French Quarter (San Francisco)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The French Quarter in downtown San Francisco, California is an historic enclave of restaurants, cafes, hotels and institutions centered on Bush Street and in the adjacent alleys of Belden Place and Claude Lane near San Francisco's Chinatown (Chinatown, San Francisco) and Union Square.
This area was the home to the city's first French settlers. According to historian Gladys Hansen, they were more sympathetic than most Europeans and Americans of the housing and employment needs of the Chinese settlers in the nascent days of Chinatown, and they shared Dupont Street (now Grant Avenue) as a business address -- a tolerance that was only tested, according to Alexandre Dumas in A Gil Blas in California (1852), when Chinese cooks began to tamper with French cuisine. The cafes, hotels and restaurants of the French Quarter today maintain a distinct joie de vivre befitting the Quarter's heritage. Every year, the area is the site of the boisterous Bastille Day celebration, the nation's largest, and Bush Street is temporarily re-named Buisson. Landmarks in the French Quarter include the venerated Notre-Dame-des-Victoires church, where Sunday mass is celebrated in French, the offices of the French Consulate, and two local francophile institutions: Café de la Presse and Le Central. The Alliance Française of San Francisco is several blocks to the West.
