GIANTS CITY

The City and County of San Francisco is the fourth Largest city in the state of California, United Sates. San Francisco is located at the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula that forms San Francisco Bay. The city was devastated by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but was rebuilt quickly. Long enjoying a bohemian reputation, the city became a counterculture magnet in the second half of the 20th century. It was a center of the dot-com boom at the end of the century. European discovery and exploration of the San Francisco Bay Area began in 1542 and culminated with the mapping of the bay in 1775. A Spanish party led by Juan Bautista de Anza arrived on March 28, 1776 and established the sites for the Presidio of San Francisco and Mission San Francisco de Asis (named for Saint Francis of Assisi and now popularly known as "Mission Dolores"). The area first began to develop as a city under the name of Yerba Buena in 1822, when what is now the downtown area was first settled by William Richardson, an English whaler. The California gold rush starting in 1848 led to a large growth in population, including considerable immigration. Between January 1848 and December 1849, the population of San Francisco increased from 1,000 to 25,000. The Chinatown district of the city is still one of the largest in the country and is probably the largest concentration of Chinese in any single city outside of China. Many businesses started at that time to service the growing population are still present today, notably Levi Strauss & Co. clothing, Ghirardelli chocolate, and Wells Fargo bank. San Francisco is one of the most densely populated cities in the United States. The city is serviced by several public transit systems. Muni is the city owned public transit system which operates buses, electric trolleybuses, streetcars and the famous cable cars. BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is the regional transit system, which connects San Francisco with the East Bay and the San Mateo County, California communities on the San Francisco Peninsula. Silicon Valley, which holds much of the computing business in the world is based some 40 miles south of San Francisco. Because of the California gold rush, San Francisco became and remains the banking and financial center of the U.S. West Coast. It is the home of the twelfth district of the U.S. Federal Reserve as well as major production facilities for the U.S. Mint. The Pacific Exchange, a regional stock exchange, is located in the financial district. Many major American and international banks and venture capital firms have all set up their regional headquarters in the city. San Francisco is both a city and a county, and is the only one of California's 58 counties to possess that unique status. It is governed by a mayor, who runs the executive branch of the city, and a Board of Supervisors, who are elected to represent 11 districts in the city. San Francisco is the home of the San Francisco 49ers, National Football League, and the San Francisco Giants, Major League Baseball.