History of San Fancisco 2



Like many other thriving cities, San Francisco suffered through the Great Depression, despite enormous public works projects. Two of the most prominent, the Bay Bridge of 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge of 1937, are still magnificent symbols, recognised world-wide. During W.W.II, the Bay Area became a major launching pad for military operations in the Pacific, with gigantic shipyards springing up around the bay.
The 60s and 70s are well remembered in San Francisco and bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane set the tone for the city. 1967, and when 20,000 people gathered in Golden Gate Park for a free concert the 'Summer of Love' was born. While hippies in the Haight dropped acid and wore flowers in their hair, revolutionaries at Berkeley were leading world-wide student upheavals, clashing with the cops and the university administration over civil rights. Not too many years later San Francisco's gays came out of the closet and the 1977 election of gay activist Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors brought recognition of the gay rights movement to a new peak. However, his subsequent assassination and the emergence of the first cases of AIDS - at the time thought of as a 'gay cancer' - marked the beginning of the end of the heyday. Lavender triangles and rainbow banners are as common today as they were 20 years ago, but the extravagance of the 1970s now resurfaces mainly at the Castro and Folsom St Fairs and the annual Gay & Lesbian Freedom Day parade.
San Francisco's second big earthquake, the Loma Prieta, came at 5:04 PM on October 17, 1989, and measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. Sixty-seven people died in total, but the damage would have been far worse were it not for a baseball game. That year, baseball's World Series was a local affair between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's. When the earthquake struck, the game was about to begin at San Francisco's Candlestick Park and a large proportion of the Bay Area population was at home watching it on TV, not out on the freeways stuck in rush-hour traffic.
 

 

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