The Great San Francisco Trivia & Fact Book

By Janet Bailey

The Great San Francisco Trivia and Fact Book"", by Janet Bailey, is a celebration of the City by the Bay. Although relatively young as compared to the world's great cities, it has had a greater influence than many older, larger cities.""

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cumberland House Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9781620453438

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

As the world’s cities go, San Francisco is young (incorporated in 1850) and small (fewer than eight hundred thousand people live here). But it’s had a greater influence, and a more colorful history, than many older and larger burgs.

Rising out of the sand dunes next to a spacious, sheltered harbor, San Francisco didn’t grow, it exploded. When the cry of Gold! rang out, the muddy streets were overrun with fortune-hunters from every corner of the globe, and within two years the settlement of a few hundred traders, ranchers, and soldiers had boomed into a metropolis of twenty-five thousand. Rowdy and free-spirited, the town adjusted to the changes and soon became the brightest star in the West. Fifty-odd years later, leveled by the worst natural disaster ever to befall a U.S. city, San Francisco rose from the rubble. Beneath all that easy elegance is a tough survivor.

And an adaptable one. San Francisco’s mix of contrariness and whimsy drew the hippies to the Summer of Love; its banks and docks became the foundation for business empires; its cafés fueled Beat writers; its engineers created astonishing bridges recognized around the world.

Locals call it The City because, they reason, what other city is worth talking about? Visitors forgive this exasperating smugness because, after all, what other place offers such a combination of beauty and brains; so many opportunities for hard work and self-indulgence; such openness to innovation alongside attachment to tradition? No wonder The City is where so many people claim to have left their hearts.

This is where citizens paid homage to an eccentric who proclaimed himself emperor ... turned old streetcars into beachfront homes ... transformed an annual footrace into a mobile costume contest, for which they show up each year dressed as chickens and giant bugs. However seriously it takes its own specialness, San Francisco has a sense of humor, perhaps the greatest of its charms. It also holds hundreds of stories. Who was the voodoo queen who presided over the House of Mystery? Why aren’t there cows in Cow Hollow? What was the Giant Bathtub beneath the Golden Gate Bridge? You’re about to find out.

CHAPTER 1

West as All Hell

Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.

WILLIAM SAROYAN

Cities are like gentlemen, they are born, not made ...

I bet San Francisco was a city from the very first time it had a dozen settlers.

WILL ROGERS

Make no mistake, stranger, San Francisco is West as all

Hell.

POE BERNARD DEVOTO

Though San Francisco has been called the most European of American cities, Europeans initially had a hard time finding the place. For two centuries, Spanish, Portuguese, and English explorers sailed right past the entrance to one of the world’s great harbors and never noticed it, no doubt because of the fog. The first to miss the bay was Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator sailing the San Salvador for Spain in 1542. His pilot, Bartolomé Ferrelo, later passed the bay twice more ... though Ferrelo did spot the nearby Farallon Islands, which are now part of San Francisco. Francis Drake, the soon-to-be-knighted English privateer, was the first European to land on the Northern California coast—probably near Point Reyes, some twenty-five miles north of San Francisco, at what is now called Drakes Bay. He arrived in 1579.

Q: Historians used to think Drake had landed inside San Francisco Bay. What discovery in the 1930s encouraged this belief?

A: A brass plaque was found near San Quentin that appeared to be the one described in the ship’s chronicles: Drake had nailed a plate of brasse to a post and claimed the land for England. Linguists and chemists subjected the plate to examination and pronounced it authentic, but later tests have suggested it is a forgery.

1595

Sebastián Cermeño, another Portuguese captain sailing under the Spanish flag, anchored at Drakes Bay and named it La Bahía de San Francisco, after the founder of the Franciscan order.

Q: How did this name come to be applied to the still-undiscovered bay to the south?

A: The explorers who finally stumbled onto it two centuries later—from land, not sea—thought it was part of the harbor where Cermeño had landed in 1595. This misperception wasn’t corrected until Juan Manuel de Ayala mapped the bay in 1775; the early name stuck. English captain George Vancouver named Cermeño’s bay after Drake in 1792.

Q What became of Cermeño’s ship, the San Agustin?

