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.
The City
San Francisco is a
city of hills and distinct neighborhoods. As a general rule,
geographical elevation means wealth - the higher up you are, the less
fog you endure, resulting in better views. Commercial square-footage is
surprisingly small and mostly confined to the downtown area, and the
rest of the city is made up of primarily residential neighborhoods with
street-level shopping districts, easily explored on foot. Armed with a
good map and strong legs, you could plough through much of the city in a
day, but the best way to get to know San Francisco is to dawdle
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