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USA, California San Francisco Paradox by the Bay
San Francisco, city and port, coextensive with San Francisco county, northern California, U.S., located on a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. It is a cultural and financial centre of the western United States and one of the country’s most cosmopolitan cities. Area 46 square miles (120 square km). Pop. (2010) 805,235; San Francisco–San Mateo–Redwood City Metro Division, 1,776,095; San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont Metro Area, 4,335,391; (2020) 873,965; San Francisco–San Mateo–Redwood City Metro Division, 1,638,407; San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley Metro Area, 4,749,008.
San Francisco holds a secure place in the United States’ romantic dream of itself—a cool, elegant, handsome, worldly seaport whose steep streets offer breathtaking views of one of the world’s greatest bays. According to the dream, San Franciscans are sophisticates whose lives hold full measures of such civilized pleasures as music, art, and good food. Their children are to be pitied, for, as the wife of publishing magnate Nelson Doubleday once said, “They will probably grow up thinking all cities are so wonderful.” To San Franciscans their city is a magical place, almost an island, saved by its location and history from the sprawl and monotony that afflicts so much of urban California.
East Asian, Filipino, Samoan, Vietnamese, Latin American, or Native American. Their dreams increasingly demand a realization that has little to do with the romantic dream of San Francisco. But both the dreams and the realities are important, for they are interwoven in the fabric of the city that might be called Paradox-by-the-Bay.
San Francisco Downtown
Hilly and roughly square, San Francisco occupies the northern tip of a peninsula. To its south are the bedroom suburbs of San Mateo county, to the east and northeast is the bay, and to the west and northwest lies the Pacific Ocean.
The most prominent of San Francisco’s hills are Twin Peaks, Mount Davidson, and Mount Sutro, all of which exceed 900 feet (270 metres) in elevation. The best known are Nob Hill, where the wealthy “nobs” (nabobs) built extravagant mansions in the 1870s, and Telegraph Hill, which once looked down on the Barbary Coast, a neighbourhood formerly alive with gaudy wickedness. As a result of the pioneer planners’ prejudice in favour of a squared-off grid, the downtown streets march intrepidly up precipitous slopes, terrifying newly arrived drivers, making the cable cars more than sentimental anachronisms, and providing splendid views of the bay.
Within the portion of San Francisco Bay lying inside the city limits are the natural islands of Alcatraz and Yerba Buena and man-made Treasure Island, created for a world’s fair in 1939 and later turned into a naval base (1941–93). Alcatraz (Spanish: “Pelican”) was from 1934 to 1963 the most notorious maximum-security, “escape-proof” prison in the United States. In 1969, after the decaying cell blocks had been given up by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a multi-tribal group of Native Americans invaded the island and asserted their rights to abandoned federal property, but they were forcibly evicted in 1971. The island became part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1972 and has become a popular tourist attraction.
Golden Gate bridge
“Painted ladies,” Victorian homes with richly coloured architectural detailing, San Francisco.
The central business district, the financial district, North Beach, and Chinatown occupy the site of the gold-rush city, which subsequently was expanded by progressive fillings along the waterfront. The remnants of many ships that were deserted in 1849 now lie under office buildings several blocks inland. To the west, at the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, lies the Presidio, a two-century-old military installation that became part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1994; it is remarkable for its parklike lawns and wind-sculptured stands of trees. South of the Presidio is Golden Gate Park, reclaimed from a onetime sandy desert. The rest of San Francisco is largely composed of residential neighbourhoods, from Pacific Heights, in which the old, wealthy families reside, to Hunters Point, which is predominantly an African American community. Most are filled with flower-decked houses of pastel stucco and “painted ladies”—frame structures with abundant and often elegant architectural detailing, intricately coloured.
Chinatown
Chinatown
The pattern of immigration into San Francisco during the latter half of the 19th century was significantly different from that of anywhere else in the United States. The waves of newcomers included not only native-born Americans moving west but also Europeans arriving directly by ship who had not previously lived for a time along the Eastern Seaboard. The demography of the gold-rush city was summed up concisely by a real-estate firm that advertised it could “transact business in the English, French, German, Spanish and Italian languages.” San Francisco remains one of the most Mediterranean of American cities—New Orleans is another—and Italians are still the dominant European minority, followed by Germans, Irish, and British.
Jewish immigrants from Europe arrived in the city even before the gold seekers of 1849, and much credit for San Francisco’s culture must be given to them. They founded libraries, symphonies, and theatres and gave the city its first aura of sophistication.
Piano player
Before World War II about 20,000 African Americans lived in the entire Bay Area, about 4,000 of them in San Francisco. The tremendous increase in the black population during the next 30 years was set in motion by the war, which brought at least a half million war workers to the Bay Area’s shipyards and other industries. Among them were tens of thousands from the South, who settled mainly in San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond. In San Francisco they moved into the old Carpenter Gothic houses in the blocks around Fillmore Street, vacated when the Japanese who had lived there were driven into wartime internment camps. By the 1980s, the character of the district shifted again, as the renovation of these houses and the high cost of property caused rents to skyrocket. Poorer African American residents were forced out of their neighbourhoods and into slum housing in the city’s already crowded southeastern sector.
An increasing number of African Americans have become prominent in the city’s life—Willie Brown was elected mayor in 1995 and reelected in 1999—and many others also have won elective office.
Chinatown, which is the best-known Chinese community in the United States, is also probably the least understood minority community in the city. The colourful shops and restaurants of Grant Avenue mask a slum of crowded tenements and sweatshops that has the highest population density in an already densely populated city. Many Chinese residents have increasingly moved into North Beach, hitherto predominantly Italian, onto the nearby slopes of Russian Hill, or into the middle-class neighbourhoods of the Richmond district north of Golden Gate Park, where some of the city’s most popular Chinese restaurants and bakeries are found on Clement Street. Many of those who reside in Chinatown are more recent immigrants, particularly from Hong Kong.
Never as large as Chinatown, the Japanese community of San Francisco was wiped out at a single stroke by the infamous Executive Order 9066 of 1942, which sent them, foreign-born and citizen alike, into “relocation centres.” The present centre of the Japanese community is Japantown (Nihonmachi), a few blocks east of Fillmore Street, now an ambitious commercial and cultural centre. Though the rising generation of Japanese Americans go to Japantown as visitors, bound for church services, social or cultural events (such as the annual cherry blossom festival), or to buy imported goods, their own roots are elsewhere.
''City Lights'' Bookshop
The Hispanic population is the second largest ethnic minority in the city (the Chinese community being the first). Before World War II the Mission District, named for the Mission Dolores, was principally working class and Irish. The Irish were largely replaced by Spanish-speaking Latin American immigrants, mainly from Central America and Mexico, although the neighbourhood saw another influx of white residents through gentrification in the first decades of the 21st century.
The Filipino community has grown remarkably since World War II and has spread to all areas of the city, especially the South of Market area. Though not as numerous as in southern California, the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian communities have grown considerably since the 1980s, which resulted in conflicts with blacks and Hispanics over low-income housing and a proliferation of ethnic restaurants in the troubled Tenderloin area between the Civic Center and Union Square.
Cable car
San Franciscans have historically considered their city to be laissez-faire and open-minded, which is probably why homosexuals have felt comfortable there. The affluent Castro district (technically Eureka Valley near Twin Peaks) has attracted gays and lesbians from throughout the country, becoming perhaps the most famous gay neighbourhood in the world. Its streets are adorned with elegantly restored Victorian homes and landmarks highlighting significant dates in the struggle for gay rights. It is said that no local politician can win an election without the gay community’s vote.
(text ftom Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Cable car driver
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