SAN FRANCISCO proper occupies just 48 hilly square miles at the end of a slender peninsula, almost perfectly centered along the California coast. Arguably the most beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in the United States, remains true to himself: a funky, individualistic, surprisingly small city of cultured proud to be partners of their cousins in LA – the last bastion of civilization in the American suburbs crazy.
It’s a compact and approachable place, where the streets of downtown rising on impossible gradients to reveal stunning views of the city, bay and its surroundings, and the fog suddenly rolled in a fog enveloped the city. This is not the California of mono-tonous blue sky and lazy warm – the temperature rarely exceeds the seventies, and even during summer can drop much lower.
The natives of this area, Ohlone Indians, all but eliminated in recent years in the year 1776 the founding of the Mission Dolores, the sixth in a chain of Spanish Catholic missions that ran throughout California. Two years after the Americans replaced the Mexicans in the year 1846, the discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra accelerate skylark Gold Rush. Within one year fifty thousand pioneers had traveled west, and east of China, turning San Francisco from a muddy village and the desert hills to the center of a growing supply and transit town. At the transcontinental railroad 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 silver far more reliable Comstock Load – worked hard to improve, build wide streets, parks, a cable car system and elaborate Victorian redwood mansion.
In the midst of a golden age, however, earthquake, followed by three days of fire, wiped out most of the city in 1906. Rebuilding began immediately, so that in a city more beautiful than before; in subsequent decades, writers like Dashiell Hammett and Jack London lived and worked here. Many of London, including Coit Tower and the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, built in the 1920s and 1930s. By World War II in San Francisco has been beaten by Los Angeles as a major west coast city, but the pursuit of excellence with the emergence of a new culture in the Fifties Beats 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, attract waves of migrants from all over the United States. It is estimated that more than half the urban population is from somewhere else. This is a city in a constant state of evolution, fast gentrifying itself into one of the most high-end cities in the world – thanks, in part, to a disposable incomes pumped into the coffers of big singles and gay contingents. Gay capital of the world, San Francisco also became the place of the dot.com revolution rose and fell. The wealth generated at one time made housing prices skyrocket – often at the expense of middle and lower classes – but the closure of hundreds of start-up IT companies has brought real estate prices go back to (almost) reasonable levels. Despite the current economic city ebb and flow, your impression of the city likely will not be changed – it remains one of the most proudly distinct places to be found anywhere.
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