Portal:San Francisco Bay Area/Selected article/Archive
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The Malloch Building is a private residential apartment building on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco designed in the Streamline Moderne style and built in 1937. The building, one of the best examples of its type in San Francisco, is also known as Malloch Apartments, Malloch Apartment Building, and simply by its address: 1360 Montgomery Street. Some have called it the "Ocean-Liner House", though other Moderne buildings have also been known by that nickname.
Designed by Irvin Goldstine for contractor John "Jack" S. Malloch and his publisher son, John Rolph Malloch, the building was used as a filming location in 1947's Dark Passage, a noir work starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. (Full article...) (more...)
The eastern span replacement of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge is a construction project replacing an unsafe cantilever portion of the Bay Bridge with a new self-anchored suspension bridge (SAS) and viaduct. The new span crosses the San Francisco Bay between Yerba Buena Island and Emeryville. It was built between 2002 and 2013, and does not have an official name other than that of the bridge as a whole. The eastern span replacement is the largest public works project in California history, with an estimated cost of $6.4 billion. Originally scheduled to open in 2007, several problems delayed the opening until September 2, 2013. It is currently the world's widest bridge, according to Guinness World Records. (more...)
The Bayshore Freeway is a part of U.S. Route 101 in the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California. It runs along the west shore of the San Francisco Bay, connecting San Jose with San Francisco. Within the city of San Francisco, the freeway is also known as James Lick Freeway. The road was originally built as a surface road, the Bayshore Highway, and later upgraded to freeway standards. Before 1964, it was mostly marked as U.S. Route 101 Bypass, with US 101 using the present State Route 82 (El Camino Real).
Before the Dumbarton and San Mateo-Hayward Bridges were built across the San Francisco Bay in the 1920s, San Francisco was bottled up at the north end of a long peninsula, with driving south on El Camino Real towards San Jose as the only reasonable alternative to the ferries for crossing the bay. The first of several highways built as an alternate to El Camino Real was the Skyline Boulevard, which was added to the state highway system in 1919. A second route, the Bay Shore Highway (Route 68), became a state highway in 1923, but only from the San Francisco city limits into San Mateo County, where the Dumbarton Bridge would begin. Just prior to the start of construction on the Dumbarton Bridge, San Francisco Supervisor Richard J. Welch noted that the Bay Shore Highway would need to be built all the way to San Jose as an escape valve for the additional traffic that the bridge would attract. (more...)
The University of San Francisco (USF) is a Jesuit Catholic university located in San Francisco, California, United States. Founded in 1855, USF was established as the first university in San Francisco. It is the second oldest institution for higher learning in California, the tenth-oldest university of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, and the eighth largest Jesuit university in the United States.
The school's main campus is located on a 55-acre (22 ha) setting between the Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate Park. Its nickname is "The Hilltop" as the campus is located at Lone Mountain, the peak of one of San Francisco's major hills. Its close historical ties with the City and County of San Francisco are reflected in the University's motto, Pro Urbe et Universitate (For the City and University). USF's Jesuit-Roman Catholic identity is rooted in the symbolic vision of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. (more...)
AT&T Park is a ballpark used for Major League Baseball. It is located in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco, California, at 24 Willie Mays Plaza, at the corner of Third and King Streets. It has served as the home of the San Francisco Giants of Major League Baseball since 2000.
Originally named Pacific Bell Park, then renamed SBC Park in 2003 after SBC Communications acquired Pacific Bell, the stadium was ultimately christened AT&T Park in 2006 following SBC's merger with AT&T.
The park also hosts the annual Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, a college football bowl game, and other occasional sporting and musical events. For the 2011 season, the park served as the home of the California Golden Bears football team.(more...)
The White Night riots were a series of violent events sparked by an announcement of the lenient sentencing of Dan White, for the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and of Harvey Milk, a member of the city's Board of Supervisors who was the first openly gay elected official in the United States. The events took place on the night of May 21, 1979 (the night before what would have been Milk's 49th birthday) in San Francisco. Earlier that day, White had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, the lightest possible conviction for his actions. That White was not convicted of first-degree murder (of which he was originally charged) had so outraged the city's gay community that it set off the most violent reaction by gays since the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City (which is credited as the beginning of the modern gay-rights movement in the United States).
