W.E. Willmore, an Englishman, was the first to dream in Long Beach. Only he called it Willmore City in 1880 when he took an option on 4,000 acres and carved it into farming lots of 5, 10, 20 and 40 acres and advertised the land for between $12 and $20 an acre. For $100 Willmore would pepper your property with 70 orange trees on each acre. The venture failed and Willmore was gone by 1884.
The Long Beach Land and Water Company, a consortium of Los Angeles businessmen, picked up the property and kept Willmore’s street plan while improving the water system, constructing a wharf and hotel and starting a horse-car line to the seashore. They called the resort town Long Beach and people came. Some even stayed and the population climbed to over 500 by the end of the century. When the Pacific Electric Railway line extended to Long Beach in 1902 things really took off.
Writers reporting on Long Beach enthused that it was the “most attractive coast town in the State.” A seaside amusement park with an ocean plunge and rollercoaster was a big draw while other scribes gushed that “there are beaches and beaches; but in the whole of North America there is not another like the magnificent twelve-mile beach, of almost imperceptible slope, hard and smooth as a floor, which stretches from San Pedro to Alamitos Bay.”
Long Beach was booming but also transforming. The Los Angeles Dock and Terminal Company began dredging channels and building jetties to carve out a large navigable port. In 1921 one of America’s richest oil fields was uncovered on Signal Hill and Long Beach was a full-blown port city - today it is the second largest container port in the United States.
Progress was rudely interrupted at dinnertime on March 10, 1933 when a tremor in a fault in the ocean off Newport Beach rattled the town and collapsed many poorly constructed masonry buildings and 120 people died. After picking itself up Long Beach went right on expanding into the general urban malaise of the 1970s, growing into one of America’s 50 largest cities. In those 1970s the Pike, the historic oceanside walkway, was ripped up, formally closing the books on the city’s days as a “beach town.” New attractions to bring back visitors to the ocean included the arrival of the RMS Queen Mary and Howard Hughes’ wooden airship, the Spruce Goose, that was the largest flying boat ever built. Where the Pike used to meander Formula One race cars began running in the Grand Prix of Long Beach. Started in 1975, it is now the longest running major street race in North America. The Aquarium of the Pacific arrived in the 1990s.
The cityscape of Long Beach has been shaped by the earthquake generations ago and recent downtown renewal. Few buildings remain from before World War I but we will seek them out and see new ones on our walking tour that will begin at the feet of someone who has seen it all come and go since he arrived in 1915...
America’s second largest city began with 11 Spanish families comprising 44 settlers along the banks of the Los Angeles River in 1781. The regular flooding caused the homesteaders’ pueblo to be moved to higher ground nearby but the settlement was little more than a ranch until Spanish Colonial rule ended in 1820. As part of a newly independent Mexico the pace of building of streets and adobe shelters picked up but even after a generation of American immigration beginning in 1848 Los Angeles remained a sleepy agricultural town with dirt streets and a population less than 10,000.
Then the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in 1876 and oil was discovered in 1892. The population soared to over 100,000 by 1900, half a million by 1920 and a million by 1930. During that time the government needed to manage that kind of growth began to assemble along a ridge just south of the original Los Angeles Pueblo. The Civic Center became the administrative core of city, state, and federal government offices, buildings, and courthouses. Today more government workers can be found here than anywhere in the United States outside of Washington, DC.
Our walking tour of the Civic Center will step a couple blocks west into the cultural heart of downtown and a block north to where the oldest part of Los Angeles can be found preserved in a two-block area but we will begin with the building that is emblazoned on the all the City’s police badges...
Los Angeles has often been characterized as a jumble of “suburbs in search of a city.” But Los Angeles has always boasted a significant downtown and it looks a whole heck of a lot like it did eighty years ago. Unlike Manhattan (on an island) or Philadelphia (squeezed between two rivers) or Chicago (pressed against a lake), developers in Los Angeles could build freely to the west rather than destroy existing structures.
But far from being an amorphous blob, downtown Los Angeles followed a rigid development pattern in its formative years. The first break-out from the original settlement in the early 1900s took place south along Spring Street (the banks) and Main Street (the businesses) and Broadway (the theaters). Restless entrepreneurs began pushing a few blocks west along 7th Street around 1915 and by 1920, the city’s private and municipal rail lines stretched for over 1,000 miles into four surrounding counties with downtown as the hub.
