🌉 A History of San Francisco

San Francisco is largely built on sand, landfill, rock and steep hills, on the edge of a fault everybody knows will move again. It is nevertheless one of the most expensive places in the world. That contradiction runs through the whole story: every time something levelled it, it built itself back, and faster than was sensible.

The Bay Nobody Noticed for Two Hundred Years

Around the bay lived the Ohlone — not one tribe but dozens of small groups speaking at least eight different languages. They lived on acorns, fish and shellfish; the mounds of empty shells they left behind stood as high as a house.

Spanish ships had been sailing past the Californian coast since the sixteenth century and simply missed the Golden Gate. The strait is narrow, usually in fog, and from the sea it looks like a continuation of the coastline. The bay, which could have held an entire fleet, was found only in 1769 by an expedition travelling overland that came upon it from above.

In 1776, a few days before the Declaration of Independence was signed at the other end of the continent, the Spanish founded a fort and the mission of St Francis here. The little mission church still stands and is the oldest building in the city.

After Mexican independence there was a sleepy settlement here called Yerba Buena — about five hundred inhabitants. In 1846 the Americans took it and a year later renamed it San Francisco. It was an utterly insignificant change.

The Year the Population Went Up Tenfold

In January 1848 a carpenter at a sawmill in the Sierra foothills found a few grains of gold. They tried to keep it quiet; it did not work.

In 1848 San Francisco had about eight hundred inhabitants. By the end of 1849 it had twenty-five thousand, and by 1870 some hundred and fifty thousand. It was the largest voluntary migration in American history and people came from every direction: from the east coast around Cape Horn, from China, from Chile, from Australia, from Ireland.

A problem appeared in the bay that nobody had expected. The crews of the ships that brought the prospectors ran off to the hills as well. Over six hundred abandoned sailing ships were left in the harbour. Some were converted into hotels, warehouses and one jail; then earth was simply tipped in around them and the city expanded over the top. When foundations for a tower are dug downtown today, a ship is occasionally hit.

Few people got rich from the gold. The ones who got rich were the ones selling the prospectors something. One of them, a Bavarian dry goods merchant, patented in 1873 a pair of trousers whose pockets did not tear out, because he reinforced them with rivets. Those trousers are still being made.

Hills, a Cable and the Cable Car

The city stands on hills that are in places steeper than thirty per cent. In the nineteenth century that meant horses fell on the wet cobbles and the carts dragged them back down.

In 1873 an engineer found the answer: a steel cable runs continuously in a loop under the street, and the car grips it and releases it with a clamp. A cable car is not a funicular and has no engine of its own. The driver has no throttle; he has a lever that holds the cable. At their height the lines ran for over sixty kilometres. Three remain, and it is the only system of its kind still running anywhere in the world — a protected monument that moves under its own power.

The Eighteenth of April 1906, a Quarter Past Five in the Morning

The earthquake was around 7.9 and lasted under a minute. In that minute the water mains cracked across the whole city.

That was worse than the shaking. Over fifty fires broke out, the fire service had no water, and it burned for three days. To stop the fire, soldiers began dynamiting whole blocks — except that they had no training for it, they used black powder, and they started further fires with it. About eighty per cent of the city burned. Over three thousand people died and a quarter of a million were left without a roof — out of four hundred thousand inhabitants.

The city decided not to admit it. The official figures gave only a few hundred dead for a long time, so as not to frighten investors, and rebuilding began at once. By 1915 San Francisco stood again to such an extent that it held a world's fair purely to show it was alive. One building from it survives and still stands — a rotunda that looks like a Roman ruin and never was one.

The Bridge the Painters Never Leave Alone

The Golden Gate Bridge was built between 1933 and 1937. The strait is deep, the current strong and the fog thick; most experts said it could not be done.

The colour of the bridge is a mistake everybody came to like. The steel arrived painted in an orange anti-corrosion primer. The navy wanted the bridge striped black and yellow for visibility. The architect looked at that primer against the hills and decided that colour was the ideal one. It is called international orange and it is applied continuously — the coat is not repaired every so often but worked on all year round.

During construction a safety net was strung under a bridge for the first time. It caught nineteen men, who then founded a club of their own with a name that translates as the Halfway to Hell Club.

Across the water is Alcatraz, a federal prison from 1934 to 1963. Officially nobody escaped from it. In 1962 three prisoners dug out the ventilation openings with spoons from the canteen, left heads made of paper pulp and hair from the barber's in their cells, and set off on a raft of raincoats. They were never found. The FBI closed the case as a drowning; the marshals still carry it as open.

Beats, the Summer of Love and Harvey Milk

In the fifties the Beats settled in the northern part of the city. In 1956 the City Lights bookshop published the poem Howl and the owner was charged with distributing obscenity. The court ruled that the book had social value, and that judgment then served American publishers as a shield for twenty years.

In 1967 over a hundred thousand young people converged on the Haight-Ashbury district for what is called the Summer of Love. It lasted one season; by autumn there were crowds of tourists, drugs and nowhere to live, and the locals held a procession with a coffin and a sign saying the hippie was dead.

In 1977 Harvey Milk was elected to the city council, one of the first openly gay politicians in the United States. A year later a former councillor shot him along with the mayor. When the court gave the killer only seven years, one of the harshest street confrontations in the city's history broke out.

The Earthquake That Demolished a Freeway

In 1989 another earthquake came, this time during the baseball world series — which meant it was broadcast live for the first time in history. A section of the bay bridge and an overpass in Oakland collapsed.

The elevated freeway that ran along the waterfront and cut the city off from the water was damaged too. Instead of repairing it, they had it pulled down. Today the waterfront is a promenade, and it is one of the few large American freeways anybody has demolished voluntarily.

From the nineties came the technology wave and with it the rents that get complained about in every second conversation in the city. The tallest building in the city is from 2018 and is named after a software company.

San Francisco in Numbers and in Fog

About eight hundred thousand people live in the city, and nearly eight million in the whole bay area. Chinatown is the oldest in North America and was founded by prospectors in 1848.

The steepest streets have gradients of over thirty per cent. Lombard Street, the one with the hairpins, is famous as the crookedest street in the world; in fact Vermont Street a little further off is crookeder, only it has no view and nobody drives there.

And then there is the fog. It forms when the cold ocean current meets hot air from inland, rolls in through the Golden Gate, and there is more of it in July than in January. It has its own name — Karl — and a social media account on which it complains about tourists in shorts.

The line about the coldest winter the writer ever spent being a summer in San Francisco is attributed to Mark Twain. Twain never wrote it. But it is true, which in the end matters more.