Character of the city
San Francisco holds a secure place in the United States’ romantic dream of itself—a cool, elegant, handsome, worldly seaport whose steep streets offer breathtaking views of one of the world’s greatest bays. According to the dream, San Franciscans are sophisticates whose lives hold full measures of such civilized pleasures as music, art, and good food. Their children are to be pitied, for, as the wife of publishing magnate Nelson Doubleday once said, “They will probably grow up thinking all cities are so wonderful.” To San Franciscans their city is a magical place, almost an island, saved by its location and history from the sprawl and monotony that afflicts so much of urban California.Since World War II, however, San Francisco has had to face the stark realities of urban life: congestion, air and water pollution, violence and vandalism, and the general decay of the inner city. San Francisco’s makeup has been changing as families, mainly white and middle-class, have moved to its suburbs, leaving the city to a population that, viewed statistically, tends to be older and to have fewer married people. Now almost one of every two San Franciscans is “nonwhite”—in this case African American, East Asian, Filipino, Samoan, Vietnamese, Latin American, or Native American. Their dreams increasingly demand a realization that has little to do with the romantic dream of San Francisco. But both the dreams and the realities are important, for they are interwoven in the fabric of the city that might be called Paradox-by-the-Bay.
Although San Franciscans complain of the congestion, homelessness, and high cost of living that plague the city and talk endlessly of the good old days, the majority still think of San Francisco the way poet George Sterling did, as “the cool grey city of love,” America’s most attractive, colourful, and distinctive place to live.
The landscape
The city site
Hilly and roughly square, San Francisco occupies the northern tip of a peninsula. To its south are the bedroom suburbs of San Mateo county, to the east and northeast is the bay, and to the west and northwest lies the Pacific Ocean.
The most prominent of San Francisco’s hills are Twin Peaks, Mount Davidson, and Mount Sutro, all of which exceed 900 feet (270 metres) in elevation. The best known are Nob Hill, where the wealthy “nobs” (nabobs) built extravagant mansions in the 1870s, and Telegraph Hill, which once looked down on the Barbary Coast, a neighbourhood formerly alive with gaudy wickedness. As a result of the pioneer planners’ prejudice in favour of a squared-off grid, the downtown streets march intrepidly up precipitous slopes, terrifying newly arrived drivers, making the cable cars more than sentimental anachronisms, and providing splendid views of the bay.
San Francisco Bay is a drowned river valley, submerged during the melting of the last glacial ice sheet. Enthusiastic and profitable filling of the tidelands has reduced its area at mean high tide from about 700 square miles (1,800 square km) in 1880 to a mere 435 square miles (1,125 square km). More than half of the bay is still fillable, but in 1965 the state legislature created the Bay Conservation and Development Commission to control further landfill projects. At its widest extent the bay measures 13 miles (21 km) across; its deepest point, 357 feet (109 metres), is in the Golden Gate, a narrow channel between the peninsula and Marin county to the north that connects the bay to the Pacific. The maximum daily flow of water through the Golden Gate into the Pacific is seven times the flow of the Mississippi River at its mouth.
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