As a developing town in the early 1900s the Los Angeles City Council passed a height restriction of 150 feet on skyscrapers to insure the famous Southern California sunshine actually reached the sidewalk. So early buildings marched like matched teeth up and down Spring Street and Main Street. After a half-century the height limit was rescinded and rather than tear down and rebuild the business district packed up and moved west to Flower Street and Hope Street and Figueroa Street and built to the sky.
Our walking tour will maneuver through these steel-and-glass monoliths on the blocks that do much to define the Los Angeles skyline. We will see the town’s tallest skyscrapers and also see some its finest Renaissance Revival architecture but we will begin at a place that has endured since the Los Angeles days of dirt streets when cypress and citrus trees were planted and a picket fence erected to keep roaming livestock from trampling the plantings...
Los Angeles - Financial District
Los Angeles has often been characterized as a jumble of “suburbs in search of a city.” But Los Angeles has always boasted a significant downtown and it looks a whole heck of a lot like it did eighty years ago. Unlike Manhattan (on an island) or Philadelphia (squeezed between two rivers) or Chicago (pressed against a lake), developers in Los Angeles could build freely to the west rather than destroy existing structures.
The Historic Core is stuffed with grand old buildings, many exactly 150 feet in height, owing to a height limit ordinance passed in 1911. The restriction was intended to limit the density of downtown Los Angeles and allow the famous Southern California sunshine to reach the sidewalks. Rare exceptions were granted for decorative towers with setbacks in the upper stories that appeared in the 1920s. The restriction was lifted in 1957 but there is still none of the experience of being stranded in an urban canyon in the Downtown Core.
The Downtown Core is roughly defined by four north-south streets from Hill Street to the west to Main Street to the east. The Financial District tour will travel down Main Street and back up Spring Street (the Theatre District tour covers Broadway and Hill Street). When the City’s banks began seeping out of the Los Angles business center in the early 1900s they congregated to the south along Spring Street. There were so many banks and law offices and insurance money here that Spring Street became known as the “Wall Street of the West” and Los Angeles became a player on the national financial stage.
The Financial Center stayed intact for more than half-a-century until the lifting of the height restrictions triggered a move several blocks to the west and the money men departed en masse. Nobody bothered to rebuild, they just left and there was no money still here to tear much down. The empty buildings spawned an unsavory element that dominated the area into the 1980s. In recent years the old Financial District has undergone redevelopment and re-gentrification. Perhaps most pleased with the state of affairs is Hollywood which mines the richly decorated blocks of Beaux Arts buildings that stand virtually unchanged for movie sets.
There are dozens of such period-piece visages waiting in the Financial District but we will begin our walking tour with a structure from still an earlier era, today just about a one-of-a-kind in Los Angeles...
The “father” and “mother” of Hollywood were Hobart Johnstone Whitley and Daeida Wilcox Beveridge. Whitley bought the 500-acre E.C. Hurd ranch in the 1880s which he called “Hollywood” from a name the Whitleys had discovered on their honeymoon. Before that the area was know to the scattered ranchers and fruit growers here as the Cahuenga Valley, after the pass in the Santa Monica Mountains immediately to the north.
Harvey Henderson Wilcox was born in New York state in 1832 and his family migrated to Michigan when he was a teen. As an adult he kicked around the Midwest cobbling shoes and trading real estate. In his fifties, after his first wife died in Kansas of tuberculosis, Wilcox married Daeida “Ida” Hartell, a girl more than thirty years his junior and relocated his ranch to southern California, purchasing land for $150 an acre. Wilcox tried farming figs like his neighbors but after a few years he decided to subdivide the land and sell lots for $1,000 each. Ida borrowed her neighbor’s name, which she may have first heard from a seatmate on a train ride from Kansas - or not, and on February 1, 1887 Harvey Wilcox filed a plat of the subdivision with the Los Angeles County Recorder’s office, the first time “Hollywood” appeared on a deed.
