Inside SF
The San Francisco Scoop
SF History
Current affairs inspired articles on San Francisco’s fascinating history.
San Francisco In Film Noir
Noir as a genre was really birthed in San Francisco, in 1922, when short stories by a writer called Dashiell Hammett began being published in literary magazine The Smart Set. It wasn’t known as ‘Noir’ at the time, these were considered to be, more or less, just pulp crime stories. But Hammett had worked as…
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The Great Fire & How It Changed SF
The Great Fire is one of the most cataclysmic moments in the history of San Francisco. In many respects it’s the big “before and after” event here. Some buildings survived – the St Francis Hotel, the Flood Mansion, the Fairmont Hotel and the Ferry Building were amongst the few – but so much of the city was…
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San Francisco’s Founding
If you look at a map of the West Coast of the U.S. it seems logical that there would be a port in the Bay Area. It’s far and away the best natural harbor between San Diego and Seattle, so it seems entirely natural – almost ordained really – that San Francisco exists. However, like…
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Old Chinatown: Crime & Vice
San Francisco has the oldest Chinatown in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the West. Chinese first began moving to the city in 1849, as news of “Gam Saan” (Gold Mountain) spread around the world and reached China, firing the imaginations of thousands of young men who were struggling after years of prolonged…
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How The Gold Rush Created San Francisco
On May 12, 1848, Mormon pioneer and businessman Samuel Brannan walked onto Portsmouth Square, shouting “Gold! Gold from the American River!”, while holding aloft a phial full of gold flakes. He hadn’t discovered the gold and he never attempted mining it, but it fired the starting gun for the great California Gold Rush. He owned…
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Maiden Lane: From Brothels To Boutiques
Today Maiden Lane is an upscale, boutique-lined, pedestrian street running east off Union Square, notable chiefly for its gates and for being the home of San Francisco’s only Frank Lloyd Wright designed building. However, the narrow, quiet, street has a scandalous past as one of old San Francisco’s main red-light districts, in the late nineteenth…
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‘Big’ Alma: From Poor Nude Model To Rich Art Patron
In the center of Union Square, on a very high column, is a statue of Nike, the Greek Goddess of Victory. If you read the inscription at the base you’ll find that it’s dedicated to Admiral George Dewey, the victor of the Battle of Manila Bay of 1898, in the Spanish-American War. Big deal, you…
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Haight-Ashbury: Summer Of Love, 1967
Background In the mid-1960s, San Francisco exploded with a counterculture movement. A tremendous spontaneous expression of youthful enthusiasm, loving life, allied with opposition to the Vietnam War, attracted an estimated 100,000 young people to San Francisco. More than ten years earlier, in the early 1950’s, another counter-cultural movement, also against materialism and conformism, called the…
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The Fatty Arbuckle Scandal & St Francis Hotel
St Francis Hotel Long before the Fatty Arbuckle scandal the St Francis Hotel opened in 1904 on Union Square, built as an investment vehicle for Charles Crocker’s grandchildren. Crocker was one of the ‘Big Four’ that had dominated San Francisco in the nineteenth century and, although he had died ten years before, his enormous mansion…
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How Maya Angelou Changed San Francisco
For Black History Month this article will highlight the influence of one of our most famous former inhabitants, Maya Angelou, and show the indelible mark she left on San Francisco. Angelou was born in St Louis, Missouri, but while still young her family moved to Oakland and in 1944, aged just sixteen years old, she…
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