Few Facts about San Francisco .....
- Lombard Street gets all the love, but Filbert St. between Hyde and Leavenworth Streets is the steepest—31.5 degrees!
- San Francisco was part of Mexico until the Mexican-American War in 1848.
- During the Depression, not a single San Francisco-based bank failed.
- Business was so good, the city constructed the Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge during the Depression.
- When Al Capone was held at Alcatraz, he gave regular Sunday concerts with the inmate band, the Rock Islanders. He played the banjo.
- In 1901, the city outlawed burials. Most of its cemeteries are in Colma, Calif. There, the dead outnumber the living by over 1000 to 1.
- The “Summer of Love” actually started in the winter. The January 1967 Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park kicked it off.
- Speaking of seasonal confusion, Mark Twain wasn’t as down on San Francisco’s weather as some people would have you believe. Twain never uttered the quote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
- The neighborhoods of Marina, Mission Bay, and Hunters Point are all built a top a landfill.
- The first bubonic plague epidemic in the continental US broke out in SF’s Chinatown in 1900.
- As historical beginnings go, the United Nations Charter was drafted and ratified in San Francisco in 1945
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he Liberty Bell once vacationed in San Francisco! When San Francisco hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, America’s most famous bell made a national train tour to be part of the fun. After the exposition ended, it returned to Philadelphia, where it’s stayed ever since. Once you’ve seen San Francisco, why travel anywhere else?