History

European visitors to the Bay Area were preceded 10,000 to 20,000 years earlier by Native Americans. When Europeans arrived, they found the area inhabited by the Yelamu tribe, belonging to a linguistic grouping later called the Ohlone (a Miwok Indian word meaning "western people") living in the coastal area between Point Sur and the San Francisco Bay.

European discovery and exploration of the San Francisco Bay Area began in 1542 and culminated with the mapping of the bay in 1775. A Spanish party led by Juan Bautista de Anza arrived on March 28, 1776 and established the sites for the Presidio of San Francisco and Mission San Francisco de Asis (named for Saint Francis of Assisi and now popularly known as "Mission Dolores"). The area first began to develop as a city under the name of Yerba Buena in 1822, when what is now the downtown area was first settled by William Richardson, an English whaler.

Yerba Buena remained a small town until the Mexican-American War broke out and a naval force under Commodore John D. Sloat took it in 1846 in the name of the United States. It was then renamed "San Francisco" on January 30, 1847.

Situated at the tip of a windswept peninsula without water or firewood, San Francisco lacked most of the basic facilities for a nineteenth century settlement. These natural disadvantages forced the town's residents to bring water, fuel and food to the site. The first of many environmental transformations was the city's reliance on filled marshlands for real estate. Much of the present downtown is built over the former Yerba Buena Cove, granted to the city by military governor Stephen Watts Kearny in 1847.

San Francisco in 1855.

The California gold rush starting in 1848 led to a large growth in population, including considerable immigration. Between January 1848 and December 1849, the population of San Francisco increased from 1,000 to 25,000. The Chinatown district of the city is still one of the largest in the country; the city as a whole is rougly one-third Chinese, one of the largest concentrations outside of China. Many businesses started at that time to service the growing population are still present today, notably Levi Strauss & Co. clothing, Ghirardelli chocolate, and Wells Fargo bank.

Like many mining towns, the political situation in early San Francisco was chaotic. This was exacerbated by squabbling in the United States Senate, where the Compromise of 1850 was igniting a fierce fight over slavery. Disgusted by increasing corruption and crime, a group of San Franciscans formed a Committee of Vigilance in 1851, and again in 1856. This military government exiled many citizens, executed a few, and forced several elected officials to resign. The Committee of Vigilance relinquished power both times after it decided the city had been 'cleaned up'.

Market Street, early 20th century

San Francisco County was one of the original counties of California, created in 1850 at the time of statehood. All of the county not in the city limits was split off to form San Mateo County in 1856. San Francisco became the USA's largest city west of the Mississippi River.

In autumn of 1855, a ship bearing refugees from an ongoing cholera epidemic in the far east (authorities disagree as to whether this was the S.S. Sam or the S.S. Carolina) docked in San Francisco. As the city's rapid gold-rush area population growth had significantly outstripped the development of infrastructure, including sanitation, a serious cholera epidemic quickly broke out. The responsibility for caring for the indigent sick had previously rested on the state, but faced with the San Francisco cholera epidemic, the state legislature devolved this responsibility to the counties, setting the precedent for California's system of county hospitals for the poor still in effect today. The Sisters of Mercy were contracted to run San Francisco's first county hospital at the height of the cholera epidemic, and in 1857, the order opened its own charity hospital, Mercy Hospital of San Francisco, which is still in operation today at its original location on Stanyan Street.

One of most colorful figures of late 19th century San Francisco was "Emperor" Joshua A. Norton.

In 1900, a ship from China brought with it rats infected with bubonic plague. Mistakenly believing that interred corpses contributed to the transmission of plague, and possibly also motivated by the opportunity for profitable land speculation, city leaders banned all cemeteries within the city. Burials moved to the undeveloped area just south of the city limit, now the town of Colma, California. A fifteen-block section of Chinatown was quarantined while city leaders squabbled over the proper course to take, but the outbreak was finally eradicated by 1905.

On April 18, 1906, a devastating earthquake resulted from the rupture of over 270 miles of the San Andreas Fault, from San Juan Bautista to Eureka, centered immediately offshore of San Francisco. The quake is estimated by modern scientists to have reached 8.25 on the Richter scale. Water mains ruptured throughout San Francisco, and the fires that followed burned out of control for days, destroying the vast majority of buildings in the city. The official reported death toll was 478, but most historians agree the true tally was much higher, probably over 3,000. Many residents were trapped between the water on three sides and the approaching fire, and a mass evacuation similar to that of the later Battle of Dunkirk to safety across the Bay saved thousands. With the centennial of the disaster approaching, a city supervisor sponsored a resolution to amend the death toll, noting "there is evidence to show the number was suppressed for political reasons" (namely that the city's reputation would have suffered).