Wilcox died in 1891 but his wife led development efforts and was instrumental in establishing much of Hollywood’s civic infrastructure, including the city hall, library, police station, primary school, tennis club, post office, city park, and much of the commercial district. She also donated land for three churches and space for Hollywood’s first theatrical productions. She came to be called the “Mother of Hollywood,” and when Daeida died in 1914, the Los Angeles Times reported that it was Daeida’s dream of beauty that gave world fame to Hollywood.
To the world today Hollywood means movies. The early years of the movie industry were centered around New York City but Thomas Edison’s film patent fees helped send the pioneering studios west. Most didn’t stop until they reached the favorable year-round weather of Southern California. Short films were being made here by 1906 and by 1911 Los Angeles was second only to New York in motion picture production and by 1915 most movies were being made here. Four major film companies – Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO and Columbia – had studios clustered in Hollywood as the formerly somnambulant suburb skyrocketed to international stardom.
In 1910, when the development was mostly fields of grain and citrus trees town officials voted for Hollywood to be annexed into the City of Los Angeles to insure a reliable supply of water. In a handful of years that community was unrecognizable. After the movie companies came radio studios then set up shop in Hollywood in the 1930s, television studios in the 1940s and recording studios in the 1950s. Most have since dispersed to neighboring communities, leaving behind more iconic landmarks than any community of similar size and we’ll begin our tour at the most famous intersection in the world...
Los Angeles - Theatre District
Los Angeles has often been characterized as a jumble of “suburbs in search of a city.” But Los Angeles has always boasted a significant downtown and it looks a whole heck of a lot like it did eighty years ago. Unlike Manhattan (on an island) or Philadelphia (squeezed between two rivers) or Chicago (pressed against a lake), developers in Los Angeles could build freely to the west rather than destroy existing structures.
The Historic Core is stuffed with grand old buildings, many exactly 150 feet in height, owing to a height limit ordinance passed in 1911. The restriction was intended to limit the density of downtown Los Angeles and allow the famous Southern California sunshine to reach the sidewalks. Rare exceptions were granted for decorative towers with setbacks in the upper stories that appeared in the 1920s. The restriction was lifted in 1957 but there is still none of the experience of being stranded in an urban canyon in the Downtown Core.
The Downtown Core is roughly defined by four north-south streets from Hill Street to the west to Main Street to the east. The Theatre District tour will travel down Broadway and back up Hill Street (the Financial District tour covers Spring and Main streets). Broadway began filling with theaters built as vaudeville stages in 1911 which gave way to glittering movie palaces during the 1920s and 1930s. Broadway’s Golden Age was brief - there was a movie-going shift to Hollywood Boulevard and then a mass population exodus to the suburbs. Some of the great movie houses were torn down, others struggled on as grindhouses showing exploitation films, and others just sat vacant. Today the Broadway Theater District contains the thickest concentration of pre-World War II movie palaces in America, although less than a handful still exhibit movies.
These movie palaces were famous for their breathtaking interiors awash in exotic themes and appropriately we will begin our tour at one of the District’s oldest buildings most famous for its elaborately crafted interior at Broadway and 3rd Street...
There was scarcely an Oakland when it was announced that the town would be the western terminus for the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. In 1868, the Central Pacific constructed the Oakland Long Wharf at Oakland Point, the site of today’s Port of Oakland. The Central Pacific also established one of its largest rail yards and servicing facilities in West Oakland. A population of 1,543 in 1860 became 10,500 in 1870. Improvements to the salt water estuary and harbor followed and by 1880 Oakland was the second most important city in California and poised for explosive growth.
The town centered around Broadway in its beginnings, up to about 4th Street. With the 1870s and 1880s boom the downtown shifted northward for another eight blocks. The population of Oakland swelled in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906 and downtown shifted again, anchored by the town’s first high-rises constructed along Broadway beginning at 12th Street. When the building boom ended with the Great Depression Oakland had grown from about 75,000 people to over a quarter million. There were automobile factories, machine shops, canneries, shipbuilding plants and lumberyards all humming along. The aggregate value of Oakland’s industrial output was multiplied five times between 1914 and 1927.
Our walking tour will explore where Oakland flourished in its boom years nearly a century ago. The area is sprinkled with architectural gems and we will start in a plaza just off Broadway dominated by a building that was the symbol for a forward-thinking Oakland a hundred years ago...