The gay community of San Francisco had a longstanding conflict with the San Francisco Police Department. White's status as a former police officer intensified the community's anger at the SFPD. Initial demonstrations took place as a peaceful march through the Castro district of San Francisco. After the crowd arrived at the San Francisco City Hall, violence began. The events caused hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of property damage to City Hall and the surrounding area, as well as injuries to police officers and rioters. (more...)
Phoenix is a fireboat owned by State of California and operated by the city of San Francisco in the San Francisco Bay since 1955. Phoenix is known for helping to save Marina District buildings from further destruction by fire following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Her worthy assistance resulted in a second vintage fireboat obtained for the city. Both Guardian and Phoenix are based at Firehouse No. 35 at Pier 22½ of the Port of San Francisco. Phoenix often leads parades of ships, and takes part in welcoming ceremonies. (more...)
The Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary or United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island (often just referred to as Alcatraz) was a maximum high security Federal prison on Alcatraz Island, off the coast of San Francisco, California, USA, which operated from 1934 to 1963.
The main prison building was built in 1910-12 during the time it was a United States Army military prison; Alcatraz was the site of a citadel from the 1860s. The United States Disciplinary Barracks on Alcatraz was acquired by the United States Department of Justice on October 12, 1933, and the island became a Federal Bureau of Prisons federal prison in August 1934, after the buildings were modernized to meet the requirements of a top-notch security prison. Given this high security and the location of Alcatraz in the cold waters and strong currents of San Francisco Bay, at least a mile off the coast, the prison operators believed Alcatraz to be inescapable and America's strongest prison. (more...)
The San Francisco Estuary and delta represents a highly altered ecosystem. The region has been heavily re-engineered to accommodate the needs of water delivery, shipping, agriculture, and most recently, suburban development. These needs have wrought direct changes in the movement of water and the nature of the landscape, and indirect changes have arisen from the introduction of non-native species. New species have altered the architecture of the food web as surely as levees have altered the landscape of islands and channels that form the complex system known as the Delta. (more...)
The Hayward Fault Zone is a geologic fault zone capable of generating significantly destructive earthquakes, throughout the foothills on the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay. It is parallel to its more famous (and much longer) neighbor, the San Andreas Fault, which lies offshore and through the San Francisco peninsula. Further east still lies the Calaveras Fault and beyond that the Clayton-Marsh Creek-Greenville Fault and their northern and southern extensions via other faults, while the San Gregorio Fault extends along the shoreline and offshore to the south of San Francisco. The nearest aligned fault to the north, the Rodgers Creek Fault, is considered by many to be an extension of the Hayward Fault Zone. These five fault structures are the major known active slip-strike faults associated with the relative motion of the Pacific Plate to the North American Plate in California at the latitude of the San Francisco Bay Area. (more...)
Sonoma Mountain is a prominent landform within the Sonoma Mountains of southern Sonoma County, California. At elevation of 2,463 ft (751 m), Sonoma Mountain offers expansive views of the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Sonoma Valley to the east. In fact, the viticultural area extends in isolated patches up the eastern slopes of Sonoma Mountain to almost 1,700 feet (520 m) in elevation.
The eastern and northern slopes are protected from afternoon heat and hence are more densely forested in oak woodlands, abetted by the well drained nutrient rich soils. The western and southern slopes, on the other hand, are drier and warmer, leading to fewer dense woodlands and more chaparral, grassland and oak savannah. (more...)
The Oakland firestorm of 1991 was a large suburban conflagration that occurred on the hillsides of northern Oakland, California, and southeastern Berkeley on Sunday October 20, 1991. The fire has also been called the Oakland hills firestorm or the East Bay Hills Fire. The fire ultimately killed 25 people and injured 150 others. The 1,520 acres (6.2 km²) destroyed included 3,354 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and condominium units. The economic loss has been estimated at $1.5 billion. (more...)
Google is an American multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords.
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares but control 56 of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil." In 2006 Google moved to headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. (more...)
The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The first to hear confirmed information about gold in California were residents of Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), western Mexico, and Central America. They were the first to go there in late 1848. All told, the news of gold brought some 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. Of the 300,000, approximately half arrived by sea and half came overland from the east, on the California Trail and the Gila River trail.
