San Francisco has had many groovy vibes (as they used to say in Haight-Ashbury), from boisterous gold rush Babel to Tony Bennett’s lamplit village where “…little cable cars climb halfway to the stars…” This restless city is a built dream whose blueprint continues to grow and change. Industrious and dynamic? Yeah, you might say that.
When the whaling vessel Niantic ran aground near the corner of present-day Montgomery and Clay streets, the gold-maddened crew abandoned the huge ship, at which point an early GC cut a hole in the hull, ran a plank into the thing, and made it a hotel. This entrepreneurial quick-thinking has defined SF’s built evolution—from 1849’s punch-drunk prospectors’ paradise to the urbane, skyscraping, globally iconic hipster hangout it is today.
How it Began Francisco
The First San Franciscans were the indigenous Miwok and Ohlone peoples whose ancestral homelands had—for some 10,000 years—occupied a great swath from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley. By 1579 Europe