Wielding a Mexican land grant for some 44,000 acres, John Sutter arrived at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers in 1939 and established Sutter’s Fort with dreams of its one day becoming a major Western commercial center. That vision would be realized but not in the way John Sutter hoped. In January of 1848 Sutter sent an employee, James W. Marshall, to the banks of the American River to construct a sawmill. Marshall found a flake of gold and within months men from across America were headed for the Sierra foothills. The California Gold Rush prospectors overran Sutter’s land and slaughtered his herds of livestock. By 1849 Sutter had given up on his empire, placed his son in charge of the business and retired.
Sutter’s Embarcadero (Spanish for “landing”) became Sacramento and the town grew rapidly as a trading and supply center for the gold fields. In 1850, the first California census counted 6,820 people in Sacramento. It was a bustling place but there wasn’t much thought to making it the capital of the new state of California. For one thing the rivers flooded nearly every year, several times taking the fledgling city with it. And a devastating fire could be counted on every couple of years as well in the early days. The first, in 1852, burned everything from the waterfront up to 9th Street.
The Spanish capital had been in Monterey and the 1849 Constitutional Convention for the new State of California was held there. San Jose got the nod as state capital but the government types turned out not to like it. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a Californian military commander, politician, and rancher, promised a suitable capital at his namesake town of Vallejo but he was unable to pull it together so when Sacramento made a bid in 1854 the Legislature accepted.
Not that the matter was settled in everybody’s eyes. There would be talk about moving the capital well into the 1900s from places like Berkeley and San Jose and Monterey but after over 150 years the matter seems likely settled. Sacramento is now the sixth largest city in California with 466,000 people and over 73,000 of them work for the state government.
So although we will explore the cobbled streets and historic buildings from the town’s beginnings in Old Sacramento it is appropriate that our walking tour will begin where the California government has operated for the better part of 140 years...
Land was set aside here for public use in the 1830s and 1,400 acres were legally declared “City Park” in 1868, making San Diego one of America’s first towns to have a park. But the scrub mesa of City Park remained completely undeveloped; not the kind of park where you would see joggers and baby strollers on winding paths today but rather the kind of park where you would meet rattlesnakes and coyotes.
The first steps towards taming and landscaping City Park took place in 1892 when a botanist named Kate Sessions made a deal to plant 100 trees every year in exchange for 32 acres she could use for her commercial nursery. Sessions introduced a variety of native and exotic plants to the park and many of her trees are still growing. She became known as the “Mother of Balboa Park” but surely even she harbored no dream of what the park would shortly become.
To celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal, San Diego staged the Panama-California Exposition in 1915 to announce its geographic position as the first American port of call on the Pacific coast for ships exiting the Panama Canal from the Atlantic Ocean. It was an audacious undertaking for a city with a population of 39,578. Los Angeles and San Francisco were both ten times as large. In fact, no city as small as San Diego had ever attempted to put on a world’s fair.
The fairgrounds would be in City Park and one of the first tasks organizers undertook was changing the park name. A contest yielded the name of Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to cross Central America and see the Pacific Ocean. The architect for the Exposition came from the East Coast, Bertram Goodhue who was celebrated for his Gothic Revival churches. In California, however, Goodhue re-interpreted historic Spanish Baroque and Spanish Colonial architecture into what became known as the Spanish Colonial Revival Style. Goodhue advocated and it was accepted that all but a handful of structures for the World’s Fair would be disposable and were constructed of plaster and wood. The Exposition was so successful it remained open for an extra year and the assembly of Spanish-flavored buildings was so striking and so popular that San Diegans could not tear the fair down completely when it was over.
When San Diego put on the California Pacific International Exposition in 1935 many of the original buildings were back in uses as exhibit halls. This time around the fair had a more practical and less visionary motive - jumpstart an economy ravaged by the Great Depression. Still, it was also successful enough to win a year’s extension. In the decades to follow there would be no more international get-togethers in Balboa Park and the fair buildings gradually fell into disrepair. Balboa Park, and the historic Exposition buildings, were declared a National Historic Landmark in 1977 and plans were hatched to make many of the “temporary” buildings permanent after so many years.
