SAN FRANCISCO proper occupies
just 48 hilly square miles at the
tip of a slender peninsula, almost
perfectly centered along the
California coast. Arguably the most
beautiful, certainly the most
liberal city in the US, it remains
true to itself: a funky,
individualistic, surprisingly small
city whose people pride themselves
on being the cultured counterparts
to their cousins in LA - the last
bastion of civilization on the
lunatic fringe of America. It's a
compact and approachable place,
where downtown streets rise on
impossible gradients to reveal
stunning views of the city, the bay
and beyond, and blanket fogs roll in
unexpectedly to envelop the city in
mist. This is not the California of
mono-tonous blue skies and slothful
warmth - the temperatures rarely
exceed the seventies, and even
during summer can drop much lower.
The original inhabitants of this
area, the Ohlone Indians ,
were all but wiped out within a few
years of the establishment in 1776
of the Mission Dolores , the
sixth in the chain of Spanish
Catholic missions that ran the
length of California. Two years
after the Americans replaced the
Mexicans in 1846, the discovery of
gold in the Sierra foothills
precipitated the rip-roaring Gold
Rush . Within a year fifty
thousand pioneers had traveled west,
and east from China, turning San
Francisco from a muddy village and
wasteland of sand dunes into a
thriving supply center and transit
town. By the time the transcontinental
railroad was completed in 1869,
San Francisco was a lawless, rowdy
boomtown of bordellos and drinking
dens, something the moneyed elite -
who hit it big on the much more
dependable silver Comstock Load -
worked hard to mend, constructing
wide boulevards, parks, a cable car
system and elaborate Victorian
redwood mansions.
In the midst of the city's golden
age, however, a massive earthquake
, followed by three days of fire,
wiped out most of the town in 1906.
Rebuilding began immediately,
resulting in a city more magnificent
than before; in the decades that
followed, writers like Dashiell
Hammett and Jack London lived and
worked here. Many of the city's
landmarks, including Coit Tower and
both the Golden Gate and Bay
bridges, were built in the 1920s and
1930s. By World War II San Francisco
had been eclipsed by Los Angeles as
the main west coast city, but it
achieved a new cultural eminence
with the emergence of the Beats in
the Fifties and the hippies in the
Sixties, when the fusion of music,
protest, rebellion and, of course,
drugs that characterized 1967's
"Summer of Love" took over
the Haight-Ashbury district.
In a conservative America, San
Francisco's reputation as a liberal
oasis continues to grow, attracting
waves of resettlers from all over
the US. It is estimated that over
half the city's population
originates from somewhere else. It
is a city in a constant state of
evolution, fast gentrifying itself
into one of the most high-end towns
on earth - thanks, in part, to the
disposable incomes pumped into its
coffers from its sizeable singles
and gay contingents. Gay capital of
the world, San Francisco has also
been the scene of the dot.com
revolution's rise and fall. The
resultant wealth at one time made
housing prices skyrocket - often at
the expense of the city's middle and
lower classes - but the closure of
hundreds of start-up IT companies
has brought real-estate prices back
down to (almost) reasonable levels.
Despite the city's current economic
ebbs and flows, your impression of
the city likely won't be altered -
it remains one of the most proudly
distinct places to be found anywhere.