In 1912, this time with no excuse other than the rising value of real estate, all remaining cemeteries in the city were evicted to south of the city limit, where in the modern-day town of Colma the dead now outnumber the living more than ten-thousand to one. Unwilling to evict the remains of San Francisco's most prominent founding citizens, however, the above-ground Columbarium of San Francisco was allowed to remain, whose 30,000 deceased residents are the only permitted within the city to this day.

Golden Gate Bridge

In 1915, the city hosted the Panama-Pacific Exposition, officially to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, but also as a showcase of the vibrant completely rebuilt city less than a decade after the Earthquake. On July 22, 1916 a bomb exploded on Market Street during a Preparedness Day parade, killing 10 and injuring 40.

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was opened in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. During World War II, San Francisco was the major mainland supply point and port of embarkation for the war in the Pacific.

The United Nations Charter was also drafted in San Francisco in 1945. The Treaty of San Francisco which established peaceful relations with Japan, was drafted and signed there six years later in 1951.

During the early 1950s, Caltrans commenced an aggressive freeway construction program in the Bay Area. However, Caltrans soon encountered strong resistance in San Francisco, for the city's high population density meant that virtually any right-of-way would displace a large number of people. Caltrans tried to minimize displacement (and its land acquisition costs) by building double-decker freeways, but the crude state of civil engineering at that time resulted in construction of some embarrassingly ugly freeways which ultimately turned out to be seismically unsafe. In 1959, the Board of Supervisors voted to halt construction of any more freeways in the city, an event known as the Freeway Revolt. Although some minor modifications have been allowed to the ends of existing freeways, the city's anti-freeway policy has remained in place ever since. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed the Embarcadero Freeway and portions of the so-called Central Freeway. Over the course of several referenda, San Francisco's residents elected not to rebuild either structure. The neighborhoods once covered by these freeways have been rebuilt, and the restoration of the Embarcadero, San Francisco's historic bay waterfront, as a public space has been especially successful.

In the 1950s San Francisco hired Harvard graduate Justin Herman to head the redevelopment agency for the city and county. Justin Herman began an aggressive campaign to renew blighted areas of the city. Enacting eminent domain whenever necessary, he set upon a plan to tear down huge areas of the city and replace them with modern construction. Critics accused Herman of racism for what was perceived as attempts to create segregation and displacement of African-Americans. Many African-Americans were forced to move from their homes near the Fillmore jazz district to newly constructed projects such as the near the naval base Hunter's Point or even to cities such as Oakland. He began levelling entire areas in San Francisco's Western Addition and Japantown neighborhoods. His planning led to the creation of Embarcadero Center, the Embarcadero Freeway, Japantown, the Geary Street superblocks, and Yerba Buena Gardens.

San Francisco has often been a magnet for America's counterculture. During the 1950s, City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach neighborhood was an important publisher of Beat Generation literature. Some of the story of the evolving arts scene of the 1950s is told in the article San Francisco Renaissance. During the latter half of the following decade, the 1960s, San Francisco was the center of hippie culture. Thousands of young people poured into the Haight-Ashbury district of the city during 1967, which was known as the Summer of Love. At this time, the "San Francisco sound" emerged as an influential force in rock music, with such acts as the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead achieving international prominence, blurring the boundaries between folk, rock and jazz traditions and further developing the lyrical content of rock.

Another peculiar development is that the Church Of Satan was founded and made its headquarters in San Francisco in 1966.

During the 1980s and 1990s San Francisco became a major focal point in the North American--and international-- punk and rave scene. On the rave scene, the city was the first to host the Love Parade outside its birthplace of Berlin, Germany in 2004.

The late 1960s also brought in a new wave of lesbians and gays who were more radical and less mainstream and who had flocked to San Francisco not only for its gay-friendly reputation, but for its reputation as a radical, left-wing epicenter. These lesbians and gays were the prime movers of Gay Liberation and often lived communally, buying (like their straight counterparts) decrepit Victorians in the Haight and fixing them up. When drugs and violence began to become a serious problem in the Haight, many lesbians and gays simply moved "over the hill", to the Castro. In the 1970s, large numbers of gay people moved to San Francisco's Castro district, which previous to their arrival, had been abandoned by Irish-Americans who moved en masse to the more affluent and culturally homogenous suburbs. Because of the rise of this new population, as well as the overall change in ethnic and cultural demographics, tensions arose in the city, and these tensions led to tragedy in 1978 when a conservative member of the Board of Supervisors and a former cop, Dan White, murdered San Francisco's first openly gay elected official, Supervisor Harvey Milk and the city's mayor George Moscone on November 27 (see "Twinkie Defense"). In the 1980s, the AIDS virus wreaked havoc on the gay community there. Today, the gay population of the city is estimated to be at about 15%, and gays remain an important force in the city's politics. San Francisco has more gays and lesbians than any other US city.