Our walking tour of Balboa Park will begin at its western boundary on 6th Avenue near a statue remembering Kate Sessions and walk along El Prado, the same path used by wide-eyed fair-goers almost a century ago...
The San Diego Presidio was the first European settlement on the Pacific Coast of present-day America, founded as a military post by Gaspar de Portola in 1769. Situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the location provided a fine defensive position but the town that grew up around the bluff was four miles away from one of the finest natural harbors on the coast. During the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s thousands of potential settlers stopped in San Diego but few stayed.
In 1850, months before California would be admitted to the Union, William Heath Davis was one of the first to move out of the developed part of town and attempt to take advantage of that harbor. Despite spending an estimated $60,000 on the project his wharf was crudely built and in 1853 the steamer Los Angeles barreled into it and the damage was never repaired. Davis was long gone by 1862 when the United States Army dismantled his wharf and used the timber for firewood.
There would not be another settlement effort until 1867 when Alonzo Horton gobbled up 900 acres of what would one day be downtown San Diego for $265. Horton energetically laid out streets, sold lots and encouraged development. Within twenty years “New Town” was THE town. Horton always had an eye on the bottom line so he created small town blocks that gave him more corners to sell
Today many of the Victorian buildings from these early boom years of the 1880s and 1890s remain in downtown’s Gaslamp Quarter. There are 94 designated historic buildings in the Gaslamp Quarter and our walking tour will spend a good amount of time among the fanciful two- and three- and four-story buildings but we will also explore the towers around the fringes and thanks to Alonzo Horton’s short blocks it will seem like we are covering quite a bit of ground...
Old Town San Diego lays claim as the birthplace of California by merit of Franciscan Friar Junipero Serra’s mission established in 1769. It was the first of 21 permanent Spanish missions and by the 1790s it was the largest. The area’s defensive position was established on Presidio Hill and the town grew up around its base.
Under Mexican rule after 1821, the tiny community gained the status of El Pueblo de San Diego. When Richard Henry Dana published his account of his life at sea in Two Years Before the Mast he described his stop at the port of San Diego in 1835 thusly: “about forty dark brown looking huts...and three or four larger ones, white-washed.”
When California became a part of the United States in 1850 San Diego, with a population of 650, was incorporated as a city and named the county seat of the newly established San Diego County. Still, most visitors moved on up the coast when sailing around Cape Horn and South America. By 1860 the population was only 731.
More ominous for the community was the establishment of “New Town” San Diego four miles to the south and closer to the harbor. The exodus from “Old Town” was so complete that in 1871, government records were moved to a new county courthouse in New Town. The following year a fire crippled what was left of original San Diego. By the 1880s there was no more New Town - it was just San Diego.
Long forgotten Old Town San Diego became an historic park in 1968. Three original adobes were restored and other structures rebuilt. Many are now home to cultural museums, shops and restaurants. Our walking tour of the birthplace of San Diego will begin on the town square that, in the Spanish tradition, was at the center of commercial and social life...
San Francisco’s Chinatown, with a start date of 1848, is the oldest Chinatown in North America and the largest Chinese community outside Asia. Chinatown is the most densely populated neighborhood in the city and its streets and narrow alleys are a tightly packed menagerie of buildings with small stores selling everything from groceries to souvenirs. Chinatown retains its customs, languages, places of worship, social clubs, and identity. It has developed its own government and carries on as a “city-within-a-city.”
While San Francisco today might seem unimaginable without Chinatown, its residents were forced to fight for the ground several times since its foundation. In the wake of rampant unemployment in the wake of the Panic of 1873 racial tensions in San Francisco flared into full-blown race riots. In response to the violence, the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association or the Chinese Six Companies was created as a means of providing the community with a unified voice. One of their first battles was over immigration quotas when the United States government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first of several odious laws targeting the Chinese.
In the rebuilding effort after the 1906 Earthquake city officials saw an opportunity to ship the Chinese to the southern fringes of the city. The Chinese Six Companies thwarted the plan, mostly by agreeing to transform the neighborhood into a westernized tourist attraction. It is that vision of Chinatown that endures today.
