Talk:San Francisco, California/Proposed History summary
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Native Americans inhabited the San Francisco Bay Area at least 10,000 years ago; the most recent inhabitants prior to European settlement were the Yelamu. By the middle of the 19th century, disease and warfare with European settlers had virtually wiped out the indigenous tribes.
The first European to reach the San Francisco Bay was the Spanish explorer Don Gaspar de Portolà, in 1770. The first Spanish mission, Mission San Francisco de Asis, was established six years later. Though Spain held the port until the Mexican revolution, there was also British settlement in the area from 1792 onward (the earlier English explorer Sir Francis Drake had missed San Francisco entirely, due to the bay's characteristic foggy weather). Russians also coexisted with the Europeans, having colonized Northern California as far south as Sonoma County.
The United States claimed the city on January 30, 1847, during the Mexican-American War. At that point, despite its useful location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. But a year later, the California gold rush brought a wave of migration and immigration, raising the population from 1,000 to 25,000 by December 1849. The railroad, banking, and mining industries became major economic forces in the city. San Francisco became a county when California became a U.S. state in 1850; the county originally included what is now San Mateo County.
The influx of Chinese workers created a sizable Chinatown district, and Chinese Americans remain one of the city's largest ethnic groups. Hostility toward immigrants contributed to lynchings and race riots in the 1850s, and to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which drastically restricted immigration from China until 1943.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the fires that followed it (burning out of control due to the loss of water supply), destroyed approximately 80% of the city, including almost all of the downtown core. At least 3,000 died, while refugees settled temporarily in Golden Gate Park and in undeveloped areas.
The opening of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1936 and 1937 made the city more accessible, and its population grew faster in the 1940s due to its importance as a military base in World War II. Urban planning projects in the 1950s further transformed the city, tearing down and redeveloping many neighborhoods and introducing major freeways.
In the second half of the 20th century, San Francisco became a magnet for America's counterculture, drawing artists, Beat Generation writers, rock musicians and hippies. It also became a center of the Gay Liberation movement; San Francisco has a higher percentage of gay men and lesbians than any other major U.S. city.
A further wave of economic expansion and physical development began in the 1980s, with a boom in construction of skyscrapers and high-rise apartments that some referred to as "Manhattanization". During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, large numbers of entrepreneurs and computer software professionals moved into the city, followed by marketing and sales professionals, and changed the social landscape as once poorer neighborhoods became gentrified; the boom was over by 2001, but housing has remained expensive. Homelessness has been an intractable problem for the last two decades, aggravated by economic disparities, drug addiction, and the closing of state institutions for the mentally ill.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused significant destruction and loss of life throughout the Bay Area. In San Francisco, the quake severely damaged many of the city's freeways, as well as the Marina District and the South of Market.
