History

When the Civic Center BART station was under construction in 1970, workers discovered the thigh bone of a young woman, dating to about 3000 BC. This bone is the earliest evidence of human life to be uncovered in San Francisco, although the shell mounds left behind by people who subsisted on mussels and other seafood indicate the area was populated long before that. By 1000 BC the last native group to reside here, the Ohlone people, had constructed temporary villages in the marshlands near the bay shore and along inland creeks. They maintained this way of life until California fell under Spanish rule.

Remarkably, the first European visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area missed the massive inlet altogether. In 1579, Sir Francis Drake landed at Point Reyes, about 60km (35mi) north of San Francisco, claiming it for Queen Elizabeth and then sailing south straight past the Golden Gate. Not long after, Spanish explorers renamed the Point Reyes bay (now known as Drakes Bay) La Bahia de San Francisco, but then proceeded to wreck their ship on Point Reyes and had to crawl south to the safety of Acapulco in a vessel lashed together from the wreckage. They too failed to notice the San Francisco Bay. Its European discovery had to wait nearly another 200 years.

In 1775, Juan Manuel de Ayala became the first European to enter the Golden Gate. He was followed in 1776 by Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, who built a presidio (fort) above the Golden Gate and the Mission Dolores in the heart of today's Mission district. A tiny village known as Yerba Buena sprang up between the two and became the birthplace of modern San Francisco. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco in 1847, just before a momentous discovery was made in the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east: there was gold in them thar hills. The news was soon out, and prospectors began to flood in; over 100,000 hardy '49ers (named after the year they made their voyage) endured the long overland trek or the dangerous sea voyage to San Francisco, and the city's population exploded from 500 to 25,000 within a year. In 1850, California became the 31st state in the union and by 1854 the booming Gold Rush town already had more than 500 saloons and 20 theatres to entertain the hard-spending miners. From the days of the Gold Rush, San Francisco was always a freewheeling, hell-raising city - so much so that during the latter half of the 1800s, it became known as the Barbary Coast for its debauched resemblance to the pirate-plagued coast of North Africa.

The initial Gold Rush fever had subsided by 1859, when a second rush took place, this time for the even richer wealth of the silver Comstock Lode near Reno, Nevada. The late 1870s saw the boom years of the gold and silver rushes dry up; nevertheless, the city grew steadily, and at the turn of the century the population was approaching 350,000. The Spanish-American War in 1898 and the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon in 1896 underlined the city's importance as a port, while the opening of numerous banks established its continuing importance as a financial centre.

There had been major earthquakes in San Francisco in 1812 and 1865, but the Big One of 18 April 1906 is estimated to have come in at around 8.3 on the Richter Scale (which had not, at that time, been invented), a magnitude still unmatched in California history. It was not the quake itself that was to devastate San Francisco. The real damage came from the fires - lit by toppling chimneys and fed by fractured gas mains - that swept across the city. By the time the conflagration had burned itself out, half the city was in ruins. A decade of frantic rebuilding followed the quake, and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition saw the city bigger and brighter than ever.

San Francisco suffered through the Great Depression, despite enormous public works projects. Two of the most prominent, the Bay Bridge of 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge of 1937, are still magnificent symbols of the area. During WWII, the Bay Area became a major launching pad for military operations in the Pacific, with gigantic shipyards springing up around the bay.

It was in the mid-1950s that national attention was first focused on the city as the birthplace of a scene of its own. When Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, upstart students at Columbia University, and Gregory Corso, 17 years old and fresh out of jail, fled the indifference of New York City and joined forces with a San Francisco poets' movement begun by poet and literary critic Kenneth Rexroth, the Beat Generation was given a voice. Kerouac became their premier author, Ginsberg their poet, and cool jazz the sound of North Beach, hub of the new Bohemia.

Hippies followed in the 1960s, and the Haight-Ashbury bloomed as the new hotspot. Local bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane set the tune for the movement, and when 20,000 people congregated in Golden Gate Park for a free concert in 1967, the 'Summer of Love' was born. While hippies in the Haight dropped acid and wore flowers in their hair, Berkeley revolutionaries were leading worldwide student upheavals, slugging it out with the cops and the university administration over civil rights. Neighbouring Oakland was the scene for yet more revolution, as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale headed the Black Panthers, the most militant group of the black power movement.

A homosexual revolution followed in the 1970s, as San Francisco's gays stepped decisively out of the closet and slammed the door shut behind them. The 1977 election of gay activist Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors brought recognition of the gay rights movement to a new peak, but the euphoria was to be short lived. The following year, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, an avowedly anti-gay former police officer and supervisor. Their deaths and the emergence of the first cases of AIDS - at the time thought of as a 'gay cancer' - marked the beginning of the end of the heyday. The rainbow banners and lavender triangles are as common today as they were 20 years ago, but the extravagance of the 1970s now resurfaces mainly at the Castro and Folsom St Fairs and the annual Gay & Lesbian Freedom Day parade.

San Francisco's second 'Big One', the Loma Prieta earthquake, came in 1989, and measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. Sixty-seven people died in all, but the damage would have been far worse were it not for a baseball game. That year, baseball's World Series was a local affair between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's. When the quake struck, the game was about to begin at San Francisco's Candlestick Park and a large chunk of the Bay Area population was at home watching it on TV, not out on the freeways stuck in rush-hour traffic.

In the 1990s the Bay Area experienced another period of urban renewal with a building boom that spruced up neighbourhoods and historic buildings across the region, making it an increasingly expensive place to live. The New Media boom - launched in Silicon Valley but at its artistic cutting edge in San Francisco - lured technologically savvy entrepreneurs to the 'Citee by the Bay'. But the dot-com boom was destined to go bust, and shortly after the turn of the millennium the industry indeed took an awkward swan dive - although not before billions of dollars had changed hands. San Francisco's history has always been one of vital cultural waves and cold-hearted economic surges, booms and recessions, and the first decade of the new century is no different - the waves of change just keep on rolling in.

back to top