The effects of the Gold Rush were substantial. San Francisco grew from a small settlement of about 200 residents in 1846 to a boomtown of about 36,000 by 1852. Roads and other towns were built throughout California. In 1849 a state constitution was written, and a governor and legislature were chosen. California became a state as part of the Compromise of 1850. more...
The Port Chicago disaster was a deadly munitions explosion that occurred on July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California, United States. Munitions detonated while being loaded onto a cargo vessel bound for the Pacific Theater of Operations, killing 320 sailors and civilians and injuring 390 others. Most of the dead and injured were enlisted African-American sailors.
A month later, continuing unsafe conditions inspired hundreds of servicemen to refuse to load munitions, an act known as the Port Chicago Mutiny. Fifty men—called the "Port Chicago 50"—were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to long prison terms. Forty-seven of the 50 were released in January 1946; the remaining three served additional months in prison.
During and after the trial, questions were raised about the fairness and legality of the court-martial proceedings. Due to public pressure, the United States Navy reconvened the courts-martial board in 1945; the court affirmed the guilt of the convicted men. Widespread publicity surrounding the case turned it into a cause célèbre among African Americans and white Americans; it and other race-related Navy protests of 1944–1945 led the Navy to change its practices and initiate the desegregation of its forces beginning in February 1946. In 1994, the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial was dedicated to the lives lost in the disaster. more...
Flower Drum Song was the eighth musical by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. It was based on the 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song, by Chinese-American author C. Y. Lee. The piece opened in 1958 on Broadway and was afterwards presented in the West End and on tour. It was subsequently made into a 1961 musical film.After their extraordinary early successes, beginning with Oklahoma! in 1943, Rodgers and Hammerstein had written two musicals in the 1950s that did not do well and sought a new hit to revive their fortunes. Lee's novel focuses on a father, Wang Chi-yang, a wealthy refugee from China, who clings to traditional values in San Francisco's Chinatown. Rodgers and Hammerstein shifted the focus of the musical to his son, Wang Ta, who is torn between his Chinese roots and assimilation into American culture. The team hired Gene Kelly to make his debut as a stage director with the musical and scoured the country for a suitable Asian – or at least, plausibly Asian-looking – cast. The musical, much more light-hearted than Lee's novel, was profitable on Broadway and was followed by a national tour. (more...)
Stanford Memorial Church is located at the center of the Stanford University campus in Stanford, California, United States. It was built during the American Renaissance by Jane Stanford as a memorial to her husband Leland. Designed by architect Charles A. Coolidge, a protégé of Henry Hobson Richardson, the church has been called "the University's architectural crown jewel".
Designs for the church were submitted to Jane Stanford and the university trustees in 1898, and it was dedicated in 1903. The building is Romanesque in form and Byzantine in its details, inspired by churches in the region of Venice and, especially, Ravenna. Its stained glass windows and extensive mosaics are based on religious paintings the Stanfords admired in Europe. The church has four pipe organs, which allow musicians to produce many styles of organ music. Stanford Memorial Church has withstood two major earthquakes, in 1906 and 1989, and was extensively renovated after each.
Stanford Memorial Church was the earliest and has been "among the most prominent" non-denominational churches on the West Coast of the United States. Since its dedication in 1903, the church's goal has been to serve the spiritual needs of the university in a non-sectarian way. The church's first chaplain, David Charles Gardner, began a tradition of leadership which has guided the development of Stanford University's spiritual, ethical, and academic relation to religion. The church's chaplains were instrumental in the founding of Stanford's religious studies department, moving Stanford from a "completely secular university" at the middle of the century to "the renaissance of faith and learning at Stanford" in the late 1960s, when the study of religion at the university focused on social and ethical issues like race and the Vietnam War. (more...)
The Loma Prieta earthquake also known as the Quake of '89 and the World Series Earthquake, struck the San Francisco Bay Area of California on Tuesday, October 17, 1989, at 5:04 pm local time. Caused by a slip along the San Andreas Fault, the quake lasted 10–15 seconds and measured 6.9 on both the moment magnitude scale and on the Richter magnitude scale. The quake killed 63 people throughout Northern California, injured 3,757 and left some 3,000–12,000 people homeless.
The earthquake occurred during the warm-up practice for the third game of the 1989 World Series, featuring both of the Bay Area's Major League Baseball teams, the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants. Because of game-related sports coverage, this was the first major earthquake in the United States to have its initial jolt broadcast live on television. (more...)
