San Francisco Overview

The City and County of San Francisco is the fourth most populous city in California and the 14th most populous city in the United States, with a 2007 estimated population of 764,976. One of the most densely populated major American cities, San Francisco is part of the much larger San Francisco Bay Area, which is home to approximately 7.2 million people. The city is located on the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean to the west, San Francisco Bay to the east, and the Golden Gate to the north.

In 1776, the Spanish settled the tip of the peninsula, establishing a fort at the Golden Gate and a mission named for Francis of Assisi. The California Gold Rush in 1848 propelled the city into a period of rapid growth. After being devastated by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt.

San Francisco is a popular international tourist destination renowned for its steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of Victorian and modern architecture, and famous landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island, the cable cars, Coit Tower, and Chinatown. The city is also known for its diverse, cosmopolitan population, including large and long-established Asian American and LGBT communities. While the climate includes chilly summer fog, the winters are mild.

Cityscape

San Francisco skyline at night

Neighborhoods

Chinatown

Main article: Neighborhoods in San Francisco, California

The historic center of San Francisco is the northeast quadrant of the city bordered by Market Street to the south. It is here that the Financial District is centered, with Union Square, the principal shopping and hotel district, nearby. Cable cars carry residents and tourists alike up steep inclines to the summit of Nob Hill, once the home of the city’s business tycoons, and down to Fisherman’s Wharf, a tourist area featuring Dungeness crab from a still-active fishing industry. Also in this quadrant are Russian Hill, a residential neighborhood with the famously crooked Lombard Street, North Beach, the city’s version of Little Italy, and Telegraph Hill, which features Coit Tower. Nearby is San Francisco’s Chinatown, established in the 1860s. The Tenderloin is often seen as the crime-infested underbelly of the city.

The Mission District is predominantly working-class and populated by immigrants from Mexico and Central America, but is also gentrifying. Haight-Ashbury, famously associated with 1960s hippie culture, is now heavily gentrified, although it still retains some bohemian character. Historically known as Eureka Valley, the area now popularly called the Castro is the center of gay life in the city.

A mural in the Mission District

The city’s Japantown district suffered when its Japanese American residents were forcibly removed and interned during World War II. The nearby Western Addition became established with a large African American population at the same time. The “Painted Ladies,” a row of well-restored Victorian homes, stand alongside Alamo Square, and the mansions built by the San Francisco business elite in the wake of the 1906 earthquake can be found in Pacific Heights. The Marina to the north is a lively area with many young urban professionals.

The Richmond, the vast region north of Golden Gate Park that extends to the Pacific Ocean, today has a portion called “New Chinatown,” but also attracts immigrants from other parts of Asia and Russia. South of Golden Gate Park lies the Sunset with an Asian majority population. The Richmond and the Sunset are largely middle class and, together, are known as The Avenues. Bayview-Hunter’s Point in the southeast section of the city is one of the poorest neighborhoods and suffers from a high rate of crime, though the area has been the focus of plans for community development. The other southern neighborhoods of the city are ethnically diverse and populated primarily with students and working-class San Franciscans.

The South of Market, once filled with decaying remnants of San Francisco’s industrial past, has seen significant redevelopment. The locus of the dot-com boom during the late 1990s, by 2004 South of Market began to see skyscrapers and condominiums dot the area. Following the success of nearby South Beach, another neighborhood, Mission Bay, underwent redevelopment, anchored by a second campus of the University of California, San Francisco. Just southwest of Mission Bay is the Potrero Hill neighborhood featuring sweeping views of downtown San Francisco.

