San Francisco

January 26, 2020

San Francisco

***Note: This blog first appeared on my Caris Roane blog in August, 2017

My earliest memory of San Francisco was from childhood when I flew from there to Los Angeles with my sister. I was five-years-old at the time and the stewardess asked me to pass out gum to all the passengers. I don’t remember minding the experience at all. I received a pair of ‘wings’ for my effort, which I wish I still had. Since I spent part of my childhood in a logging town in northern California, San Francisco has always been part of my memories.

Later, when I lived in Southern California, not far from Disneyland, I remember seeing Tony Bennett on one of the Disneyland stages where I heard him sing, ‘I Left My heart in San Francisco.’ The iconic song, featuring images like ‘little cable cars climb halfway to the stars’, will always define the city for me. In more recent years, I was in San Francisco twice for different writer conventions. It’s a beautiful city with lovely temperate weather, though it is known for its fog. Some of its nicknames are: City by the Bay, Golden Gate City, SF, San Fran, and of course Fog City.

FunFacts About San Francisco (Source) (Source):

· San Francisco was founded in June of 1776 when colonists from Spain established the Presidio of San Francisco.

· San Francisco was originally named Yerba Buena in 1835 after a wild mint herb that grew along the shores of the bay. It was renamed San Francisco, after St. Francis, in 1847.

The manually operated cable cars in San Francisco (different from ‘streetcars’) are the only ones of its kind left in the world.
In 1954, Marilyn Monroe married the famous baseball player, Joe Dimaggio, at San Francisco City Hall.
The Chinese Fortune Cookie originated in San Francisco in 1914. It was created by a Japanese immigrant, Makoto Hagiwara. Over 3 billion fortune cookies are made annually.

· In 1929, when banks failed all across the country, not one of San Francisco’s banks went under.

· In 1848, there were 469 residents of the new ‘San Francisco. These included Ohlone Indians, New Zealanders, Hawaiians, Spanish Californians, Americans, Europeans and South Americans.

o When James Marshall discovered gold in Sutter’s Mill, the gold rush began. By 1852 San Francisco had 35000 residents.

· San Francisco is a relatively small city with only 49 square miles and 800,000 inhabitants.

· In 1901, San Francisco outlawed burials. The dead are buried in nearby Colma where the deceased outnumber the living. Both Wyatt Earp and Joe Dimaggio are buried there.

· Angel Island, an immigration center that operated between 1910 and 1940, has been called the Ellis Island of the West. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants passed through Angel Island, mostly from China, Japan, India and the Philippines. (Source)

· San Francisco has more than 14,000 Victorian homes.

· Three-quarters of the city was destroyed by fire in the 1906 earthquake.

· San Francisco became the birthplace of the United Nations in 1945.

· There are more than 50 hills within the city limits.

· The San Andreas and Hayward fault lines cause most of the earthquake activity in the area.

· Some of the most famous landmarks are: the Golden Gate Bridge, the Victorian houses, (some known as the ‘Painted Ladies’) of the Alamo Square area, the back and forth curves of Lombard Street, Pier 39 and Alcatraz Island.