Romeo Void was an American rock band from San Francisco, California, formed in 1979. The band primarily consisted of saxophonist Benjamin Bossi, vocalist Debora Iyall, guitarist Peter Woods, and bassist Frank Zincavage. The band went through four drummers, starting with Jay Derrah and ending with Aaron Smith. The band released three albums, It's a Condition, Benefactor and Instincts, along with one EP. They are best known for the songs "Never Say Never" and "A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)", the latter becoming a Top 40 pop single.
The band was started at the San Francisco Art Institute by Iyall and Zincavage. They released a single on the recently formed 415 Records before recording their debut album, which has been deemed a "masterpiece of American post-punk". The success of their second release, a 4-song EP, Never Say Never resulted in a distribution deal with Columbia Records. The band continued to release music and tour until they broke up in 1985. The members have reunited briefly over the years. Iyall has continued to pursue music as a side project. The band's music was generally associated with the new wave and post-punk movements of the early 1980s, but also experimented with danceable song structures and a saxophonist. Iyall garnered acclaim as a skilled lyricist who explored themes like sexuality and alienation from a female perspective with "dark intelligence" and "searing imagery". (more...)
The Kingston Trio is an American folk and pop music group that helped launch the folk revival of the late 1950s to late 1960s. The group started as a San Francisco Bay Area nightclub act with an original lineup of Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds. It rose to international popularity, fueled by unprecedented sales of 33⅓ rpm long-playing record albums (LPs), and helped to alter the direction of popular music in the U.S.
The Kingston Trio was one of the most prominent groups of the era's pop-folk boom that started in 1958 with the release of their first album and its hit recording of "Tom Dooley", which sold over three million copies as a single. The Trio released nineteen albums that made Billboard's Top 100, fourteen of which ranked in the top 10, and five of which hit the number 1 spot. Four of the group's LPs charted among the Top 10 selling albums for five weeks in November and December 1959, a record unmatched for more than 50 years, and the group still ranks after half a century in the all-time lists of many of Billboard's cumulative charts, including those for most weeks with a number 1 album, most total weeks charting an album, most number 1 albums, most consecutive number 1 albums, and most top ten albums. (more...)
The Chinatown centered on Grant Avenue and Stockton Street in San Francisco, California, (Chinese: 唐人街; pinyin: tángrénjiē; Jyutping: tong4 jan4 gaai1) is the oldest Chinatown in North America and the largest Chinese community outside Asia and is the oldest of the four notable Chinatowns in the city. Since its establishment in 1848, it has been highly important and influential in the history and culture of ethnic Chinese immigrants in North America. Chinatown is an enclave that continues to retain its own customs, languages, places of worship, social clubs, and identity. There are two hospitals, numerous parks and squares, a post office, and other infrastructure. Visitors can easily become immersed in a microcosmic Asian world, filled with herbal shops, temples, pagoda roofs and dragon parades. While recent immigrants and the elderly choose to live in here because of the availability of affordable housing and their familiarity with the culture, the place is also a major tourist attraction, drawing more visitors annually than the Golden Gate Bridge. (more...)
The Mantra-Rock Dance was a counterculture music event held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) as an opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public, and as a promotional and fundraising effort for their first center on the West Coast of the United States.
The Mantra-Rock Dance featured some of the most prominent Californian rock groups of the time, such as the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, as well as the then relatively unknown Moby Grape. The bands agreed to appear with Prabhupada and to perform for free; the proceeds were donated to the local Hare Krishna temple. The participation of countercultural leaders considerably boosted the event's popularity; among them were the poet Allen Ginsberg, who led the singing of the Hare Krishna mantra onstage along with Prabhupada, and LSD promoters Timothy Leary and Augustus Owsley Stanley III. (more...)
Next, Inc. (later Next Computer, Inc. and Next Software, Inc. and stylized as NeXT) was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets. NeXT was founded in 1985 by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs, after he was forced out of Apple, along with a few of his co-workers. NeXT introduced the first NeXT Computer in 1988, and the smaller NeXTstation in 1990. The NeXT computers experienced relatively limited sales, with estimates of about 50,000 units shipped in total. Nevertheless, its innovative object-oriented NeXTSTEP operating system and development environment were highly influential.