Beaches and parks

The Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park

Baker Beach

Ocean Beach runs along the Pacific Ocean shoreline, but is not suitable for swimming because the waters off the coast are cold and have deadly rip currents. Baker Beach occupies a picturesque setting just west of the Golden Gate Bridge. The biggest and best-known park is Golden Gate Park, stretching from the center of the city to the Pacific Ocean. Once covered only in grass and sand dunes, the park is planted with thousands of non-native trees and plants and is rich with attractions including the Conservatory of Flowers, the Japanese Tea Garden, and Strybing Arboretum. The Presidio, a former military base, and its Crissy Field section, restored to its natural salt marsh condition, are part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which includes Alcatraz, and other regional parks. Buena Vista Park is the city’s oldest, established in 1867. Lake Merced is a fresh-water lake surrounded by parkland.

Culture and contemporary life

Main article: Culture of San Francisco

San Francisco is characterized by a high standard of living. The great wealth and opportunity generated by the Internet revolution drew many highly educated and high income workers and residents to San Francisco. Many poorer neighborhoods have become gentrified. The downtown has seen a renaissance driven by the redevelopment of the Embarcadero, including the neighborhoods South Beach and Mission Bay. Property values and household income have escalated to among the highest in the nation, allowing the city to support a large restaurant and entertainment infrastructure. Because the cost of living in San Francisco is exceptionally high, many middle class families have decided they can no longer afford to live within the city and have left.

Boutiques along Fillmore Street in Pacific Heights

Although the centralized commerce and shopping districts downtown, including the Financial District and the area around Union Square, are well-known, San Francisco is also characterized by a rich street environment featuring many mixed-use neighborhoods anchored around central commercial corridors to which residents and visitors alike can walk. They feature a mix of businesses and restaurants catering to the daily needs of the community and drawing in visitors. Some are highly gentrified, dotted with boutiques, cafes and nightlife, such as Union Street in Cow Hollow, and 24th Street in Noe Valley. Others are less so, including Irving Street in the Sunset, or Mission Street in the Mission. This approach has influenced the South of Market redevelopment, with businesses and neighborhood services rising alongside high-rise residences.

A streetlight rainbow flag in The Castro.

The international character San Francisco has had since its founding is witnessed today by large numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. With 39 percent of its residents born overseas, San Francisco has numerous neighborhoods filled with businesses and civic institutions catering to new arrivals. In particular, the arrival of many ethnic Chinese, which accelerated beginning in the 1970s, complemented the already-established community based in Chinatown and has transformed the annual Chinese New Year Parade into the largest cultural event of its kind.

Following the arrival of writers and artists of the 1950s, who established the modern coffeehouse culture, and the social upheavals of the 1960s, San Francisco became one of the epicenters of liberal activism, with Democrats, Greens, and progressives dominating city politics. Indeed, San Francisco has not given a Republican candidate for president greater than 20 percent of the vote since 1988. The gay rights contributions and leadership the city has shown since the 1970s has resulted in the powerful presence gays and lesbians have in civic life. A popular destination for gay tourists, it hosts San Francisco Pride, the world’s best-known gay pride parade and festival.

Entertainment and performing arts

Inside the War Memorial Opera House

San Francisco’s War Memorial and Performing Arts Center features some of the longest operating performing arts companies in the U.S. The War Memorial Opera House houses the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet, while the San Francisco Symphony plays in Davies Symphony Hall. The Herbst Theatre stages an eclectic mix of music performances, as well as public radio’s City Arts & Lectures.

The Fillmore is a music venue located in the Western Addition. It is the second incarnation of a venue which gained fame in the 1960s under concert promoter Bill Graham and was where the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane got their start and fostered the San Francisco Sound. Beach Blanket Babylon is a zany musical revue and civic institution. It has performed to sold out crowds in North Beach since 1974.

The American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) has been a leading force in Bay Area performing arts since its arrival in San Francisco in 1967, routinely staging original productions. San Francisco frequently hosts national touring productions of Broadway theatre shows in a number of vintage 1920s-era venues in the Theater District including the Curran, Orpheum, and Golden Gate Theatres.

SFMOMA from Yerba Buena Gardens

Museums

The Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) contains 20th century and contemporary pieces. It moved to its iconic building in South of Market in 1995 and attracts 600,000 visitors annually. The Palace of the Legion of Honor contains primarily European works. The De Young Museum and the Asian Art Museum have significant anthropological and non-European holdings.

