San Francisco (USA, California)
San Francisco
San Francisco (shortened Frisco) – is a city and a county in the State of California, USA, named after a Catholic saint (Spanish San) Francis of Assisi. The population in 2008 was 808,000 people; it is the fourth biggest city of California in terms of population and twelfth biggest city of the USA in terms of population density. San Francisco is situated on the northern end of the Peninsula of San Francisco. For the most part of its history, it has been the most populated and important city of the area of the San Francisco Bay.
In 1776, the Spaniards settled on the coast of the peninsula, built a fort near the Golden Gate Strait and founded a mission named after Saint Francis. The beginning of the Gold Rush in 1848 was marked with a period of booming development of San Francisco. After a ruinous earthquake and a fire in 1906 this city was rapidly and almost completely rebuilt.
San Francisco is a world tourist center, known for its cold summer fogs, steep hills and a combination of Victorian and Modern architecture. Among the popular sights of the city are the Golden Gate Bridge, the Island of Alcatras, a system of cable railways, the Coit Tower and Chinatown.
Unique geographic location affected San Francisco’s history a great deal, which made it an important center of sea trade and a convenient defensive fortification. Since corporations began to develop in the United States, the city rapidly became one of the main centers of economic development and cultural variety.
Approximately from 10,000 to 20,000 years before the arrival of Europeans, San Francisco Peninsula was inhabited by Native Americans. When Europeans arrived here they found a tribe of Ohlone (Western People in Indian), who had lived on this territory from 8,000 B. C. until the beginning of the XIX century. Their camp was on the coast of Big Sur.
A Spanish exploration party headed by Gaspar de Portula arrived on November 2, 1769; it was the first documented visit to the Bay of San Francisco; the entire coastal territory was announced to be a part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Seven years later, the mission of San Francisco de Asis was founded (also known as Mission Dolores), which was under the protection of a small military fort, where now Presidio Park is situated. The Russian Hill district, which is located in downtown San Francisco, appeared during the Gold Rush when the settlers found a small tomb on top of a hill. Even though the bodies were not identified, inscriptions in Cyrillic on the tombs gave the ground to think that those were tombs of Russian merchants and sailors who lived in Fort Ross.
After Mexico proclaimed independence from Spain in 1821, San Francisco as well as the entire California became Mexico’s territory. In 1835, an Englishman William Richardson built the first European homestead in not far away from the mission, around what is today Portsmouth Square. Together with the ruler of the Colony, Francisco de Haro, he made the first street plan of the city and changed the Mission of Francis de Assisi’s name to Yerba Buena (literally, Good Grass). In 1838, he filed a petition about purchasing a big piece of land in Marin County; in 1841 Richardson received it and built Sausalito ranch there. Richardson Bay bears his name.
On July 7, 1846, during the Mexican-American war, US Navy Commodore John D. Sloat declared the right of the United States over California; two days later he and Captain John B. Montgomery arrived in Yerba Buena. In July of 1846, the population in Yerba Buena was doubled when 248 Mormons migrated from the Eastern coast to settle here. They arrived on the ship “Brooklyn” under the command of Sam Brannan. One year later Yerba Buena changed its name to San Francisco. The city and the entire California became officially American according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican- American War. As a settlement of XIX century San Francisco had one big flaw: the city was situated at the very tip of the peninsula, so it was short of drinking water and timber. This natural problem caused the residents to bring in drinking water, firewood and food to the site. The first among a great number of actions aimed at changing the environment in San Francisco was drying up of swamps to enlarge the territory for construction. Today’s center of the city is built over the old cove of Yerba Buena which was dried at the direction of governor Steven Watts Kearney in 1847.
California Gold Rush, which began in 1848, increased the number of the population of the city a great deal. Starting from January of 1848 until December of 1849, the population of San Francisco enlarged from one thousand to twenty thousand people. Booming increase continued for fifty years; new Comstock deposits of silver in Nevada invoked another influx of immigrants. The city’s development plan was not ready for such a sudden increase of residents, which caused the city to experience big problems with transportation in its narrow streets, which are not fully overcome to this day. San Francisco became the biggest city west of the Mississippi river; since 1920, Los Angeles has been the biggest one.
During the years of the Gold Rush many Chinese workers came to the city to work in the gold mines and in the future – to labor on the Transcontinental Railroad. Chinatown was and still is one of the biggest ones in the country. One fifth of San Francisco’s dwellers are Chinese; it is one of the biggest Chinese expat communities in the world. The Gold Rush promised a good gain to many; that is why rich and famous bankers, architects, tycoons, and mine owners such as Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington, and Leland Stanford started to move to the city. They began to quickly build up Nob Hill district with their mansions; now many of these constructions became famous Hotels in San Francisco (Mark Hopkins Hotel and the Huntington Hotel). Many dwellers of the city demanded the authorities provide more jobs, so during the “Big Migration” many new companies emerged which afterwards became widely known – a clothes company – Levi Strauss & Co, a chocolate making company – Ghirardelli and Wells Fargo bank.
As in many mining cities, the social climate in San Francisco was unstable. This situation caused a great reaction in the US Senate, and a series of laws, known as “Compromise 1850”, ignited contentions over the problem of cruel labor conditions. In 1851 and then in 1856, Committees of Vigilance were formed which fought crime and corruption in the government circles and violence against immigrants, but this committee may have crated more lawlessness than it bridled. This movement, which was popular among the people, lynched 12 people, kidnapped hundreds of Irishmen and government militia members and forced several officially elected heads of the city to resign. The Committee of Vigilance relinquished power twice, after it was decided that the city was “cleaned up”. This committee later focused on immigrants from China and made havoc in Chinatown. This tumult caused a law to be passed to crack down on Chinese immigration to USA by reducing the allowed number of immigrants in the city. “Chinese Immigration Act” was passed in 1882 and annulled only in 1943.