Overview
A Short History of San Francisco, at a little over 100 pages, is indeed short. I too will be brief by listing facts that I found interesting (and that may be useful in a game of trivia). The overarching theme is that San Francisco is a beautiful, adaptable city like no other. I’ve lived here for almost three weeks and find the author’s claim to be incontestable.
Fun Facts
- Due to the Gold Rush, San Francisco achieved a population of over 50,000 people in less than a decade. It took New York City 190 years to accomplish this; Boston, 200; Philidelphia, 120
- Two years after the Gold Rush began, San Francisco ranked fourth in the nation in foreign trade
- Golden Gate Park was designed by the New York’s Central Park builder and grew on top of sand; today, it is considered one of the horticultural wonders of the world
- The construction of Golden Gate Park was essential to the city becoming the “Paris of the West”
- The windmills still standing in Golden Gate Park were for water pumping; they supplied the park with 70,000 of water per hour
- Most of San Francisco’s Victorian homes were built from the 1870s to the turn of the century
- As hand-crafted as they now appear, the homes were once criticized for uniformity
- After witnessing a gruesome street car accident caused by a horse trudging up a slippery San Francisco hill, Andrew Hallidie, a Scotsman who pioneered steel cable manufacturing, invented the city’s famous cable car rails and introduced them in 1873
- There remain only three lines in operation and they are the nation’s only mobile historical landmark
- John Muir, the famous conservationist, was a self-taught expert in botany, zoology, and geology. “He was the first to recognize that Yosemite’s precipices had been carved by glaciers.”
- More than anyone else, he opened up the eyes of America to California and its natural beauty
- Following the earthquake of 1906, a fire raged in the city for three days and two nights; over 500 people perished, and 250,000 residents were left homeless
- The earthquake destroyed the new City Hall, which took 29 years and $8 million to build; turns out, much of it was built with crates and newspapers
- Fortunately, the current city hall is considered one of the best municipal buildings in the country
- Coit Tower is named after Lillie Coit, an eccentric heiress who dressed in male drag in the 1860s and 1870s so she could visit the city’s racier nightspots
- One of her great pleasures was chasing fire wagons, and the Knickerbocker Number Five Fire Company made her an honorary member
- She died in 1929 and left behind $100,000 to build a tower in honor of her firefighting friends
- The Golden Gate Bridge’s concrete pier is “bulkier than the largest Egyptian pyramid, and more concrete was used in its construction than on the Empire State Building”
- When completed, the bridge’s foundations were the deepest on earth
Recommendation
If you would like to learn more about San Francisco in general, this is a good book to start with. I wish it didn’t feel as dated and that it focused more on the history of innovation in the area. It obviously doesn’t cover the city’s history in detail, but if you’re interested in San Francisco trivia, you should read it.
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