The Palace of Fine Arts, originally built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, today houses the Exploratorium, a popular science museum dedicated to teaching through hands-on interaction. The California Academy of Sciences is a natural history museum and hosts the Morrison Planetarium and Steinhart Aquarium. The San Francisco Zoo cares for a total of about 250 animal species out of which 39 have been deemed endangered or threatened.

Media

The San Francisco Chronicle, in which Herb Caen famously published his daily musings, is Northern California’s most widely circulated newspaper. The San Francisco Examiner, once the cornerstone of William Randolph Hearst’s media empire and the home of Ambrose Bierce, declined in circulation over the years and has been reduced to a small tabloid. Sing Tao Daily claims to be the largest of several Chinese language dailies that serve the Bay Area. Alternative weekly newspapers include the San Francisco Bay Guardian and SF Weekly. San Francisco Magazine is a major glossy magazine.

The San Francisco metro area is the sixth-largest TV market and the fourth largest radio market in the U.S. The city’s oldest radio station, KCBS (AM), began as an experimental station in San Jose in 1909. KALW was the city’s first FM radio station when it signed on the air in 1941. All the major television networks have affiliates serving the Bay Area region, with most of them based in the city. There are also some unaffiliated stations, and CNN, ESPN, and BBC have regional offices in San Francisco. The city’s first television station was KPIX, now owned by CBS, which began broadcasting on December 24, 1948. Other stations include KGO, KRON, and KTVU.

Public broadcasting outlets include both a television station and a radio station, broadcasting under the name KQED out of a facility near the Potrero Hill district. KQED-FM is the most-listened to National Public Radio affiliate in the country. San Francisco companies such as CNET and Salon.com pioneered the use of the Internet as a media outlet. Leading global media which are marketed specifically to gay and lesbian audiences are centered in San Francisco, with PlanetOut the parent company of major print newsmagazines and online communities.

Sports

The San Francisco 49ers of the NFL are the longest-tenured major professional sports franchise in the city. They began playing in 1946 and moved to their present location in Monster Park on Candlestick Point in 1971. They reached prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, winning five Super Bowl titles behind stars Joe Montana, Steve Young, Ronnie Lott, and Jerry Rice.

A Muni light rail passes AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants

Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants left New York for California prior to the 1958 season. Though boasting stars such as Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Barry Bonds, they have yet to win the World Series while based in San Francisco. Game 3 of the 1989 World Series in San Francisco was infamously pre-empted by the Loma Prieta earthquake. The Giants play at AT&T Park which was opened in 2000, a cornerstone project of the South Beach and Mission Bay redevelopment.

The Dons, the athletic teams of the University of San Francisco, compete in NCAA Division I. Bill Russell led the Dons to NCAA men’s basketball championships in 1955 and 1956. The San Francisco State Gators compete in Division II. The San Francisco Dragons of Major League Lacrosse play at Kezar Stadium, which they will share with the California Victory of United Soccer League First Division. The semi-professional San Francisco Bay Seals of the USL’s developmental league are a second soccer team in the city.

San Francisco has ample resources and opportunities for participatory sports and recreation. The Bay to Breakers footrace, held annually since 1912, is best known for colorful costumes and a celebratory community spirit. The San Francisco Marathon is an annual event that attracts more than 7,000 participants. There are more than 200 miles (320 km) of bicycle lanes in the city and the Embarcadero and Marina Green are favored sites for in-line skating. Extensive public tennis facilities exist in Golden Gate Park and Dolores Park.

Boating, sailing, windsurfing and kitesurfing are popular activities on the San Francisco Bay, and the city operates a yacht harbor in the Marina District. San Francisco’s residents have been judged to be among the fittest in the U.S.

Economy

Alcatraz receives 1.5 million visitors per year.