Chinatown has captured the popular imagination. Bruce Lee was born here; chop suey was popularized here; Humphrey Bogart solved the intricacies of the Maltese Falcon here. Our walking tour of Chinatown will find temples, fortune cookies and several buildings by one of the most famous women architects in America and it will all start in an open space oft times referred to as “the Heart of Chinatown”...
In 1906, a devastating earthquake and subsequent fires decimated San Francisco, destroying more than 28,000 buildings, including the landmark City Hall which had been conceived in 1872 and not fully completed until 1899. To rebuild, city planners embraced the City Beautiful Movement then in vogue that advocated the construction of monumental, classically inspired buildings. Advocates of the philosophy believed that such beautification could promote moral and civic virtue among increasingly diverse populations and create a harmonious social order that would better the quality of life.
To design its City Beautiful plan San Francisco went right to the source - Daniel Burnham of Chicago. Burnham planned and executed the successful World Columbian Exposition in 1893. With a rebuilt City Hall as its centerpiece the Civic Center would gather the San Francisco’s major government and cultural institutions in orderly, symmetrical buildings grouped around open plazas.
It would take three decades for the original plan for the Civic Center to be fully realized. When it was complete, San Francisco boasted one of the most successful renderings of the City Beautiful Movement in the United States. The San Francisco Civic Center was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987. If you were strolling through the Civic Center 75 years ago you would recognize most of it today so let’s get our tour started and take a look...
San Francisco - Financial District
Much of today’s Financial District was under water during Spanish and Mexican rule. The Bay shoreline originally ended at Battery Street but with the American annexation and the California Gold Rush about five blocks worth of new city ground was created all the way to the Embarcadero. Sand hills as tall as ten men once stood here and they were leveled and the sand used for fill. Gold Rush money quickly made this area the financial capital of the West and the coast’s first and only skyscrapers began poking up along Market Street by the end of the 19th century.
The neighborhood was completely destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. Rebuilding was rapid and generally adhered to a few guiding principles. The Neoclassical style championed by the City Beautiful movement sweeping American cities in the first decades of the 1900s made it the design of choice for most San Francisco architects. And earthquake wariness typically kept the banks and corporate headquarters to between 15 and twenty stories at the most.
By mid-century technology for earthquake-proofing buildings caused height restrictions to be repealed and builders in the Financial District reached for the sky with a vengeance. So many skyscrapers went up that San Franciscans began to despair over the “Manhattanization” of their city. Steel and glass canyon walls obscured heritage structures in some cases and wiped them off the streetscape altogether in others.
The pendulum has since swung back and strict, European-style height restrictions are once again shaping the Financial District. Our tour to explore the last century of development around the “Wall Street of the West” will begin on one of the world’s great thoroughfares, Market Street, at a landmark where survivors of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire gathered to take stock of the devastation and look towards the future...
San Francisco - Fishermans Wharf
Today Fisherman’s Wharf is one of the busiest and well-known tourist destinations in the United States, packed with seafood restaurants, shops, sidewalk entertainment and dockside attractions. But this element has only defined Fisherman’s Wharf for a few decades. Also here is an active fishing fleet that has been the lifeblood of San Francisco’s northern shore for the better part of a century-and-a-half.
Immigrants from Genoa and Sicily pioneered the San Francisco fishing industry in small, sail-powered craft called feluccas. The bay was stuffed with these traditional Italian fishing vessels until the end of the 1800s when they began to be replaced with hardier, more modern fishing boats with motors that permitted year-round fishing. When they brought their catch to the docks often they would drop fresh seafood directly into boiling cauldrons for diners. Later came fish stands and then it-down restaurants. Some of the fleets operating out of Fisherman’s Wharf are manned by third- and fourth-generation family fishermen.
The prize quarry for Fisherman’s Wharf fishermen is the Dungeness crab that takes its name from the port of Dungeness, Washington and is the West Coast’s most commercially important crustacean. A century ago the Dungeness crab, which can grow 8-10 inches across, was gathered in abundance on the sandy shores around San Francisco Bay but over the years as its natural food, clams, disappeared from the Bay and the crab has migrated into deeper ocean waters. Today crab season does not open until November with an eagerly anticipated celebration along Fisherman’s Wharf.
