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Few cities in the world have experienced as many dramatic transformations as one American city on the Pacific coast.
What began as a small colonial outpost became a boomtown almost overnight, attracting fortune seekers from around the world.
It would endure devastating earthquakes, catastrophic fires, economic upheavals, and cultural revolutions, repeatedly reinventing itself and helping shape the course of American history.
Learn more about the remarkable history of San Francisco on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Long before San Francisco became a metropolis of nearly 8 million, it was home to the Ohlone people. Like the tribes in nearby Yosemite National Park, which I covered in a previous episode, the native Bay Area people practiced controlled burns to maintain the region’s unique blend of oak savannahs and grasslands.
Maintaining the health and density of the peninsula’s oak forests was crucial, as the Ohlone depended on acorns as a dietary staple. Clearing the underbrush was also vital to preventing wildfires and giving hunters better visibility of game.
Ohlone fishermen provided sustenance by fishing the seemingly endless stock in Bay Area fisheries.
The Ohlone way of life was interrupted in the late 18th century with the arrival of the Spanish. The Spanish established a series of missions throughout California to control the region. Under the mission system, indigenous populations were subjected to forced labor and baptism, while suffering under the weight of new diseases that were passed along from interactions with the Spanish.
From the missions, the Spanish directed the region’s military and cultural life. The most famous mission citadel in the Bay Area was the Presidio. The Presidio was a military garrison that served as the Spanish colonial government’s enforcement arm.
The newly independent nation of Mexico took control of the region in 1821. During the Mexican period, a small trading settlement developed along the waterfront, known as Yerba Buena, named after a herb that grew there.
Under Mexican control, Yerba Buena reverted to a quieter lifestyle. The mission system ended, and their property became pasture and farmland. Locals were isolated from distant Mexican authorities, and local rancher elites preferred a pastoral economy to an urban economy. The region was quiet, with only a few trading posts, but that was all about to change.
During the Mexican-American War, U.S. naval forces seized Yerba Buena in July 1846, and Lieutenant Washington A. Bartlett of the United States Navy became the settlement’s first American alcalde (al-call-dee), or chief municipal magistrate.
Roughly six months later, on January 30, 1847, Bartlett renamed the city San Francisco. Bartlett’s decision reflected that contemporary maps had long referred to the region as San Francisco, which translates to Saint Francis and honors the founder of the Franciscan religious order and the name of a local mission.
The Americans recognized San Francisco as one of the most strategic locations on the continent. San Francisco Bay is one of the finest natural harbors in the world, offering a vast, sheltered body of water with access to the Pacific Ocean through the narrow Golden Gate Strait.
San Francisco changed forever in January 1848 when James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill. Hoping to keep the gold for himself, Marshall and the property owner, John Sutter, tried to keep the discovery quiet.
Some of the mill workers made a similar discovery and used small flakes of gold to make purchases in town. In May of 1848, Sam Brannan, a local merchant, visited the Sutter Mill, where he bought a few flakes of gold, and Marshall told him, “There was more gold than all the people in California could take out in fifty years.”
When he returned from Sutter’s Mill, he stepped off the ferry, held up the gold in a small glass bottle, and reportedly began yelling: “Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!
Brannan had an interesting angle in spreading the news. He had secretly bought nearly all the mining equipment he could get his hands on, knowing that the men in town would soon abandon their jobs and rush to buy supplies from him at heavily marked-up prices.
Brannan was so confident in his scheme that he planned to open a second store. In no small way, Sam Brannan created the California gold rush. Brannan’s announcement brought people from all over the world to San Francisco, including from Mexico, Canada, China, and across the United States.
Before the Gold Rush, San Francisco was a small settlement of fewer than 1,000 people. By the end of 1849, its population had exploded to an estimated 25,000, and within a few more years, it had grown to more than 35,000.
The massive influx of immigrants during the Gold Rush and the subsequent railroad boom, laid the foundation for one of the city’s most enduring neighborhoods: Chinatown.
Many sailed into San Francisco Bay, but the influx of sailors had an unintended consequence. As they reached shore, crews abandoned many of the ships carrying fortune seekers to San Francisco. By 1851, more than 800 abandoned ships lay in Yerba Buena Cove.
Some of the ships were repurposed into makeshift warehouses, stores, and saloons. The city was overcrowded, so city planners used the abandoned ships as the foundation to expand the shoreline. Workers sank ships into the mudflats and buried them beneath sand, dirt, and debris as they pushed the shoreline outward into the bay, creating the foundations for what is now the San Francisco Financial District.
The gold boom created challenges beyond physical space, as lawlessness, crime, and corruption plagued the city. Without the necessary infrastructure to handle the soaring crime, vigilante committees emerged to take the law into their own hands.
Despite its early problems, San Francisco kept growing. In 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad completed its western terminus across the bay in Oakland. The railroad had a bigger impact than the gold rush.