Tourism is the backbone of the San Francisco economy. Its frequent portrayal in music, film, and popular culture has made the city and its landmarks recognizable worldwide. It is the city where Tony Bennett left his heart, where the Birdman of Alcatraz spent many of his final years, and where Rice-a-Roni was said to be the favorite treat. San Francisco attracts the third highest number of foreign tourists of any city in the U.S. and claims Pier 39 near Fisherman’s Wharf to be the third-most popular tourist attraction in the nation. More than 15 million visitors came to San Francisco in 2005, injecting nearly $7.5 billion into the economy. With a large hotel and restaurant infrastructure and a world-class facility in the Moscone Center, San Francisco also is a top-ten North American destination for conventions and conferences.

The San Francisco skyline centered within the Financial District

The legacy of the California Gold Rush turned San Francisco into the principal banking and finance center of the west coast in the early twentieth century. Montgomery Street in the Financial District is known as the “Wall Street of the West” (although this nickname may be outdated, considering the rise of Los Angeles and Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road as rival financial centers on the West Coast), home to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the Wells Fargo corporate headquarters, and the site of the now defunct Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Bank of America, a pioneer in making banking services accessible to the middle class, was founded in San Francisco and built one of the first modern skyscrapers in the city: 555 California Street. Many large financial institutions, multinational banks and venture capital firms are based in or have set up regional headquarters in the city. With over thirty international financial institutions, six Fortune 500 companies and a large support infrastructure of professional services, including law, public relations, architecture, and graphic design also populating the downtown, San Francisco is one of ten Beta World Cities.

San Francisco’s economy has increasingly become tied to that of Silicon Valley to the south, sharing a need for highly educated workers with specialized skills. It has been positioning itself as a biotechnology and biomedical hub and research center. The Mission Bay neighborhood, site of a second campus of UCSF, fosters a budding industry and serves as headquarters of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the public agency funding stem cell research programs statewide.

Small businesses with fewer than ten employees and self-employed firms make up 85 percent of city establishments. The number of San Franciscans employed by firms of greater than 1,000 employees has fallen by half since 1977. The penetration of national big box retail chains into the city has been slow. In an effort to buoy small privately owned businesses in San Francisco, the Small Business Commission supports a publicity campaign to keep a larger share of retail dollars in the local economy, while the Board of Supervisors has used the planning code to limit the neighborhoods in which “formula retail” establishments can set up shop, an effort affirmed by San Francisco voters.

Demographics

Population (thousands) by year

The estimated 2007 population of San Francisco is 764,976. With nearly 16,000 people per square mile, San Francisco is the second most densely populated major American city. San Francisco is the traditional focal point of the San Francisco Bay Area and forms part of the greater San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland Combined Statistical Area (CSA) whose population is over 7 million: the fifth largest in the U.S. as of the 2000 Census.

Like many larger U.S. cities, San Francisco is a minority-majority city, as non-Hispanic whites comprise less than half of the population. As of 2005, the Census Bureau estimated that 44.1 percent of the population was non-Hispanic white. Asian Americans, principally Chinese, make up about a third of the population. Hispanics of any race make up about 14 percent of the population. San Francisco’s African American population has declined in recent decades, from 13.4 percent of the city in 1970 to 7.2% of the population in 2006. The current percentage of African Americans in San Francisco is similar to that of the state of California.

Relatively few of the city’s residents are native San Franciscans. Only 35 percent of its residents were born in California; 39 percent were born outside the U.S.

San Francisco has the highest percentage of same-sex households of any American county, with the Bay Area having a higher concentration than any other metropolitan area. Gay men outnumber lesbians; it has been estimated that one in five male city residents over the age of 15 is gay or bisexual.

The San Francisco median household income is $57,833 and the median family income, at $67,809 in 2005, is the third-highest for any large city in the nation. Following a national trend, an out-migration of middle class families is contributing to widening income disparity and has left the city with a lower proportion of children, 14.5 percent, than any other large American city. The city’s poverty rate, at 7.8 percent, is lower than the national average and among the lowest for cities ranked by the U.S. Census Department.

