Chapter 2, part 1
2.
Now a break from our story, for a small history lesson
The city of San Francisco is without question one of the moat naturally beautiful cities in the world. It is surrounded by a vast, pristine bay and golden hills that turn a lush green in the winter. The city sits on a peninsula, which divides San Francisco’s Bay from the Pacific Ocean. Where the ocean meets the western edge of the City is the Sunset district, which features a lovely beach and freezing water. Towards the southern border, the Lake Merced area provides shelter for groves of fog-shrouded cypress, which can only be found on the California coast.
Add the above to an impressive number of beautiful man-made structures, from the ferry building to the Golden Gate Bridge, and you are presented with a city that has a greater variety of postcards than any other.
The area of what became San Francisco was discovered in the late 1700’s by the Spanish, who had been exploring up and down the coast of California for a few hundred years without ever noticing it. Regardless, the Spanish did eventually settle the area, establishing a number of missions and erecting a fort (called the presidio) at the entrance to the bay to protect the town from any seaborne invasion force. The city remained a small outpost with a mission for a less than a hundred years. During that time a country called America was formed, a man named Napoleon won and then lost Europe, and the world moved into it’s new century.
But in San Francisco the vacqueros didn’t mind. No, they just did their ranch work as always, without the distractions of world affairs. They were far off and isolated.
The next development of San Francisco took place a hundred miles north by northeast, when a Swiss emigrant by the name of Sutter opened up a small estate which he called “Sutter’s Fort” at the end of the overland immigrant trail. After six long months on the trail, people were always in need of supplies, and Sutter provided them. As his business expanded and blossomed, Sutter began to build a mill in 1848 on the American River in the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains, but the mill was never finished. Something was found that changed the very history of the state and the world.
Gold.
And just like that they flocked to California and San Francisco. They meant everyone. They came from all over the world, the rich wanting to be richer, the poor wanting to be rich. The entire Sierra Foothills became swamped with miners and merchants. Towns with funny names appeared; Hangtown for its lawlessness, Dutch Flat and Chinese Flat for their nationalities.
And the nearest port to the gold? San Francisco bay. Ship after ship arrived daily, and most ships were doomed never to leave; their crews, masters, owners and captains venturing out to look for gold. The first known photograph of the city comes from this period, it shows the harbor littered with the masts of hundreds of abandoned ships bobbing into eternity at the wharf.
The 49er’s (as they came to be called) quickly discovered, however, that prospecting is actually rather tedious work; that California’s mountains are a miserable place to be; and that San Francisco offered jobs that would pay the bills. The loose placer gold that could be discovered easily by hand began to pan out, and the deeper gold embedded in veins in bedrock could only be mined by a labor-intensive and expensive process
So the miners settled down; most were broke. They couldn’t afford passage back or didn’t want to go. Land was cheap and plentiful, and though some people did return to their eastern homes, a multitude stayed behind. During that time, California became a state, (on the side of the Union) and after the civil war, the Transcontinental Railroad arrived, allowing passengers a six day journey to the west. San Francisco was here to stay.
Or was it? The rapidly expanding city became a center of trade and commerce, until the morning of April eighteenth, 1906. The Great Earthquake. The Firestorm. The utter destruction of a beautiful city. The great loss of life and property was something the nation had not seen since Sherman’s march through the sea. But the people of San Francisco rebounded; aid poured in from around the country and the world. The city’s buildings were either razed and replaced; or restored. The City of San Francisco rose from it’s ashes into the twentieth century.
The next hundred years saw the beginning of hippies and the end of streetcars; the rise and fall of naval presence in the bay, and the establishment of a cosmopolitan city. Today San Francisco is known simply as “The City” to all of Northern California. Traveler’s can reach The City in three primary arteries; either the Bay or Golden Gate Bridges, or up the peninsula on one of the three highways that snake down to San Jose.
A motorist arriving from Sacramento and lands beyond, one must first cross the Bay Bridge, after paying a modest five-dollar toll for the privilege. The Bay Bridge is a complex truss structure for its first half, before landing on Yerba Buena Island, and after a short tunnel, it appears on the other side as a beautifully simple suspension bridge, with a terriffic view. The island hides the city skyline for a few miles, long enough that the driver’s first view of it out of the tunnel is surprisingly close. In minutes he would arrive downtown and get should he be so inclined to exit the freeway, (which ends a mile of that point anyway) he would instantly be in the area known as SOMA; the South Of MArket district.
A motorist from the south would be traveling up highway 101 or 280, but more scenic route is the Pacific Coast highway up the coast past the Country Clubs flanking Lake Merced. Apart from the coastal beauty of the route, it serves one more purpose: it is the most direct route to get to Taraval Street and the Days Inn where Mirjiam was going to stay. Though I questioned that particular choice of hotel, it was cheap, and a major plus for the Swiss, it was serviced directly by the Taraval streetcar route. Zurich has one of the largest streetcar systems in the world, and Mirjam took a “tram” every day to school, so they were well versed in that form of travel. I hoped they knew how slow it would be.
The day was rapidly approaching, and each night I would text or email Mirjam to make final adjustments. When they saw me, they wanted to see Fisherman’s Wharf and that area in the northeast corner of the city. As this area is close to Ghirardelli Square, I knew we could get an ice cream sundae straight from Memory Lane.
I would also have to get permission from my parents, and I knew this might not be an easy task. As a sixteen year old boy in the City, I might not be ready to take on that challenge alone. My plan to get there would be simple enough; a rapid transit train into the city proper from effectively my house, and then board the F line streetcar, a trolley route serving the wharf directly from the Market Street train stations. I would then walk to wherever we would meet. After that, I would wander around with them and see what they wanted to do. I just didn’t know what they wanted to do, and neither did they! They said I knew best, I told them to tell me what they wanted to see. Though my father might not have liked that plan I thought it was going to be fun.