But there is plenty to see on Fisherman’s Wharf any time of year. Our walking tour will begin at the eastern end of the wharf district and work our way west, towards the Golden Gate, hugging the historic waterfront as we go...
Of all 44 of San Francisco’s hills, Nob Hill was the most desirable to build a house on in the early days of San Francisco. It was centrally located and it had the best views. And at 376 feet above the waterfront it offered a refuge from the bawdiness of the unwashed masses for those who could afford to build here. In fact, the name “Nob” is reputedly a contraction of the Hindu word “nabob” which meant a wealthy or powerful person.
The first of those nabobs came with riches from the 1848 gold strike when there was just sandy scrub covering the hill. The defining mansions of Nob Hill were built by all four of the Big Four, the quartet of railroad barons of the Central Pacific Railroad who engineered the Transcontinental Railroad - Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. They were followed to Nob Hill by two of the “Silver Kings” from Nevada’s Comstock Lode, James Flood and James Fair, who were spreading money from America’s biggest silver strike.
The mansions on the hill in the 1870s were something to behold. Commoners would trudge up the steep sides of Nob Hill - almost a 25% grade on the south side - just to take a look. When adventure novelist Robert Louis Stevenson came to town for a visit in 1882 he called it “the hill of palaces.” The residents of Nob Hill constructed their own cable car line, the California Street Railroad Company in 1878 and it is still the least painful way to ascend the hill.
The 1906 Earthquake and Fire showed no deference to wealth and the Nob Hill neighborhood was completely destroyed, just like 28,000 other buildings in the city. All of the grand mansions save one, the only one not built of wood, was left in rubble. And the millionaires did not rebuild. Not one. They moved westward, to Pacific Heights mostly or completely out of town.
But the money did not leave Nob Hill altogether. You still had those million-dollar views and that great location. So swanky hotels rose on the ruins of the historic mansions. And then came posh apartment houses. Nob Hill was still, and always, a places for nobs. Our walking tour of Nob Hill will remember its beginnings and explore the present and we will begin on the site of one of those splendid 19th century mansions that was not built over but left as open space for ever more...
San Francisco - Telegraph Hill
San Francisco has 44 named hills; seven stand out as the “Original Seven Hills” - Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Rincon Hill, Mount Sutro, Twin Peaks and Mount Davidson. The Spaniards called this protuberance Loma Alt or “High Hill” and early San Franciscans knew it as Goat Hill. It became Telegraph Hill in 1849 after a windmill-like structure was constructed on top that signaled the nature of incoming ships entering through the Golden Gate. this information was used by financiers, merchants and speculators in the know to negotiate commodity prices. The coming of the real electrical telegraph made the semaphore system obsolete with a decade but the name never left.
In the 1920s, Telegraph Hill became with North Beach a destination for poets and bohemian intellectuals. Telegraph Hill was the residential area; North Beach was a neighborhood of cafes and bars that became internationally known as the epicenter of the Beat Generation in the 1950s.
Our walking tour will begin near San Francisco Bay and climb up Telegraph Hill and back down into North Beach before finishing down Broadway that developed into the town’s red light entertainment district as the remnants of San Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast. And we will begin at the headquarters of one of San Francisco’s iconic companies...
In 1847 when Jasper O’Farrell sketched out a street plan for San Francisco, he left two spaces open for a public plaza. This was one of them. The area got its name when it was used for rallies of support for the Union Army during the Civil War. Today the battles fought in the blocks around Union Square are for the credit cards of consumers who crowd one of the largest collections of department stores, upscale boutiques, tourist trinket shops, art galleries, and salons in the United States.
From its inception Union Square has played the role of ceremonial heart of San Francisco by hosting public events, concerts and holiday celebrations throughout the year. Each year a painted heart from a local artist is installed at the four corners of Union Square that will be auctioned off to benefit the San Francisco General Hospital.
In addition to world-famous retail stores, the streets surrounding Union Square are stuffed with venerable theaters, grand hotels and historic clubhouses. Originally this was a park surrounded by churches and residences but the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 changed all that. To see how the last century has transformed Union Square we will begin where Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds began, at the center of the square...
