Telegraph Hill, San Francisco
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Telegraph Hill (elev 275 ft, 83 m) refers to a small district in San Francisco, California. Its main feature is Coit Tower, which stands atop the hill.
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[edit] Location
A much quieter neighborhood than adjoining North Beach and its bustling cafés and nightlife, Telegraph Hill is a mostly residential area. Aside from Coit Tower, it is well-known for its gardens flowing down Filbert Street down to Levi's Plaza. The neighborhood is bounded by Vallejo Street to the south, Sansome Street to the east, Francisco Street to the north and Powell Street and Columbus Avenue to the west, where the southwestern corner of Telegraph Hill overlaps with the North Beach neighborhood.
[edit] History
Originally named Loma Alta ("High Hill") by the Spaniards, the hill was then familarly known as Goat Hill by the early San Franciscans, and became the neighborhood of choice for many Irish immigrants. From 1825 through 1847, the area between Sansome & Battery, Broadway and Vallejo streets was used as a burial ground for foreign non-Catholic seamen.
The hill owes its current name to a semaphore, a windmill-like structure erected in September 1849, for the purpose of signaling to the rest of the city the nature of the ships entering the Golden Gate. Atop the newly-built house, the marine telegraph consisted of a pole with two raisable arms that could form various configurations, each corresponding a specific meaning: steamer, sailing boat, etc. The information was used by observers operating for financiers, merchants, wholesalers and speculators. As some of these information consumers would know the nature of the cargo carried by the ship they could quickly predict the upcoming (generally lower) local prices for those goods and commodities carried. Those who did not have advance information on the cargo might pay a too-high price from a merchant unloading his stock of a commodity — a price that was about to drop.
On October 18, 1850, the ship Oregon signaled to the hill as it was entering the Golden Gate the news of California's recently acquired statehood. A redundant station was built at Point Lobos in 1853. However, with the advent of the electrical telegraph in 1862, the system quickly became obsolete and was eventually dismantled, but the hill and its surrounding neighborhood have retained the name of Telegraph Hill.
In the 1920s, Telegraph Hill became with North Beach a destination for poets and bohemian intellectuals, dreaming of turning it into a West Coast West Village.
Today Telegraph Hill is known for supporting a flock of feral parrots (primarily Red-masked Parakeets), most of whom are descended from escaped or released pets.
[edit] Movies featuring Telegraph Hill
- After the Thin Man
- Dark Passage
- Vertigo
- The House on Telegraph Hill
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers
- North Beach
- The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
- The Hulk (final scene)
- The Enforcer, the third film in Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series
[edit] Trivia
- The 1360 Montgomery building, featured in the 1947 film noir Dark Passage and where Lauren Bacall's character resides, is a typical example of modern architecture.
- The local wild parrots (depicted in the 2003 documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill) are Cherry-headed conures, also known as red-masked parakeets, an indigenous species from Peru. They are also often spotted farther east on Embarcadero Plaza, and seem to have spawned a colony in the Cupertino area, in the South Bay.
- Sail ships brought cargo to San Francisco, but needed ballast when leaving. Rocks for ballast were quarried from the bay side of Telegraph Hill. Exposed rock from this quarrying is still visible from the Filbert Steps.