NeXT later released much of the NeXTstep system as a programming environment standard called OpenStep. NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993 to concentrate on marketing OPENSTEP, its own OpenStep implementation, for several OEMs. NeXT also developed WebObjects, one of the first enterprise web application frameworks. WebObjects never became very popular because of its initial high price of $50,000, but it remains a prominent early example of a web server based on dynamic page generation rather than on static content. (more...)
Point Reyes is a prominent cape and popular Northern California tourist destination on the Pacific coast of northern California. It is located in Marin County approximately 30 miles (50 km) west-northwest of San Francisco. The term is often applied to the Point Reyes Peninsula, the region bounded by Tomales Bay on the northeast and Bolinas Lagoon on the southeast. The headland is protected as part of Point Reyes National Seashore.
The cape protects Drakes Bay on its southern side. The headland is largely drained by Drakes Estero. Drakes Bay and Drake's Estero are named after English seafarer Sir Francis Drake who possibly hauled his ship, the Golden Hinde, up onto the beach for repairs in June 1579. Inverness Ridge runs along the peninsula's northwest-southeast spine, with forested peaks around 430 meters (1,400 ft). West of the ridge, the land flattens out and the vegetation turns to scrub. The Mount Vision fire in 1995 burned part of Inverness Ridge. Point Reyes lends its name to the town of Point Reyes Station, California.
The point may once have been known as Lobes Lighthouse by the sailors of clipper ships on the meat trade. (more...)
The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate strait, the mile-wide, three-mile-long channel between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The structure links the U.S. city of San Francisco, on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, to Marin County, bridging both U.S. Route 101 and California State Route 1 across the strait. The bridge is one of the most internationally recognized symbols of San Francisco, California, and the United States. It has been declared one of the Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The Frommers travel guide considers the Golden Gate Bridge "possibly the most beautiful, certainly the most photographed, bridge in the world". It opened in 1937 and had, until 1964, the longest suspension bridge main span in the world, at 4,200 feet (1,300 m). (more...)
The Heidi Game or Heidi Bowl was an American football game played on November 17, 1968. The home team, the Oakland Raiders, defeated the New York Jets, 43–32. The game is remembered for its exciting finish, as Oakland scored two touchdowns in the final minute to overcome a 32–29 New York lead. It came to be known as the Heidi Game because the NBC Television Network controversially broke away from the game, with the Jets still winning, to air the 1968 television film Heidi at 7 p.m. in the Eastern Time Zone.
In the late 1960s, few professional football games took longer than two and a half hours to play, and the Jets–Raiders three-hour television time slot was thought to be adequate. However, in this instance, a high-scoring contest between the two bitter American Football League rivals, together with a number of injuries and penalties, caused the game to run long. Although NBC executives had originally ordered that Heidi must begin on time, as 7 p.m. approached, and it became clear the exciting game would run long, they decided to postpone the start of the film and continue football coverage. However, when they tried to call the studio to implement their decision, they were unable to get through because so many members of the public were calling NBC to inquire, complain, or opine about the scheduled 7 p.m. cutoff that the NBC switchboards were jammed. As a result, the change could not be communicated, and Heidi began as scheduled, preempting the final moments of the game in the eastern part of the country—to the outrage of viewers there, who missed two Oakland touchdowns that turned the game around.
The Heidi Game led to a change in the way professional football is shown on network television; ever since then, games have been shown to their conclusion before evening programming begins. The experience also led television networks to take steps to ensure that network personnel would be able to communicate with each other under similar circumstances in the future: special telephones (dubbed "Heidi phones") were installed that connected through a separate telephone exchange. In 1997, the Heidi Game was voted the most memorable regular season game in U.S. professional football history. (more...)
Temple Sinai (officially the First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland) is a Reform synagogue located at 2808 Summit Street (28th and Webster Streets) in Oakland, California, United States. Founded in 1875, it is the oldest Jewish congregation in the East San Francisco Bay region.
Its early members included Gertrude Stein and Judah Leon Magnes, who studied at Temple Sinai's Sabbath school, and Ray Frank, who taught them. Originally traditional, the temple reformed its beliefs and practices under the leadership of Rabbi Marcus Friedlander (1893–1915). By 1914, it had become a Classical Reform congregation. That year the current sanctuary was built: a Beaux-Arts structure designed by G. Albert Lansburgh, which is the oldest synagogue building in Oakland.