America’s tenth-largest city got under way on November 29, 1777 as El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, the first civilian town in the Spanish colony of Nueva California. After California was granted statehood and following intense lobbying at the Constitutional Convention, the first town also became the first capital. Town leaders hastily purchased a two-story hotel under construction to accommodate the state legislature but an unusually wet winter delayed progress on the building. After holding senate sessions in private houses and slogging through knee-deep muddy streets the disgruntled legislators voted to move the capital from San Jose before the third session convened. California’s first capitol building was left vacant and was destroyed by fire in 1853.
There were efforts to bring the capital back to San Jose over the years but for the most part the town settled in as a farming community supporting the agriculture industry that was exploding in the surrounding Santa Clara Valley. When World II ended the valley was the last vast undeveloped land surrounding San Francisco Bay; the population of San Jose was less than 100,000 in 1950.
The City opened its arms to growth, annexed some areas to provide room for suburbs and the population would grow ten-fold before the 20th century ended. The town would come to encompass almost 180 square miles. The economic engine for the boom came from technology as the San Jose area became home to the largest concentration of highly-educated expertise in the world - more than 6,600 technology companies employ over 250,000 people in the region today.
Despite some of the most amazing growth in United State history, however, the heart of the city has never strayed far from the original assemblage of adobe brick structures in the Pueblo of San Jose and that is where our walking tour of the Capital of Silicon Valley will explore...
It is hard to imagine a town getting off to a less rousing start than Coburn Station. The bad vibes started 17 years before there was even a settlement here, in 1846, when 87 pioneers who had set out in wagon trains from Missouri became trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Donner Party took shelter in three cabins that had been constructed two years earlier up by Truckee Lake. With food running out and winter promising little relief fifteen men and women tried to cross the mountains on handmade snowshoes but became disoriented in the sea of white. Seven members survived to be rescued and finally a third relief attempt brought 48 of the original travelers to California. The tragedy of the Donner Party would have been a tragic footnote among the hundreds of thousands of overland emigrants to Oregon and California but almost immediately stories of cannibalism by the survivors began to leak out. With the fire of sensationalism lit the saga of the unlucky Donner Party would be recounted over and over with varying degrees of luridness in magazines, books and popular culture for decades. Around Truckee landmarks abound with the Donner name - a state park, the mountain pass the settlers never made it through, the main road in town and on and on. Truckee Lake is now Donner Lake.
Whatever bad karma existed here for potential settlers was trumped by the advantages in the location. The Truckee River is the only outlet from Lake Tahoe and provided super clean water in the valley. And the Truckee Basin was a natural stopping point for east-west travelers - you could tie up your horse and rest up before tackling the intimidating Sierra Nevada if heading west or you could recuperate coming down out of the mountains traveling east. So, in 1863 Coburn Station got under way in earnest around the only stage road through the Sierras - and five years later it mostly burnt to the ground.
The town rebuilt quickly but took a new name - Truckee, like the river and lake. Truckee is an approximation of a great Paiute chief named Tru-ki-zo who proved friendly to western settlers. He supposedly approached with shouts of “Tro-kay” which was a friendly greeting. The first order of business for the new town of Truckee was the Transcontinental Railroad that was being built right by its front door. Unimaginable quantities of lumber were needed to complete the 19th century’s greatest building project - for buildings, trestles, bridges, railroad ties, tunnel supports and, for the track near Truckee, enormous wooden “snow sheds” constructed over the tracks to enable the trains to run in winter. There were sheds shielding forty miles of track in the Sierra Nevada mountains above Truckee. The giant virgin stands of lodgepole pine came down so quickly that twenty-five sawmills were operating along the Truckee River trying to keep up.
Everything was built soon enough and industry drifted away from Truckee but the travelers kept coming. In the 20th century skiing became a popular winter pasttime and word got out that Lake Tahoe is the best lake in America. The old stagecoach path became Interstate 80 and Truckee established itself as a resort town.
Not much new has been built in town lately and many of the Victorian structures now house tourist-related businesses. Our walking tour of Truckee will start not on today’s main drag but a block away on a more historic avenue where the Dutch Flat-Donner Lake Wagon Road once ran, where the largest red light district of any small town in the West once flourished and which is named for the wooden spar on a ship that extends past the bow...