People and Economy of San francisco

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.

BRITANNICA QUIZ

Places in Music

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 Which of these musicians is not a native of Georgia?

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.

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

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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.

San Francisco: ChinatownLanterns hanging in Chinatown, San

Francisco.© trekandshoot—iStock/Getty Images

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.

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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.

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.

Economy
The gold rush (1848–49) established San Francisco as the premier city
of the West, known from the Oregon border to the pueblo of Los
Angeles simply as the City. It is still a great port, the financial and
administrative capital of the West, and a substantial centre for
commerce and manufacturing.

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San Francisco is well known for its connection to the technology
industry. Some San Franciscans commute to nearby Silicon Valley—a
region just south of the bay that is the heart of the nation’s technology
industry—to work, but the city itself is home to a number of smaller
technology companies and start-ups. Another large portion of the
city’s employed work in the area of finance. Other leading areas of
employment include business services (personnel supply, building
maintenance, security, computers and data processing, and
advertising), retail trade, the tourist and convention industry, and
professional services. Many companies, such as Levi Strauss & Co.,
producer of one of San Francisco’s most famous products, blue jeans,
have located their national headquarters in the Bay Area.

Port
From its beginnings as a port of call in the hide-and-tallow trade and,
later, as the home port of the Pacific whale fishery, San Francisco has
been acutely conscious of the importance of shipping. In the 19th
century ships stopped there from their trip around Cape Horn or
the Isthmus of Panama, and “steamer day” was a civic institution;
after 1914 cargo and passenger vessels arrived from the East by way of
the Panama Canal. In 1867 the Pacific Mail Steamship Company
opened the first transpacific service, sailing from San Francisco to
Yokohama (Japan) and Hong Kong. Imports and exports now passing
through the San Francisco Customs District make the combined ports
of San Francisco Bay—San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda, Sacramento,
and Stockton—one of the most active international ports in the
country.

Industry and tourism

Manufacturing is the main source of income in the Bay Area. In San
Francisco, in which manufacturing is a lesser source of income, the
principal industries are apparel and other textile products, food

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processing, and shipbuilding, while the aerospace and electronics
industries are strong in the cities of the peninsula.

Tourism is a major source of income. The bridges, Coit Tower, the

museums, the restaurants, Chinatown, North Beach, the Victorian
mansions, crooked Lombard Street, and the dazzling Fairmont Hotel
are major attractions; Fisherman’s Wharf, however, is the most
popular. Families browse the area, watching fishermen prepare the
crab catch and mend their nets amid dozens of souvenir shops, street
entertainers, restaurants, and bakeries selling one of the city’s
specialties, sourdough bread. Getting to Fisherman’s Wharf on the
Powell-Hyde Street cable car is a popular route.

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•

San FranciscoSan Francisco, with Coit Tower in the background.© MedioImages/Getty Images
Boats docked at Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

San Francisco’s waterfront offers whale-watching excursions, provides

a boat tour from the wharf to Alcatraz Island, and is home to
Ghirardelli Square, the onetime chocolate factory; the Cannery, built
for the California Fruit Canners Association (now Del Monte
Corporation) in 1907, and now a marketplace; Pier 39, reconstructed
using timbers from old ships to create a New England look, home to
shops and eateries and one of the best seal-watching spots on the
coast; the Ferry Building, a ferry terminal on the Embarcadero that
also houses a food hall and a farmers market; and the Anchorage,
which has a mini-amphitheatre. Nearby is the Marina District,
formerly known as Harbor View when its natural amphitheatre was
the scene of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

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 Beach near Lands End, San Francisco.© William Lee

Finance
A financial centre since the first pinch of gold dust was exchanged for
cash, San Francisco is the seat of the Pacific Stock Exchange as well as
the headquarters of many banks and other financial services
companies, among them Wells Fargo. Though there are no native,
independent banks headquartered in San Francisco, the city still ranks
among the nation’s largest investment banking centres.

Transportation
Periodic smog, produced mainly by the automobiles in the area, is a
serious concern. Freeway traffic is also a problem, as travel from the
East Bay cities of Oakland and Berkeley and from Marin county to the
north is confined to two great but overburdened bridges. The world’s

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longest high-level steel bridge, the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge,
is 4.5 miles (7.2 km) long; it was completed in 1936 and consists of two
back-to-back suspension bridges, a connecting tunnel on Yerba Buena
Island, five truss spans, and a cantilever span. The orange-red Golden
Gate Bridge, leading north to Marin county, was completed in 1937. It
is a pure suspension bridge with a 4,200-foot (1,280-metre) centre
span; the spectacular clear span was the longest in the world until
1964 when New York City’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened. At its
highest point the bridge is about 260 feet (80 metres) above the bay.

San Francisco: Golden Gate BridgeGolden Gate Bridge, San

Francisco.© Mariusz Blach/Fotolia

Until the ferries were doomed by the bridges, San Francisco was
served by a great network of ferry routes, whose splendid vessels were
said to deliver more passengers to the Ferry Building at the foot of

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Market Street than arrived at any other transportation depot
except Charing Cross railway station in London. Only after the bridges
began to choke with traffic did the ferries return, on a smaller scale,
between San Francisco and Marin county.

A much greater undertaking was the interurban rapid-transit system

known as BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which began operating in
1972. With service between San Francisco and
surrounding communities through an underwater tube more than 3.6
miles (5.8 km) long, BART was the first system of its sort—part
subway and part elevated—to be built in half a century. These
comfortable, computerized automatic trains run at speeds as high as
80 miles (130 km) per hour.

San Francisco, situated at the head of a peninsula, has always been a

dead end for rail traffic. Beginning with the arrival of the first
westbound train over the tracks of the Central Pacific on September 6,
1869, transcontinental trains began discharging their passengers in
Oakland, where ferries or buses carried them to San Francisco. As in
the rest of the country, the railroad’s importance as a passenger carrier
declined after World War II.

The instantly recognizable symbol of San Francisco is the beloved

cable car. Invented by Andrew Hallidie (because he felt sorry for the
dray horses that were often injured on the steep hills), the system was
tested in 1873 and soon adopted by other cities. By the 1880s, cities
such as Chicago, Kansas City (Missouri), and Los Angeles had
variations of Hallidie’s creation. The other cities eventually abandoned
cable cars, but San Francisco has stubbornly clung to the picturesque
if archaic, and sometimes dangerous, means of negotiating the
hills. Rudyard Kipling was awed by the concept:

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 San Francisco: cable carCable car in San Francisco.©
Efaah0/Dreamstime.com
I gave up asking questions about their mechanism.…If it pleases Providence
to make a car run up and down a slit in the ground for many miles, and if for
two-pence-hapenny I can ride in that car, why should I seek reasons for that
miracle?

Before the 1906 earthquake 600 cars covered 110 miles (177 km) of the
city, but the system was devastated by the quake and much of it was
not restored. Today more than two dozen cars operate at peak hours,
carrying about 15,000 people daily to limited destinations via three
lines.

San Francisco International Airport is located about 7 miles (11 km)

south of the city-county limits, occupying a filled site on the
southwestern shore of the bay.

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