SAN FRANCISCO

byname Frisco, city and port, coextensive with San Francisco county, northern California, U.S., located on a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. It is a cultural and financial centre of the western United States and one of the country's most cosmopolitan cities. San Francisco holds a secure place in the United States' romantic dream of itselfa cool, elegant, handsome, worldly seaport whose steep streets offer breathtaking views of one of the world's great bays. San Franciscans, according to the dream, are sophisticates whose lives hold full measures of such civilized pleasures as music, art, and good food. Their city is a magic place, almost an island, saved by its location and its history from the overpowering ugliness that, again according to the dream, afflicts so much of the rest of urban California. For all the truth there may be in this picture, there is, of course, also another San Francisco in which the per capita consumption of alcohol is the highest of any U.S. city, the suicide rate is higher than the national average, and the divorce rate is several times that of New York City. San Francisco is clearly a city in which the tensions between the dream and the reality have been costly. Furthermore, since World War II, San Francisco has had to come to grips with the common urban problems of pollution of both the air and the water; the ugliness that comes from rampant building, violence, and vandalism; and the decay of the inner city. San Francisco has been shrinking as families, mainly white and middle-class, have moved to its suburbs, leaving the city to a population that, viewed statistically, tends to be older and to have fewer married people and fewer whites than the stereotype has it. Almost one of every two San Franciscans is, in the sterile term of the census taker, nonwhitein this case black, East Asian, Filipino, Samoan, or American Indian. Many others are immigrants from Spanish America. Their dreams increasingly demand a realization that has little to do with the romantic dream of San Francisco. But both the dreams and the realities are important, for they are interwoven in the fabric of the city that might be called Paradox-by-the-Bay. city, northeastern Crdoba provincia, north-central Argentina, on the border of Santa F provincia at the northern edge of the Pampa. Founded in 1886 and given city status in 1915, it has been a railroad centre since the 19th century and is a commercial and manufacturing centre for an agricultural (grain and flax) and pastoral area. Major products include linseed oil, batteries, leather goods, shoes, dairy products, agricultural tools, and frozen meat. San Francisco is linked by railroad and highway to Crdoba, the provincial capital, and to Buenos Aires. Pop. (1980) Greater San Francisco, 58,616. city and port, coextensive with San Francisco county, northern California, U.S., located at the northern end of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. San Francisco is a cultural and financial centre of the western United States and one of the country's most cosmopolitan cities. The Coit Memorial Tower on Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. At left is Alcatraz Island in San San Francisco lies on extremely hilly terrain. The largest of the city's hills are Twin Peaks, Mount Davidson, and Mount Sutro, all more than 900 feet (270 m) in height. The best known are Nob Hill, where the wealthy nobs built extravagant mansions in the 1870s, and Telegraph Hill, which once looked down on the Barbary Coast. San Francisco is rainy and mild in winter, sunny and mild in spring, foggy and cool in summer, and sunny and warm in fall. The average mean minimum temperature is 51 F (11 C), the average mean maximum 63 F (17 C). The mean rainfall, almost all of which occurs between November and April, is about 21 inches (533 mm). Economic life in San Francisco is dominated by service industries, many of which are geared toward the city's large numbers of tourists. Finance and international trade also constitute important parts of the economy. The city is headquarters of two of the country's largest banksBank of America and Wells Fargo Bank. It is also the seat of the Pacific Stock Exchange. Imports and exports passing through the San Francisco Customs District make the combined ports of San Francisco BaySan Francisco, Oakland, Alameda, Sacramento, and Stocktonone of the most active international ports in the country. San Francisco's population is highly diverse, both ethnically and socially. The city has large communities of Asians, Italians, blacks, and Hispanics. Each of the city's neighbourhoods has its own distinctive character. The central business district has an impressive array of high-rise buildings, including the 52-story Bank of America building and the 48-story Transamerica Corporation building, with a spire that resembles an elongated pyramid. San Francisco's Chinatown, said to be the largest Chinese community outside Asia, is renowned for its colourful shops and restaurants. Other major neighbourhoods include Japan Town, the Fillmore district, Russian Hill, and the Mission district, the latter the home of Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Central America. The Marina district, in the northern part of the city, was heavily damaged during the earthquake of Oct. 17, 1989. Universities in the Bay Area include the University of California (1855), located across the bay in Berkeley, and Stanford University (opened 1891), down the peninsula in Palo Alto. Within San Francisco, institutions of higher education include San Francisco State University (1899; formerly San Francisco State College) and the University of San Francisco (1855), a Jesuit institution. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. San Francisco has a well-developed transportation system. A rapid-transit system known as BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), which opened in 1972, operates for a total of 75 miles (120 km) between San Francisco and the East Bay cities of Oakland and Berkeley. For automobile transportation, San Francisco is connected to the East Bay by the 8.25-mile- (13-kilometre-) long San FranciscoOakland Bay Bridge (damaged in the earthquake of 1989) and to Marin county on the north by the famous Golden Gate Bridge (see photograph). The city is also served by a major international airport, located 7 miles (11 km) south of the citycounty limits. Area city, 46 square miles (120 square km); San Francisco metropolitan area, 2,482 square miles (6,428 square km). Pop. (1990) city, 723,959; San Francisco PMSA, 1,603,678; San FranciscoOaklandSan Jose CMSA, 6,253,311. Additional reading For accounts of the early history of San Francisco, the serious reader should not be discouraged by the bulk and variousness of the works of the historians Hubert Howe Bancroft and Theodore H. Hittell; the latter is particularly readable. Frank Soul, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (1855), is invaluable; while Benjamin E. Lloyd, Lights and Shades of San Francisco (1876), is both vivid and divertingly moralistic. Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast (1934, reprinted 1968), is a classic account of the underworld; while Julia Cooley Altrocchi, The Spectacular San Franciscans (1949), is a useful social history. John Haskell Kemble, San Francisco Bay: A Pictorial Maritime History (1957), contains splendid drawings and photographs. William Bronson, The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned (1959), is a first-rate historical account of the 1906 earthquake. The growth of San Francisco is treated in Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (1975); John B. McGloin, San Francisco: The Story of a City (1978), is a popular history; and Frederick M. Wirt, Power in the City: Decision Making in San Francisco (1974, reissued 1978), is a study of local politics. The Writers' Program, California, San Francisco: The Bay and Its Cities, new rev. ed. (1973), is a popular guide; San Francisco Bay (1957), written by the naturalist-conservationist Harold Gilliam, is authoritative and evocative; and Mellier G. Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective (1959), is a systematic description of the metropolitan area. See also Gladys Hansen, San Francisco Almanac: Everything You Wanted to Know About the City (1980); and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters, Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from the Beginnings to the Present Day (1980). Kenneth Lamott Gladys Cox Hansen