A: It sank in a violent storm while the crew was camping ashore. Its cargo of goods from the Orient—including porcelain, silk, and spices—has never been salvaged. The crew had to return to Acapulco in the small, open launch they’d previously carried ashore.

1602

Sebastián Vizcaíno, who had served under Cermeño on the San Augustin, returned to search for the lost cargo and for a safe harbor for galleons sailing from the Philippines. He failed to retrieve the goods, but he did explore the coastline, including Monterey Bay to the south. His enthusiastic description of that harbor played a part, more than 150 years later, in attracting the expedition that came upon San Francisco Bay.

1769

With Russian fur traders showing an interest in the California coast and its sea otters, Spanish authorities in Mexico renewed their interest in the region they’d ignored for the past century and a half. Gaspar de Portolá was appointed governor of Baja (lower) and Alta (upper) California and put in charge of an overland expedition to Monterey Bay, which Vizcaino had so admired. Portolá and a band of sixty soldiers, Franciscan friars, and Indian servants set off on foot. This time, it was Monterey Bay that the explorers failed to recognize, and they passed it by. On November 3, nearly eight months after beginning their journey, they were camped at present-day Pacifica when a scouting party led by Sergeant José Ortega spotted an enormous estuary to the north. The day before, soldiers out deer hunting had come back to camp reporting the same sight, but Ortega is credited as the discoverer of San Francisco Bay. Realizing they’d overshot their mark, the men were disappointed rather than elated at their discovery, and Portolá and his party headed back toward Monterey.

1775

A group of 250 colonists left Mexico for a six-month overland journey to San Francisco Bay. Led by Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, they were to establish a fort and mission near the harbor ... thus maintaining the Spanish Empire’s hold on Alta California. To sweeten the deal in recruiting soldiers and settlers, the Viceroy of New Spain agreed to cover the costs of the journey and offered two years’ pay and five years’ clothing and supplies in advance.

Q: From where did the group depart?

A: From Tupac, Sonora, near what is now Tucson, Arizona. The journey was more than 1,500 miles—on foot.

1776

Leaving the colonists temporarily at the provincial capital of Monterey, de Anza, his lieutenant José Moraga, Franciscan priest Pedro Font, and a squad of soldiers continued north to the San Francisco peninsula. They marked sites for the fort and mission and went back to Monterey to fetch the settlers.

Although, so far as I have traveled, I have seen very good places and beautiful lands, I have yet seen none that pleased me so much as this.

FATHER PEDRO FONT

Q: What site did de Anza pick for the military outpost?

A: Cantil Blanco (White Cliff), a bluff at the tip of the peninsula near what is now the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate Bridge. But the outcropping was too windy and too far from fresh water for a military camp, so the fort, or presidio, was built a mile inland. Its 275-foot redwood enclosure was replaced two years later with adobe buildings around a central courtyard. A fort wasn’t erected on the bluff until 1794.

Q: For the mission, the explorers found a sheltered spot three miles southeast of Cantil Blanco. Father Junipero Serra, who was in Monterey supervising the establishment of California’s Franciscan missions, sent Fathers Palóu and Cambon to head the San Francisco mission. When did Father Palóu conduct the first Mass?

A: On June 29, 1776—five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed on the opposite coast. Most people count this as the day San Francisco was founded. On October 9, a small wooden church was dedicated, replacing the makeshift mud-and-brush shelter. The first Mass at the Presidio was celebrated on September 17.

1777

Priests baptized the mission’s first converts from among the Ohlone, indigenous people living on the eastern and western shores of the bay. Formerly referred to by anthropologists as Costanoans, from a Spanish word meaning coast people, the Ohlone didn’t constitute a tribe or nation but rather some fifty politically independent groups speaking related languages. More than 10,000 Ohlone are thought to have lived in the Bay Area, and perhaps 150 in what is now San Francisco, when Portolá’s men first sighted the bay.

Q: The mission fathers didn’t intend to wipe out the native people, but their conversion efforts paved the way for the Ohlone’s destruction. How?

A: After saving their souls, the priests put the neophytes to work in the mission fields and buildings, housing them in guarded barracks segregated by gender. The priests’ plan was to eventually give the Indians title to mission lands after they’d learned civilized occupations. But the regimented lifestyle was painful for people used to living by nature’s rhythms, and those who ran away to rejoin their communities were captured by soldiers and beaten. Exposed to European diseases and cut off from their culture, their death rate soon exceeded the birth rate. When the missions closed in the 1830s, the newly freed serfs were thrown on the mercy of Yankee pioneers, who murdered them and took their land. By the time the Gold Rush was underway, the Ohlone were nearly extinct.

