San Francisco

Eras

• Everybody Came at Once, In 1848 San Francisco was a settlement of a few hundred people. Within two years it held tens of thousands, most of them young men who had crossed an ocean or a continent on a rumour. Ships were abandoned in the bay by crews who walked off to the goldfields and were built into the waterfront where they sat. The city was made by an emergency and has never entirely stopped behaving like one.
• 1906 Earthquake, At 5.12am on 18 April 1906 the San Andreas fault moved and the city fell over; then it burned for three days, because the water mains had broken with everything else. Around 3,000 people died and more than half the population was left homeless. The photographic record is extraordinary, including a film shot down Market Street days before, which turns out to be the last footage of a city that no longer existed by the end of that week.
• Angel Island, Ellis Island processed arrivals in hours. Angel Island detained them for weeks, months, occasionally years, because its purpose was the opposite, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it a place designed to keep people out. Detainees carved poems into the barrack walls, which is how we know what it was like. Chinatown grew as both a refuge and a confinement, and in 1942 the city watched its Japanese residents removed to camps.
• Building the Bridge, Both bridges went up in the Depression, which is the point: the Bay Bridge opened in November 1936 and the Golden Gate in May 1937, built with public money at a moment when there was none. The Golden Gate was the first job site to hang a safety net beneath the work, it saved nineteen men, who called themselves the Halfway to Hell Club, and eleven still died.
• Rock, A fort, then a military prison, then the federal penitentiary that held Capone. It closed in 1963 because it cost too much to run on an island. Then in November 1969 a group of Native American activists occupied it for nineteen months, citing an 1868 treaty, and turned the most famous prison in America into the most visible protest of the era. The Presidio, meanwhile, was an army post continuously from 1776 to 1994.
• Six Poets at the Six Gallery, On 7 October 1955 Allen Ginsberg read Howl aloud in a converted garage on Fillmore Street. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published it, was arrested for obscenity, and won, a 1957 ruling that a work with redeeming social importance is not obscene, which changed what American publishers could print. City Lights is still open. North Beach was cheap then.
• Haight, A neighbourhood of a few thousand people received something like a hundred thousand arrivals in the summer of 1967, most of them broke, and a media apparatus that covered it as a spectacle. The Acid Tests, the Human Be-In, the Dead, Owsley's supply, and the moment it stopped being a scene and became a destination. Shared with our Psychedelics and LSD archives, because it is the same story told from the city's side.
• Harvey Milk, Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977, one of the first openly gay elected officials in America, and was shot dead in City Hall a year later along with Mayor Moscone. When his killer got a manslaughter verdict the city rioted. Four years after that the same neighbourhood was the epicentre of the AIDS epidemic, and buried a generation while the federal government looked away.
• Tech Boom, The city has had a boom roughly every fifty years and has never once handled one gracefully: gold, silver, shipping, the 1934 general strike that shut down the waterfront, the dot-com bubble, and the platform era. Each one arrived promising to remake the place and each one mostly remade who could afford to live in it.
• What It Costs, A city of extraordinary wealth with people dying on its pavements, an argument about housing that has run for forty years without resolution, and a national commentary that treats it as either a utopia or a ruin depending on the week. Both readings flatten a place that has been simultaneously rich and broken since 1849.