Homelessness has been a chronic and controversial problem for San Francisco since the early 1980s. The city is believed to have the highest number of homeless inhabitants per capita of any major city in the U.S. The rates of violent and property crime, reported for 2005 as 799 and 4974 incidents per 100,000 residents respectively are higher than the national average. Among the 50 largest U.S. cities by population, San Francisco ranks 29th and 39th in each of those categories. In 2007, the city recorded 98 homicides, the highest number in more than a decade, due largely to guns and drugs.

Education

Colleges and universities

The Mission Bay campus of UCSF

The University of California, San Francisco is one of the ten campuses of the University of California system, and is San Francisco’s second-largest employer. It is solely dedicated to graduate education in health and biomedical sciences and is ranked among the top-five medical schools in the U.S. It also operates the UCSF Medical Center, ranked among the top 10 hospitals in the U.S. A 43 acre Mission Bay campus, complementing its original facility in Parnassus Heights, opened in 2003. It contains research space and facilities to foster biotechnology and life sciences entrepreneurship and will double the size of UCSF’s research enterprise. The University of California, Hastings College of the Law, founded in Civic Center in 1878, is the oldest law school in California and claims more judges on the state bench than any other institution.

San Francisco State University is part of the California State University system and is located near Lake Merced. The school has close to 30,000 students and awards undergraduate and master’s degrees in more than 100 disciplines. The City College of San Francisco, with its main facility in the Ingleside district, is one of the largest two-year community colleges in the country. It has an enrollment of about 100,000 students, and offers an extensive continuing education program. Founded in 1855, the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco, located on Lone Mountain, focuses on the liberal arts, and is one of the oldest universities established west of the Mississippi.

Higher education in the arts is provided by the San Francisco Art Institute, the Academy of Art University, and an extension of the Oakland-based California College of the Arts. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the only school of its kind on the west coast, grants degrees in orchestral instruments, chamber music, composition, and conducting.

The California Culinary Academy, associated with the Le Cordon Bleu program, offers programs in the culinary arts, baking & pastry arts, and hospitality & restaurant management.

Primary and secondary schools

Public schools are run by the San Francisco Unified School District as well as the State Board of Education for some charter schools. Lowell High School, the oldest public high school in the U.S. west of the Mississippi, and the smaller School of the Arts High School are two of San Francisco’s magnet schools at the secondary level.

Just under 30 percent of the city’s school-age population attends one of San Francisco’s more than 100 private or parochial schools, compared to a 10 percent rate nationwide. Nearly 40 of those schools are Catholic schools managed by the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Among the most prominent private high schools in San Francisco are Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, San Francisco University High School, The Urban School, Lick-Wilmerding High School, St. Ignatius College Preparatory and Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory.

Transportation

The Bay Bridge connects to Oakland and the East Bay.

Roads and highways

Because of its unique geography—making beltways somewhat impractical—and the results of the freeway revolts of the late 1950s, San Francisco is one of the few American cities that has opted for European-style arterial thoroughfares instead of a large network of freeways. This trend continued following the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, when city leaders decided to demolish the Embarcadero Freeway, and voters approved demolition of a portion of the Central Freeway, converting them into street-level boulevards.

Interstate 80 begins at the approach to the Bay Bridge and is the only direct automobile link to the East Bay. U.S. Route 101 extends Interstate 80 to the south along the San Francisco Bay toward Silicon Valley. Northbound, 101 uses arterial streets Van Ness Avenue and Lombard Street to the Golden Gate Bridge, the only direct road access from San Francisco to Marin County and points north. Highway 1 also enters San Francisco at the Golden Gate Bridge, but diverts away from 101, bisecting the west side of the city as the 19th Avenue arterial thoroughfare, and joining with Interstate 280 at the city’s southern border. Interstate 280 continues this route along the central portion of the Peninsula south to San Jose. Northbound, 280 turns north and east and terminates in the South of Market area. Highway 35, which traverses the majority of the Peninsula along the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains, enters the city from the south as Skyline Boulevard, following city streets until it terminates at its intersection with Highway 1. Major east-west thoroughfares include Geary Boulevard, the Lincoln Way/Fell Street corridor, and Market Street/Portola Drive.