The congregation weathered four major financial crises by 1934. From then until 2011, it was led by just three rabbis, William Stern (1934–1965), Samuel Broude (1966–1989), and Steven Chester (1989–2011).
In 2006 Temple Sinai embarked on a $15 million capital campaign to construct an entirely new synagogue campus adjacent to its current sanctuary. Groundbreaking took place in October 2007, and by late 2009 the congregation had raised almost $12 million towards the construction. As of 2011[update], the Temple Sinai had nearly 1,000 member families. The rabbis were Andrew Straus and Jacqueline Mates-Muchin, and the cantor was Ilene Keys. (more...)
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that practically everyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen. This decision established an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents around 1871, had been denied re-entry to the United States after a trip abroad, under a law restricting Chinese immigration and prohibiting immigrants from China from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. He challenged the government's refusal to recognize his citizenship, and the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, holding that the citizenship language in the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed essentially everyone born in the U.S.—even the U.S.-born children of foreigners—and could not be limited in its effect by an act of Congress. (more...)
Zodiac is a 2007 American mystery thriller film directed by David Fincher and based on Robert Graysmith's non-fiction book of the same name. The Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. joint production stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey Jr., with Anthony Edwards, Brian Cox, Elias Koteas, Donal Logue, John Carroll Lynch, Chloë Sevigny, and Dermot Mulroney in supporting roles.
Zodiac tells the story of the manhunt for a notorious serial killer known as "Zodiac" who killed in and around the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s and early 1970s, leaving several victims in his wake and taunting police with letters and ciphers mailed to newspapers. The case remains one of San Francisco's most infamous unsolved crimes.
Fincher, screenwriter James Vanderbilt, and producer Brad Fischer spent 18 months conducting their own investigation and research into the Zodiac murders. Fincher employed the digital Thomson Viper Filmstream camera to photograph the film. However, Zodiac was not shot entirely digitally; traditional high-speed film cameras were used for slow-motion murder sequences.
Reviews for the film were generally positive, but it did not perform strongly at the North American box office, grossing only $33 million. It was more successful in other parts of the world, earning $51 million. This brought its box office total to $84 million, with a budget of $65 million spent on its production. (more...)
San Francisco has 436 high-rises, 45 of which are taller than 400 feet (122 m). The tallest is the Transamerica Pyramid, which rises 853 ft (260 m) and as of January 2014[update] is the 35th-tallest building in the United States. The city's second tallest building is 555 California Street, formerly known as Bank of America Center.
San Francisco has 22 skyscrapers that rise at least 492 feet (150 m). Its skyline is ranked (based upon existing and under construction buildings over 492 feet (150 m) tall) second in the Pacific coast region (after Los Angeles) and sixth in the United States, after New York City, Chicago, Miami, Houston, and Los Angeles. (more...)
The Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco is the head of the executive branch of the San Francisco city and county government. The mayor has the duty to enforce city laws, and the power to either approve or veto bills passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the legislative branch. The mayor serves a four-year term and is limited to two successive terms. Because of San Francisco's status as a consolidated city-county, the mayor also serves as the head of government of the county; both entities have been governed together by a combined set of governing bodies since 1856.
There have been 42 individuals sworn into office. John W. Geary, elected in 1850, was the first mayor of the city. Charles James Brenham, who served as mayor during the 1850s, is the only person who has served two non-consecutive terms. The previous mayor, Gavin Newsom resigned to become the Lieutenant Governor of California on January 10, 2011. Ed Lee was appointed by the Board of Supervisors on the following day to finish out Newsom's term. Lee was elected to his own term on November 8, 2011. (more...)
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), is a rapid transit system serving the San Francisco Bay Area. The heavy-rail public transit and subway system connects San Francisco with cities in the East Bay and suburbs in northern San Mateo County. BART operates five routes on 104 miles (167 km) of line, with 44 stations in four counties. With an average of 373,945 weekday passengers, 176,616 Saturday passengers, and 119,247 Sunday passengers in January 2013, BART is the fifth-busiest heavy rail rapid transit system in the United States.
BART is operated by the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, a special-purpose transit district that was formed in 1957 to cover San Francisco, Alameda County, and Contra Costa County. The acronym is widely pronounced "bart", not spelled out.