After several months spent in the missions, [the Indians] usually begin to grow fretful and thin, and they constantly gaze with sadness at the mountains which they can see in the distance.

LOUIS CHORIS, AN ARTIST ON BOARD THE RUSSIAN

SHIP RURIK, WHICH VISITED SAN FRANCISCO BAY IN 1816

1810

As Mexico agitated for independence from Spain, the financially overextended Spanish Empire virtually abandoned the Presidio and mission. The mission had its farms for subsistence; the Presidio soldiers, whose wages were in arrears and supply ships chronically late, depended on the mission for food and clothing. By 1825, Frederick William Beechey, captain of the visiting British warship Blossom, commented on the ragged lot who made up the dilapidated military outpost and wrote that but for a tottering flagstaff ... three rusty fieldpieces, and a half-accoutered sentinel parading the gateway in charge of a few poor wretches heavily shackled, a visitor would be ignorant of the importance of the place.

1821

Mexico declared independence after a decade of revolution, and San Francisco became Mexican soil.

1834

Mexico’s Secularization Act opened the vast mission lands to private ownership. The government couldn’t afford to develop the land, so it made land grants to soldiers and settlers for cattle ranches and farms. Over the next decade, about twenty of these land grants were made within what is now San Francisco.

Q: Many of today’s neighborhoods take their names from these nineteenth-century landowners and their ranchos. Name some of them.

A: Bernal Heights (after landowner José C. Bernal); Noe Valley (José de Jesus Noe); Potrero Hill (from Rancho Potrero de San Francisco); Visitacion Valley (Rancho Canada de Guadalupe Rodeo Viejo y Visitación); Lake Merced (Rancho la Laguna de la Merced).

1835

On June 25, William A. Richardson, a former British sailor who’d stayed behind and married the Presidio commandant’s daughter, stretched a ship’s sail over four wooden poles to make a simple home and trading post on the eastern shore of the peninsula. Whalers and other ships had taken to anchoring at the sheltered cove because of strong tides at the Presidio. Richardson was the first resident of the village that became known by the name of the cove, Yerba Buena, after a local plant that grew wild in the area. On the site of today’s downtown, Yerba Buena was one of the three settlements—together with the Presidio and mission—that gave birth to San Francisco.

Q: Where did Richardson place his tent?

A: One hundred yards west of what was then the shoreline, before the cove had been filled and the town extended into the bay. A plaque at 823-827 Grant Avenue marks the spot. By October, he’d replaced the tent with a rough wooden house, and two years later he built a one-story adobe next to it called Casa Grande, where he conducted business and lived with his family.

Q: Grant Avenue is San Francisco’s oldest street, on the approximate site of a dirt path cleared in 1839. By what names was it previously known?

A: Calle de la Fundación (Foundation Street), then Dupont Street.

1846

The United States went to war with Mexico over Texas. California was at stake as well, and on July 9, Captain John B. Montgomery and men from the warship Portsmouth landed at Yerba Buena, raised the Stars and Stripes over the plaza, and claimed the town—and California—for the United States. (Commodore John D. Sloat had already taken Monterey.) The small group of Mexican soldiers stationed at the hardship post that was the Presidio surrendered peacefully. The plaza was renamed Portsmouth Square, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed the victory in 1848, formally ceding both Texas and California to the United States.

Q: Before Montgomery landed, Pathfinder John C. Frémont, the self-aggrandizing captain of the U.S. Army’s Topographical Engineers, carried out several pointless stunts on behalf of the Yankee rebellion. What were they?

A: On July 1, Frémont, Kit Carson, and their scruffy band of American explorers spiked the inoperable bronze cannons at the undefended Castillo de San Joaquin near the Presidio. The next day, they arrested Robert Riley, captain of Yerba Buena port. A month earlier, the band had initiated the Bear Flag Revolt, briefly placing Sonoma’s leading citizen, a bewildered Mariano Vallejo, under arrest and claiming to have captured Sonoma for the California Republic.

