2005 OAH Convention SupplementVisiting San Francisco |
||
|
|
While in
Founded in 1922, after three earlier attempts failed, the California Historical Society collects manuscripts, maps, posters, books, and pamphlets in its North Baker Research Library. The library is open Wednesday through Friday, noon to 4:30 p.m. The photography collection holds over 500,000 images and the Fine Arts Collections contain 5,000 works of art, reflecting all aspects of
The Castro A neighborhood especially prominent during the 1970s and 1980s for its gay cultural and political life, it remains a lively center for the city’s queer culture, even as many other areas stand prominent in San Francisco’s queer history and contemporary life. The Castro theatre, designed in 1922, remains the city’s classic and beautiful movie palace seating 1,600 people. Great restaurants run along Castro and Market streets, with a tradition of courtyard dining for brunches and lunch, and nightlife long after midnight. Chinatown Initially welcomed in San Francisco during the gold rush, Chinese immigrants soon encountered hostility from a vast sector of California’s growing population who sought exclusive civil and legal rights for those deemed ‘white.’ As anti-Chinese laws and practices developed, the Chinese population increasingly congregated in what became a fifteen-block area at the heart of the city’s center. The 1882 Exclusion Act allowed only those Chinese from an elite sector of persons, including merchants, students, scholars, and diplomats, to enter the United States. On Angel Island, an immigration station placed in San Francisco Bay primarily to regulate Chinese migration, legal immigrants, and paper sons and daughters from China (people seeking entrance who did not qualify under the Act but who claimed affiliation with someone who did) experienced humiliating circumstances until shortly before the Act’s repeal in 1943. Chinatown survived through the concerted efforts of Chinese American leaders who, for example, hired architects to rebuild a Chinatown that fit the Orientalist fantasies of the era after the 1906 quake. In doing so, they circumvented the attempts of the city to move the population entirely out of its central location. With its own economic infrastructure, political parties, and social and cultural institutions, Chinatown and its residents played a role in twentieth-century Chinese national politics and have influenced San Francisco politics and urban life. Today representing one of many Chinese neighborhoods in a city that uses Mandarin on voter ballots and school forms alongside English and Spanish, it remains an important place for Chinese Americans and newer immigrants. Note the plaques on many street corners and in alleyways that describe particular places and guide people through the neighborhoods’ history. Excellent restaurants with a diverse array of ethnic Chinese specialties abound. Civic Center and U.N. Plaza Initially inspired by the design ideas of the City Beautiful Movement, the plan for the Civic Center area began to be formulated in 1904, and continued after the 1906 earthquake to produce first-rate examples of French High Baroque Revival. City Hall, which initially took thirty years to build at an exorbitant price, opened in 1899 only to collapse in the 1906 quake. The current City Hall opened in 1915, and constituted the first major project of architect Arthur Brown Jr. after he completed his studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Each of its 600 rooms allow natural light to enter, making prominent the ornamental iron work, elaborate plasterwork, and giant dome (modeled after St. Peter’s in Rome.) After four years of earthquake retrofit, a system of rubber-and-steel “base isolators” now allow the building to move nearly a meter in any direction when the earth quakes. Long the chosen site of celebrity civil marriages, it gained national attention after Mayor Newsom opened the registry to over 400 lesbian and gay couples in 2004, before the courts halted the weddings and eventually ruled against the couples’ civil liberties. The renowned San Francisco ballet and opera companies perform in the War Memorial Opera House which opened in 1932 and, as the other major buildings, conforms to the Beaux Arts style of City Hall. In 1945, governments signed the charter for the United Nations in the War Memorial building. U.N. Plaza runs right behind the San Francisco Public Library, and both form an important part of the San Francisco’s civic life. The plaza contains monuments and plaques to commemorate member nations. A Farmer’s Market on Wednesday and Sunday brings fresh produce and regional farm goods, and is especially frequented by the neighborhoods’ Vietnamese and Cambodian residents. The Asian Art Museum now utilizes the original public library that opened in 1917. The Museum and new library, situated beside each other and across from City Hall, are well worth a visit, on a walking tour that might include U.N. Plaza and City Hall. Davies Symphony Hall, next to the War Memorial Opera House, possesses state-of-the-art acoustics and combines contemporary architecture with gestures to French Classicism. Both the ballet and symphony will be performing at the time of the convention. The Embarcadero and Ferry Building