Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1
A Distinctly
American City
The best the city has to offer
F
EW MODERN VISITORS REALIZE IT
,
BUT SAN FRANCISCO HAS ALREADY
lived several lifetimes. The city today bears little resemblance to the place it was just
150 years ago. Back then, it was a rough-and-tumble, seaside shantytown that had
been cobbled together by refugees—mostly men—who came from the East (both
the East Coast and the Far East) to seek their quick fortunes. Much of it was liter-
ally built atop the ruins of ships that brought them there, and the city's brothels
and saloons were notorious around the world. Gradually, the city gained esteem as
the most important banking center west of the Rockies. As America's westward
population exploded, San Francisco was poised to be its unofficial capital. The
bust-to-boom trajectory took less than two generations, and it typified the wild
success America enjoyed after Manifest Destiny and during the Gilded Age.
Then the quake and fire of 1906 struck. Overnight, it was over. The palatial
mansions and hotels of the grand city, the fruit of years of accumulated wealth,
were destroyed. An entire world—the one visited by and written about by Oscar
Wilde, Mark Twain, and every other great name of the age—was lost. Also deci-
mated was the city's reputation as a safe, solid place to invest. Nervous bankers—
made even more nervous by the prospects of more insurance disasters—diversified
their West Coast investments by sinking them into Seattle and Los Angeles, and
San Francisco's stature dwindled somewhat into what it is today: a respected, sec-
ond-tier city with a spectacular setting.
But its influence didn't end there. The city rebuilt, and, within 50 years, some
of the most important social changes of the late 20th century came from there—
the Beat writers in the 1950s and the hippie movement of the 1960s both came
out of San Francisco's neighborhoods. Even as recently as the 1990s, when the
dot-com boom launched, and then shipwrecked, the world economy, the city was
an epicenter of events. That's quite a lot of influence for a city of only about
775,000.
Today's San Francisco presents a character unlike that of any other modern city
in America. It's not just that it looks different—the Painted Ladies, the hills
crowded with old wooden buildings and stately stone towers, the Bay views peek-
ing from the end of streets—but the city truly is different. What some more con-
servative Americans bemoan as the city's permissive, anything-goes attitude is
actually representative of America at its best. It's a true melting pot, with many
different types of people living in one place, all more or less getting along. Very
few cities work as hard as San Francisco to make themselves hospitable and equal
to everyone who lives there, and San Franciscans are proud of how multicultural
and inclusive their home is compared to many other places of similar size. But
there are also nuances to the city that most visitors are never made aware of; in