Public transportation

A cable car descending Nob Hill

Public transit solely within the city of San Francisco is provided predominantly by the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni). The city-owned system operates both a combined light rail/subway system (the Muni Metro) and a bus network that includes both trolleybuses and standard diesel buses. The Metro streetcars run on surface streets in outlying neighborhoods but underground in the downtown area. Additionally, Muni runs the highly-visible F Market historic streetcar line, which runs on surface streets from Castro Street to Fisherman’s Wharf (through Market Street), and the iconic San Francisco cable car system, which is the only moving National Historic Landmark in the U.S.

Commuter rail is provided by two complementary agencies. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is the regional rapid transit system which connects San Francisco with the East Bay through the Transbay Tube. The line runs under Market Street to Civic Center, where it turns south to the Mission District, the southern part of the city, and through northern San Mateo County, to the San Francisco International Airport, and Millbrae. The Caltrain rail system runs from San Francisco along the Peninsula down to San Jose. The line dates from 1863, and for many years was operated by Southern Pacific.

The Transbay Terminal serves as the terminus for long range bus service (such as Greyhound) and as a hub for regional bus systems AC Transit (Alameda County), SamTrans (San Mateo County), and Golden Gate Transit (Marin and Sonoma Counties). Amtrak also runs a shuttle bus from San Francisco to its rail station in Emeryville.

A small fleet of commuter and tourist ferries operate from the Ferry Building and Pier 39 to points in Marin County, Oakland, and north to Vallejo in Solano County.

Airports

Main article: San Francisco International Airport

San Francisco International Airport (SFO), though located 13 miles (21 km) south of the city in San Mateo County, is under the jurisdiction of the City and County of San Francisco. SFO is primarily adjacent to the cities of Millbrae and San Bruno, but also borders the most southern part of the city of South San Francisco. SFO is a hub for United Airlines, its largest tenant, and the decision by Virgin America to base its operations out of SFO reverses the trend of low-cost carriers opting to bypass SFO for Oakland and San Jose. SFO is an international gateway, with the largest international terminal in North America. The airport is built on a landfill extension into the San Francisco Bay. During the economic boom of the late 1990s, when traffic saturation led to frequent delays, it became difficult to respond to calls to relieve the pressure by constructing an additional runway as that would have required additional landfill. Such calls subsided in the early 2000s as traffic declined, and, in 2005, SFO was the 14th busiest airport in the U.S. and 23rd largest in the world, handling 32.8 million passengers.

Seaports

The Ferry Building along the Embarcadero

Main article: Port of San Francisco

The Port of San Francisco was once the largest and busiest seaport on the west coast. It featured rows of piers perpendicular to the shore, where cargo from the moored ships was handled by cranes and manual labor and transported to nearby warehouses. The port handled cargo to and from trans-Pacific and Atlantic destinations, and was the west coast center of the lumber trade. The 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike, an important episode in the history of the American labor movement, brought the port to a standstill. The advent of container shipping made pier-based ports obsolete and most commercial berths moved to the Port of Oakland.

Many piers remained derelict for years until the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway reopened the downtown waterfront, allowing for redevelopment. The centerpiece of the port, the Ferry Building, while still receiving commuter ferry traffic, has been restored and redeveloped as a gourmet marketplace. The port’s other activities now focus on developing waterside assets to support recreation and tourism.

Bicycling

Bicycling is a popular mode of transportation in San Francisco, with about 40,000 residents commuting to work regularly by bicycle. There are 63 miles (101 km) of bicycle lanes and paths throughout the city. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition promotes the bicycle for everyday transportation in and around San Francisco.

Source: San Francisco, California in Wikipedia