Under former Mayor, and now US senator, Diane Feinstein, San Francisco underwent "Manhattanization" when many of the large skyscrapers present in the Financial District and residential condominiums were built across the city in the late 1970s through the 1980s. This was met with widespread opposition with the city's residents who felt that the skyscrapers ruined views and destroyed San Francisco's unique character. Similar to the freeway revolt in the city decades earlier, a "skyscraper revolt" forced the city to enact height restriction limits on tall buildings. This law has become a standard in many of the world's cities today, and pushed skyscraper construction to the South of Market district where it is still ongoing.

During the 1980s, homeless people began appearing in large numbers in the city, the result of factors that were affecting the country at large, combined with San Francisco's attractive environment and generous welfare policies, economic and social changes, and the availability of addictive drugs are often cited as reasons for the growth of the problem. Mayor Art Agnos (1988-92) was the first to attack the problem, and not the last; it is a top issue for San Franciscans even today. Agnos allowed the homeless to camp in the Civic Center park, which led to its title of "Camp Agnos." The failure of this lenient policy led to his being replaced by Frank Jordan in 1992. Jordan launched the "MATRIX" program the next year, which aimed to displace the homeless through aggressive police action. And it did displace them - to the rest of the city. His successor, Willie Brown, was able to largely ignore the problem, riding on the strong economy into a second term. Present mayor Gavin Newsom's policy on the homeless is the controversial "Care Not Cash" program where he plans to end the city's generous welfare policies towards the homeless and instead wants the homeless to be put in affordable housing and attend city funded drug rehabilitation and job training programs.

On October 17, 1989, an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter magnitude scale struck on the San Andreas Fault near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz mountains, approximately 70 miles south of San Francisco, during game 3 of the 1989 World Series. The quake severely damaged many of the city's freeway's including the Embarcadero Freeway and the Central Freeway. The damage to these freeways was so extensive, that they were eventually demolished. The quake also caused extensive damage in the Marina District and the South of Market. Known in most of the United States as the "World Series Quake," but in California and by seismologists as the Loma Prieta earthquake, it caused significant destruction and loss of life throughout the greater bay area.

During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, large numbers of entrepreneurs and computer software professionals moved into the city, followed by marketing and sales professionals, and changed the social landscape as once poorer neighborhoods became gentrified. The rising rents forced many people and businesses to leave, and this caused considerable tension in the city's politics. The resulting backlash resulted in a progressive majority winning control of the Board of Supervisors in the 2000 election.

By 2001, the boom was over, and many people left San Francisco. South of Market, where many dot com companies were located, had been bustling and crowded with few vacancies, but by 2002 was a virtual wasteland of empty offices and for-rent signs. Craig Newmark founded the website Craigslist based in his San Francisco home. The success of Craigslist stands as a testament to the over-production of the dot-com era.

In November of 2002, three off-duty police officers (one the son of the assistant chief) allegedly assaulted two civilians over a bag of steak fajitas. The resulting scandal was dubbed "Fajitagate" after it was alleged that high-ranking officers within the Police Department had tried to cover up the incident. Though top officials were formally indicted, they were soon exonerated, but with considerable damage to their reputations, and having brought the city nationwide ridicule.

The 2003 mayoral election of Matt Gonzalez versus Gavin Newsom was notable in that it was between a candidate of the progressive left and a moderate liberal, conservative candidates having had a hard time in the city. The newly elected Mayor Newsom, who won by a close margin, burst onto the national political scene when, in defiance of state law, he led San Francisco to become the first city in the U.S. to issue same-sex marriage licenses in February, 2004. The California Supreme Court later invalidated these licenses. Newsom also helped enact a strong new homeless policy, "Care Not Cash," in which the checks that homeless people previously received were replaced with vouchers for housing.

San Francisco's history of innovative ordinances was seen again with the 2004 decision to ban outdoor smoking in all city-owned parks, plazas and public sports venues, amongst other outdoor areas. California's statewide smoking bans already being some of the toughest in the nation, the new policy in San Francisco represents an even stricter stance on public smoking. Other California cities have enacted similar outdoor smoking bans (though not as far-reaching), but San Francisco's new anti-smoking policy is significant considering the city's size and cultural influence on the rest of the state and the nation. While somewhat controversial, the law will go into effect on July 1, 2005.

In 2005, San Francisco hosted the United Nations annual World Enivronment Day, the first time it has been held in the US. On June 5th, the mayors of 100 cities, including the mayor of San Francisco, signed an accord that made their cities more compliant with the Kyoto Protocol.