San Francisco 20th Century History: The City Builds
Recovering from the jolt of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, San Francisco continued to grow.The Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 conferred upon San Francisco the Marina District (newly filled land) and the beloved Palace of Fine Arts, a recreation of ancient ruins that architect Bernard Maybeck envisioned as a building to evoke "sadness modified by the feeling that beauty has a soothing influence."
Also in 1915, San Francisco's gilded City Hall, with its signature dome, was completely replaced after the San Francisco 1906 earthquake.
Alcatraz Island Prison and the Hetch Hetchy Dam (a flooded sister to Yosemite Valley that supplies San Francisco's water) became forever linked with San Francisco history in 1934. The Golden Gate Bridge's awe-inspiring expanse and distinctive ruddy shade of International Orange was born in 1933.
World War II brought a flood of ship building to the Bay and by 1980, San Francisco had the landmark Transamerica Pyramid, the Yerba Buena Gardens and the Davies Symphony Hall.
San Francisco Counterculture: Beatnik 1950s and Psychedelic 1960s
The new developments in San Francisco's infrastructure came alongside a radical development in San Francisco's culture.San Francisco Chronicle columnist coined the phrase "Beatnik" to describe the wave of poets, thinkers and writers sharing a common disenchantment with American values and the established order that flourished in San Francisco's cafes, fueled by espressos in havens such as North Beach's City Lights.
In the 1960s, the disenchantment espoused by the Beatniks evolved into a truly San Franciscan historical phenomenon: the Hippie Generation. Peace, love and psychic expansion through psychedelics thrived in the Haight Ashbury and the peaceful greens of Golden Gate Park. Today, the Haight and Ashbury cross street is sacred ground for those who remember the days when optimism and wonder filled San Francisco's consciousness.
San Francisco Tech Boom
If 1950s and 1960s San Francisco was the decade of Counterculture, San Francisco in the 1990s rushed in the era of Cyberculture. Seemingly overnight, San Francisco bustled with digital-age miners looking to strike it rich on technology's vast frontier. The city swelled with money, restaurants and bars overflowed with "yuppies" living in swank new lofts and high rent apartments (the byproduct of mass evictions and displacements), while the fat of venture capital fueled spending and digital dreams. The tech bubble burst in 2001, and San Francisco, just as soon as it had filled, drained in months.Credits: http://www.sanfrancisco.com/history/