The containerization of ocean shipping, after 1960, led to the decline of the Port of San Francisco, as there was insufficient space for container yards along the city’s waterfront. The loading and unloading of container ships shifted to the Port of Oakland, across the bay, although the headquarters of the major local unions of longshore workers remain in San Francisco. The ferries that landed from Oakland and elsewhere almost every twenty-minutes since the 1870s declined with the completion of the Bay Bridge (1939; electric trains and trucks ran on the lower deck until the late 1950s,) and BART. Many plaques and public art work placed along the Embarcadero walkway address the history of the waterfront and make for an excellent walk that extends as far as Fisherman’s wharf. A Saturday farmers market in the redesigned Ferry Building brings organic produce and other goods grown in northern and central California to a large public. The building itself remains a gem, and the many restaurants and stalls within it offer outstanding food from the region for fairly reasonable prices. The ferry building is an especially good place for lunch. Rincon Center, on Mission Street between Steuart and Spear, contains restored murals in the WPA style that traces the history of California from precolonial times until the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and displays of archaeological artifacts from the site. The intersection of Mission and Steuart streets was the site where police killed two men on July 5, 1934, leading to the San Francisco general strike. The intersection of Market and Steuart Streets also was the site where a bomb exploded in the midst of a parade promoting preparedness in 1916, leading to the imprisonment of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings from 1916 until 1939. The Italianate building on Market between Steuart and Spear was formerly the headquarters of the Southern Pacific Company, which its adversaries condemned as the “octopus” in the late nineteenth-century, giving Frank Norris the title for his novel. The Fillmore or Japantown and Japan Center Before the relocation of Japanese-Americans at the start of WWII, this neighborhood covered about forty blocks that housed a large Japanese community. With the tragic relocation, many families lost and sold their homes and businesses. During the war years, African American families, many of whom relocated to the Bay Area for the abundant war-related manufacturing jobs, moved into what became known as the Fillmore District. Many of the neighborhood’s original Japanese families settled elsewhere after being released from the camps, yet returned to the area to shop, and attend cultural and religious events. Currently about 4 percent of San Francisco’s Japanese community lives in the district, where the city built the Japan Center in 1968. A beautiful Peace Plaza Garden and architecturally acclaimed Peace Pagoda stand prominently outside the three-block long covered mall with Japanese-language bookshops, sushi bars, noodle joints, antique, and houseware shops. A month-long celebration of Japanese culture takes place here in April, as do ceremonies of memory at other times during the year. The Japan Center and surrounding restaurants have an excellent array of Japanese cuisine. During the war years, the Fillmore District became an important center of African American life. The neighborhood fostered black intellectual, political, and cultural leaders, and became nationally known for its jazz scene. Though a flourishing neighborhood for residents who fought hard to sustain their lives and property there, it became the city’s first massive site for urban renewal. A long and protracted neighborhood battle ensued, but urban renewal ultimately left huge areas destroyed and long vacant, and pushed over a thousand black families out of their homes. Some relocated to Bayview and Hunter’s Point, neighborhoods in the southeast corner of the city, around Third Street. The Japan Center exists on the northern edge of the Fillmore District, and the larger area has a mixture of older homes and projects that suggest the meager gains of the urban struggle, and the devastation wrought by the redevelopment policies of the 1950s and 1960s. The Fillmore Historic Jazz District represents a more recent attempt to revive the area. Visit the 50-year old Boom Boom Room for blues, and the newer, state-of-the-art Rasselas for jazz, both on Fillmore near Geary, by the Japan Center. Golden Gate Park The city petitioned the board of land commissioners for the property of Golden Gate Park in 1852 and invited Frederick Law Olmsted to visit the proposed site of sand dunes that composed over 1,000 acres, running from the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to the ocean. Olmsted declined work on that patch of shifting dunes and barren, windswept land. William Hammond Hall, however, began to design the park in 1866, though it took much of the later part of the century to move the squatters, who claimed ownership by right of possession. In 1890 John McLaren became superintendent of gardening, and for the next half century, he “tacked down the sand” by planting grass and trees fed by tons of water, manure, and humus. In 1931 alone, he planted about a million