In 1860, the city’s population sat at roughly 56,000. The year after the railroad was completed, it jumped to nearly 150,000. By 1880, it reached 234,000, making it the ninth-largest city in the United States.
This demographic shift differed from the Gold Rush. Rather than a transient wave of fortune-seekers, the railroad brought families and a permanent influx of capital backed by eastern financial interests.
The disparity of wealth was laid bare as the city suffered under the weight of the Panic of 1873, one of the worst economic downturns in American history.
While the national economy struggled through the Panic of 1873, San Francisco experienced its own financial crisis in 1875 when speculative investments, instability in mining stocks, and the failure of the Bank of California sent shockwaves through the city’s economy.
The California crash was partly fueled by reduced output from the Comstock Lode in 1874, one of the largest silver bonanzas in history.
Growing unemployment fueled social unrest, including violent anti-Chinese demonstrations in 1877. That same year, Denis Kearney helped establish the Workingmen’s Party of California, which combined demands for economic reform with a campaign against Chinese immigration.
The city’s greatest challenge occurred at 5:12 in the morning of April 18, 1906, as the earth beneath San Francisco violently shifted along the San Andreas Fault. A 7.9 magnitude earthquake ripped through the city, shaking it for nearly a minute with terrifying force.
Brick buildings crumbled into rubble, gas lines snapped, and water lines shattered, rendering the city defenseless against the disaster that loomed just seconds behind the quake.
What followed was not merely an aftershock, but a three-day inferno of catastrophic firestorms. Because the municipal water system was broken, fires raged unchecked through the devastated streets, merging into a monstrous wall of fire that consumed everything in its path.
By the time the fires finally burned themselves out, over 80 percent of the city was completely destroyed. An estimated 3,000 people died, and approximately 225,000 residents, more than half the city’s population, were left homeless. Many survivors took refuge in temporary tent cities established in Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, and other open spaces.
However, the city refused to fold.
Even before insurance payments arrived, engineers planned to rebuild the city right where it was, replacing wood and unstable brick structures with steel-reinforced buildings. The structures rose higher and on a much grander scale than ever before.
The rebuild happened at legendary speed, as the city miraculously hosted the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition as a testament to its resurrection.
While the nation toiled under the Great Depression in the 1930s, engineers bridged both the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Strait. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened in 1936, followed by the iconic Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, transforming the city’s geography and economy.
The bridges eliminated ferry bottlenecks and united the agricultural east bay with San Francisco’s commerce and banking, paving the way for unprecedented regional prosperity and cementing its status as the financial and commercial center of the western United States.
With the outbreak of World War II, the city proved it could reinvent itself again, this time as the primary naval and industrial staging ground for the war against Japan in the Pacific Theater. The San Francisco Bay’s deep harbors and proximity to East Asia made it an ideal location as the waterfront became a massive, bustling port of call, funneling millions of troops and vital supplies across the ocean.
At the same time, Henry Kaiser’s shipyards revolutionized shipbuilding, turning out Navy Liberty ships at an unimaginable pace.
The wartime prosperity and patriotism of World War II soon gave way to profound cultural shifts in the postwar period. By the late 1960s, anti-Vietnam War protests flooded the streets, and the Hippie movement took hold in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, a topic which I covered in a previous episode.
As the counterculture of the 1960s faded, San Francisco focused on deploying the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, or BART, which began service in 1972.
In 1989, another major earthquake, measuring 6.9 in magnitude, struck San Francisco. The quake caused roughly $7 billion in damage and once again tested the city’s resilience. Yet, echoing the aftermath of 1906, the recovery moved quickly and led to further urban transformation.
By the twenty-first century, Silicon Valley’s digital gold rush spilled northward into San Francisco. The city’s former industrial neighborhoods became a hub for tech startups as venture capital poured in, creating a new class of digital entrepreneurs.
This change came at a cost. The rapid influx of cash and exploding internet profits fueled a devastating wave of real estate inflation, pricing out long-term residents.
In 2000, the San Francisco Housing Coalition put the damage into perspective in the book Hollow City, noting: The dot-com boom has made the Bay Area a place where the people who make it work—teachers, artists, nurses—can no longer afford to live.
San Francisco’s housing costs increased dramatically over the decades. Median advertised rents for two-bedroom apartments rose from approximately $975 in 1990 to $2,100 in 2000, and by June 2020, one rental survey placed the figure at more than $4,300 per month.
San Francisco’s history is one of extraordinary change and reinvention. From a small settlement on the edge of the Spanish Empire to the epicenter of the Gold Rush, from the devastation of the 1906 earthquake to the cultural revolutions of the twentieth century and the technological revolution of the twenty-first, the city has repeatedly transformed itself.
Its magnificent natural harbor made it a gateway to the Pacific, but people from around the world made it one of America’s most influential cities.
Few places have experienced such dramatic cycles of boom, bust, destruction, and rebirth. And while San Francisco still faces enormous challenges, its history suggests that the city’s greatest constant has always been its capacity for change.