San Francisco: 9 Claims to Fame

More than a mile long, the Golden Gate Bridge held the title of the world’s longest bridge from 1937, the year it was completed, until 1964. Although it has been surpassed in length, it’s hard to imagine that there will ever be a more photogenic bridge. On a clear day it seems to float between the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the water, and it looks graceful and mysterious enrobed in a layer of San Francisco’s trademark fog.

The bridge needed to be painted to prevent corrosion from the salt and mist of San Francisco Bay, but the designers happened upon the orange shade partly by chance. A number of different color schemes had been proposed. The navy and the Army Air Corps both proposed high contrast stripes (black and yellow for the navy, red and white for the Air Corps) to maximize visibility in all weather conditions. Others expected the bridge to be a shade of battleship gray, as most large steel bridges were. When the steel for the bridge arrived at the construction site, though, it was coated in a red lead primer. Irving Morrow, one of the consulting architects, was inspired and carried out color studies that ultimately led to the selection of the vermillion orange shade known as international orange.

California’s reputation as a natural paradise is well deserved, but one of the drawbacks of living there is that the area is prone to earthquakes. The worst earthquake, measured at a devastating magnitude of 7.9, struck the San Francisco area on the morning of April 18, 1906. The quake destroyed about 28,000 buildings and started fires that raged for four days. An estimated 3,000 people died in the quake, making it the United States’ second deadliest natural disaster after the Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900. Many of the ruined buildings were replaced with new structures that were designed to be earthquake and fire resistant.

In the last half of the 20th century, San Francisco was at the center of two important countercultural movements. The literary and social current known as the Beat movement, which expressed, broadly, a sense of alienation from middle-class American society, had its origins in New York City and in San Francisco’s North Beach. The City Lights Bookstore, owned by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was a gathering place for Beat poets and published some of the most important works associated with the movement, such as Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956).

The Beat movement lost steam in the 1960s and was replaced by a new subculture, the hippies. Hippies shared the Beat’s alienation from mainstream American life (in fact, “hippie” derives from “hip,” the adjective the general public applied to all things Beat). Hippies could be identified by their unconventional, often extravagant clothing and hairstyles. Most hippies opposed the Vietnam War and violence, in general, and advocated recreational drug use and openness in sexual relationships.

Folk and rock music were central to the hippie experience. The Monterey Pop Festival, a three-day festival held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds near San Francisco in June 1967, launched the careers of numerous musical acts associated with the hippie movement—such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin—and kicked off the so-called “Summer of Love,” a mass gathering of about 100,000 hippies centered on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

If the Golden Gate Bridge inspires awe and wonder, there’s another site in San Francisco Bay that inspires something more like wonder and dread. The former maximum security prison built on Alcatraz Island was notorious for being nearly impossible to escape and for housing some of the country’s most dangerous criminals. (Among others, the gangster Al Capone ended up there.)

Over its 30 years of operation as a civilian prison (1936–66) a few prisoners did manage to get themselves past the walls of the prison. It is not known, however, if any of the escapees managed to survive crossing the treacherous waters of the San Francisco Bay.

The first wave of migration to San Francisco was driven by the California Gold Rush, but modern San Francisco is booming for another reason: the tech industry. Encouraged by the presence of prestigious Stanford University, high-tech enterprises began to concentrate in the area after World War II.

The southern part of the San Francisco area is nicknamed Silicon Valley for its critical role in the development of technologies such as the computer and the Internet. The area continues to have one of the highest concentrations of high-tech workers in the world.

The cable car, a type of streetcar pulled by a steam-powered loop of moving cable, was invented in San Francisco by Andrew Hallidie. The first cable cars went into operation on Sacramento and Clay streets in 1873. The system was well suited for San Francisco’s steep hills, which had often posed problems for horse-drawn street cars.

Over the next century cable cars were slowly replaced by systems that used more efficient means of propulsion, such as electricity. But a portion of San Francisco’s transit system is still pulled by cables. In 1964 San Francisco’s cable cars were the first moving objects to be designated as National Historic Landmarks by the National Park Service.

Every great American city needs an iconic food item, and San Francisco’s is sourdough bread. Techniques for baking sourdough bread were brought to the area by Europeans in the mid-19th century. Bakers in San Francisco used to claim that the unique sourness of San Francisco sourdough came from the climate and that the bread couldn’t be reproduced outside of the San Francisco area. This difficult-to-prove claim has fallen by the wayside in recent years, but the city’s special relationship with sourdough bread is indisputable. One species of lactic acid bacteria found in sourdough bread is even named after San Francisco: lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.

The psychological thriller Vertigo (1958), about a doomed love affair, is commonly called one of the best films made by Alfred Hitchcock and one of the best films made by any filmmaker, period. San Francisco plays an important role; the knotty, disorienting tale is even more startling because it unfolds before a backdrop of dreamy San Francisco vistas. One tragic scene (no spoilers!) takes place at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Today, visitors to San Francisco can relive the film by taking tours of the sites where it was filmed.

Since the 19th century, San Francisco has been known as a city of relative tolerance and sexual permissiveness, and in the 20th and 21st centuries it has been at the forefront of the gay rights movement. In the Gold Rush days, the city was predominately male, and same-sex relations were carried on more openly than elsewhere. This led to its being branded—in less tolerant parts of the country—as a “Sodom by the sea.” The gay community expanded dramatically during World War II when hundreds of thousands of sailors traveled through the city going to and from tours in the Pacific, and large numbers of female industrial workers were brought in to build and maintain equipment. Sailors who were dishonorably discharged for homosexual activity were often released in San Francisco; many chose to stay. Even in the relative open-mindedness of San Francisco, LGBT people still faced persecution. Gay and lesbian establishments throughout the city were subject to surveillance, harassment, and raids by police. This harassment and discrimination mobilized resistance and ultimately brought greater visibility to the struggle for gay rights. The Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian group, was founded in the city in 1955, and the Mattachine Society, a group for men, originally founded in Los Angeles, quickly developed a presence in San Francisco. In 1962 the Tavern Guild, an association of gay bars, was formed in response to police harassment. In the mid-1960s these efforts began to pay off. After an unprovoked raid on a New Year’s Eve ball in 1964 raised sympathy for the gay community and support for reform, the San Francisco police were forced to appoint a special liaison to rein in abuse and discrimination.

In 1977 Harvey Milk, a San Francisco camera shop owner, was elected to the Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay elected official. Milk’s murder in 1978 by a former city council member was a tragic setback, but a silent march from the Castro district to city hall in Milk’s honor demonstrated the strength of the gay community’s resolve. The White Night riots broke out in 1979 when Milk’s killer received a light sentence.