Q: However little Frémont’s actions may have lived up to his memoirs, he did make a lasting contribution by naming which feature of San Francisco Bay?

A: He named the entrance Chrysopylae, the Golden Gate—comparing it favorably to the Chrysoceras, or Golden Horn, of Byzantium (Istanbul).

1847

Washington A. Bartlett, Yerba Buena’s first American alcalde (mayor), issued a proclamation changing the town’s name from Yerba Buena to San Francisco.

Q: What prompted his action?

A: Competition from Thomas O. Larkin and Robert Semple, who were about to build a town on the Carquinez Straits to the northeast. Mariano Vallejo had deeded them the land, and they planned to name the new town Francisca—after Vallejo’s wife and to make the most of their proximity to San Francisco Bay. Bartlett and his townspeople wanted to be sure their settlement was the one associated with the bay. Semple and Larkin renamed their town.

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The village of Yerba Buena, soon to become San Francisco. The USS Portsmouth is in the foreground. Courtesy Golden Gate National Recreation Area, National Park Service (TASC Photo Collection).

Q: What new name did they choose?

A: Benicia—another of Señora Vallejo’s names.

1847

A summer census counted 157 houses and 469 residents in the village, not including the mission or Presidio. Half the residents were American-born; about a third were Spanish Californians, Ohlone, or Hawaiians; and the rest hailed from Europe, South America, and New Zealand.

1848

On January 24, carpenter James Marshall found gold in the American River, the discovery that transformed San Francisco from a sleepy village into a raucous city. Marshall was building a sawmill in the Sierra Nevada foothills for John Augustus Sutter, who’d left debts and family behind in Switzerland and dreamed of creating a colony called New Helvetia around his fort in present-day Sacramento. In the tailrace (the channel for water that powered the mill), Marshall spotted a gleaming, nut-size nugget: I was certain it was gold, he said later. Sutter tried to keep the discovery quiet, fearing that crowds would disrupt his plans for the area. But word soon spread to San Francisco, throughout California and Mexico, and via trading ships to Hawaii and the Far East. By December, when President Polk confirmed the rumors in a message to Congress, history’s greatest peacetime migration was underway.

Never since the Crusades was such a movement known.

HISTORIAN J. D. B. STILLMAN

Q: The Wimmer nugget, supposedly the one found by Marshall, is displayed at the University of California’s Bancroft Library. After whom is it named?

A: Millworker Peter Wimmer and his wife, Jenny, who is said to have boiled it in lye to test its authenticity. (Gold doesn’t tarnish in lye.)

Q In what part of San Francisco was gold found?

A: Nowhere. Gold eventually showed up in most counties in California, but San Francisco was not one of them.

Q: How did Marshall and Sutter profit from the Gold Rush?

A: They didn’t. The forty-niners horned in on Marshall’s mining claim, and he didn’t find much gold beyond that first nugget. He tried writing and public speaking with little success, turned to drink, and died in poverty. Sutter’s land was overrun with fortune-hunting squatters, who trampled his crops, stole his livestock, and tore down his buildings for lumber. He left California a ruined man and died in Washington, D.C., after Congress refused to pay him reparations for the damage to his property.

1849

Tens of thousands raced for the diggings, by land and sea, from every part of the world. Most of the forty-niners came through San Francisco, which had a convenient anchorage and where would-be prospectors could stock up on provisions. By July, San Francisco’s population had swelled to 5,000, and at the end of the year it had reached 20,000. The city was still growing in 1852, when even the deep placers (gold deposits) were wearing thin, and by 1860 it had more than 56,800 residents. Most prospectors failed to reap the certain fortunes they had expected; those who really profited were the merchants charging inflated prices for food, housing, and supplies. A post-Rush depression hit the city in 1854. But the boom times established San Francisco as an international crossroads, financial center, and wild pleasure ground—with the ratio of men to women 10 to 1 in 1849, the main diversions were gambling, drinking, and frequenting prostitutes.

1849

San Francisco organized a town council; its first city charter was adopted the following year. Lack of city funds made governing so difficult that Mayor John W Geary refused to run for reelection in 1851. To build up the town treasury, the council stepped up the sale of town lots and increased business license fees—especially those for gambling houses. The revenues went toward setting up a municipal court and police force and paid for