trees and introduced 700 new species of shrubs and trees into California. Though critically evaluated today for its environmental impact, the green lawns (where all are invited to walk and rest), the gardens, forests, lakes, and meadows offer an incredible array of sites for multiple kinds of recreation and beauty. The Japanese Tea Garden offers a particularly special area for contemplation and to enjoy simple pleasures. The Mission District The Mission District, with Mission Dolores on its western edge, constitutes a large, working class neighborhood with a vibrant street life. Built on a flat plain, and sunnier than most city neighborhoods, it early developed a multiethnic, socially stratified population interspersed among the farms and ranches. By the end of the nineteenth century, a strongly Irish, unionized working class predominated. After World War II, the district’s population became increasingly Mexican and Central American. A large number of former Spanish-language movie theaters on Mission Street, now used for other purposes, remain visible along with an array of Latino and Asian businesses, especially between 16th and 24th Streets. Walk east on 24th Street to Balmy Alley, a famous backyard alley full of murals that have gained international recognition, as have other murals painted throughout the neighborhood. Walk farther east on 24th Street to the Galería de la Raza, an internationally known Chicano/Latino art gallery and store. Modern Times and Bolerium Books are located in the Mission, together with other bookstores, art, and theater spaces. A wide variety of excellent restaurants exist on Mission and Valencia streets. Among the favorites are La Rondalla, Foreign Cinema, the Savannah Club for dinner and live jazz, and El Rio, for Latin music and dance. North Beach North Beach began with an ethnically mixed population including Peruvians, Chileans, and Mexicans who settled there after the 1849 gold rush. While retaining a multiethnic character, immigration from northern Italy created an area whose built structure resembled an Italian fishing community. As some Italian residents moved to the southern edge of the city to farm, the migration of anarchists and intellectuals, fishers, merchants, and laborers continued into the twentieth century. Some became prominent businessmen and politicians, including the founder of the Bank of America. The comparatively bohemian character of the neighborhood attracted Beat poets during the 1950s, and City Lights bookstore remains one of the cultural gems found among great family-style, well-priced restaurants and classic bars. Sonoma Sonoma is one of the few Northern California towns that retains many physical reminders of its Mexican heritage. Mission San Francisco Solano is among several adobe buildings surrounding the original plaza, now a handsome town square. Mariano Vallejo’s Petaluma adobe, the largest private residence built in California during the Mexican period, is located a few miles west of town. The Sonoma mission was the last and northernmost of the Franciscan institutions and the only one started during the Mexican period. Established in Pomo Indian territory in 1824, the mission settlement was formally transformed into a pueblo or civilian town in 1835. Eleven years later American settlers gathered in the plaza to proclaim the California “Bear Flag Republic,” an expression of Manifest Destiny extremism that was part of the process of American conquest during the U.S.-Mexican War. Anglo residents occupied the land, displacing the Vallejo family, which had grabbed most of the former mission property in the 1830s. In the 1850s Agaston Haraszthy began the modern California wine industry at nearby Buena Vista Vineyards. The town remains a center of viticulture, with several notable wineries and attractive tasting rooms located in the area. In the early twentieth century, author Jack London attempted to establish a model farm a few miles north of Sonoma , and his estate, along with many of the town’s historic structures, is currently part of the California state park system. Fine restaurants and gift shops now face the old plaza, but in the surrounding vineyards and wineries, Mexican immigrant workers are the foundation of the region’s agricultural economy. They are the most profound expressions of the town’s Latino heritage, the latest participants in a migration north from Mexico that began two centuries ago. South of Market (SOMA) This area remained a densely populated district of multifamily homes, and single-room hotels and apartment buildings whose population worked along the waterfront and in the industries that once made San Francisco the largest manufacturer on the West Coast. In the latter part of the twentieth century, block after block gave way to new buildings or new uses reflecting an economy sustained by banking, tourism, services, and cyberspace, but not without substantial urban protest. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, built on and around contested sites, are surrounded by a large park decorated with public art, including a waterfall memorial to Martin Luther King. These museums form a nexus for the California Historical Society and other smaller organizations, museums, large hotels and upscale shopping malls nearby. Go to
|
|