connect San Francisco with the East Bay and Marin. Finally in the early 1930s, work began on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which opened in 1936, and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937.
Beats and Hippies
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other young writers and thinkers of what was to be known as the Beat Generation established themselves in the cafes and bars of North Beach, continuing the city’s literary, bohemian tradition, albeit with a dreamy, druggy, jazz-inflected twist. Rising North Beach rents forced beatniks (a term coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen) out to the Victorians of Haight Ashbury, where their boundary-breaking prose had already inspired a new movement of long-haired young cultural mavericks.
Derisively dubbed “hippies” by the beats, who saw them as junior beat wanna-bes, the hippies took their cultural and psychic explorations to different extremes, aided by LSD, a recently synthesized hallucinogen. Bands like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane came up with the soundtrack to “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” and the 1967 Summer of Love drew over 100,000 young seekers to the Haight.
Flower Power began to manifest itself more and more stridently as political unrest, with demonstrations and even riots becoming a feature of life at San Francisco State University and, even more so, at the University of California, Berkeley. “Peace and love” began to turn into a bad trip.
The Modern Era
San Francisco’s gay community began to assert itself with greater confidence and urgency in the 1970s, electing Supervisor Harvey Milk as the nation’s only openly gay politician. Milk was killed in 1978, along with Mayor George Moscone, by former Supervisor Dan White. White’s subsequent conviction on a mere manslaughter charge prompted riots and the burning of police cars by angry gays and their supporters in front of City Hall on “White Night.” During the 1980s, the gay community reeled under the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic. Though incidences of the disease have leveled off and more effective drugs prolong the life of those afflicted with it, the Castro has drawn even more tightly together to promote awareness of the disease and to support those whose lives have been affected by it.
In 1989, just as the Bay Area was sitting down to watch the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics play each other in the third game of the World Series, it was rocked by the 7.1 Loma Prieta Earthquake. The legacy of the quake can be seen in the sometimes nightmarish San Francisco traffic, caused by irreparable damage to important sections of freeway.
Today, imperious mayor, Willie Brown, presides over a city of extremes. The magic of a thriving downtown business sector, explosive new dot-com businesses South of Market, and a real estate boom in The City’s southern corridor does not seem to be enough to dispel concern over an ever-rising homeless population and intractable problems with The City’s public transportation system, MUNI.
Public confidence in San Francisco’s economy is greater than ever, however, and for the 725,000 residents and the millions of visitors, it would be hard to dim the luster of the abundant charms of, as Herb Caen also coined, Baghdad by the Bay.
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