BART is a rapid transit and commuter rail system and an alternative to highway transportation, especially to avoid congestion on the San Francisco Bay Bridge, which connects San Francisco to the East Bay suburbs and the city of Oakland. As of 2013[update], the BART system is being expanded to San Jose with the Silicon Valley BART extension. (more...)
The Black Cat Bar or Black Cat Café was a bar in San Francisco. It originally opened in 1906 and closed in 1921. The Black Cat re-opened in 1933 and operated for another 30 years. During its second run of operation, it was a hangout for Beats and bohemians but over time began attracting more and more of a gay clientele.
Because it catered to gays, the bar became a flashpoint for the nascent homophile movement. The Black Cat was at the center of a legal fight that was one of the earliest court cases to establish legal protections for gay people in the United States. Despite this victory, continued pressure from law enforcement agencies eventually forced the bar's closure in 1964.
The Black Cat opened in 1906, shortly after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. When entrepreneur Charles Ridley acquired the bar in 1911, he turned it into a showplace for vaudeville-style acts. Over the next several years, Ridley and the Black Cat came under increased police scrutiny as a possible center of prostitution. In 1921, the bar lost its dance permit and closed down. (more...)
The Coast Miwok are a tribe that was the second largest group of Miwok Native American people. The Coast Miwok inhabited the general area of modern Marin County and southern Sonoma County in Northern California, from the Golden Gate north to Duncans Point and eastward to Sonoma Creek. The Coast Miwok included the Bodega Bay Miwok from authenticated Miwok villages around Bodega Bay and Marin Miwok.
The Coast Miwok spoke their own Coast Miwok language in the Utian linguistic group. They lived by hunting and gathering, and lived in small bands without centralized political authority. In the springtime they would head to the coasts to hunt salmon and other seafood, including seaweed. Otherwise their staple foods were primarily acorns—particularly from black and tan oak–nuts and wild game, such as deer and cottontail rabbits and black-tailed deer, Odocoileus hemionus columbianus, a coastal subspecies of the California mule deer, Odocoileus hemionus. When hunting deer, Miwok hunters traditionally used Brewer's angelica, Angelica breweri to eliminate their own scent. Miwok did not typically hunt bears. Yerba buena leaf tea were used medicinally. (more...)
The Conservatory of Flowers is a greenhouse and botanical garden that houses a collection of rare and exotic plants in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California. With construction completed in 1878, it remains the oldest building in the park, and the oldest municipal wooden conservatory remaining in the United States. It is also one of the first municipal conservatories constructed in the country. For these distinctions and for its associated historical, architectural, and engineering merits, the Conservatory of Flowers is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the California Register of Historical Places, is a California Historical Landmark, and a San Francisco Designated Landmark. (more...)
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The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. The band was known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, improvisational jazz, psychedelia, and space rock, and for live performances of long musical improvisation. "Their music," writes Lenny Kaye, "touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists." These various influences were distilled into a diverse and psychedelic whole that made the Grateful Dead "the pioneering Godfathers of the jam band world". They were ranked 57th in the issue The Greatest Artists of all Time by Rolling Stone magazine. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and their Barton Hall Concert at Cornell University (May 8, 1977) was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. The Grateful Dead has sold more than 35 million albums worldwide.
The Grateful Dead was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area amid the rise of counterculture of the 1960s. The founding members of the Grateful Dead were Jerry Garcia (guitar, vocals), Bob Weir (guitar, vocals), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (keyboards, harmonica, vocals), Phil Lesh (bass, vocals), and Bill Kreutzmann (drums). Members of the Grateful Dead had played together in various San Francisco bands, including Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and the Warlocks. Lesh was the last member to join the Warlocks before they became the Grateful Dead; he replaced Dana Morgan Jr., who had played bass for a few gigs. With the exception of McKernan, who died in 1973, the core of the band stayed together for its entire 30-year history. Other longtime members of the band include Mickey Hart (drums 1967–1971, 1974–1995), Keith Godchaux (keyboards 1971–1979), Donna Godchaux (vocals 1972–1979), Brent Mydland (keyboards 1979–1990), and Vince Welnick (keyboards 1990–1995) (more...)
Green Day is an American punk rock band formed in 1987. The band consists of lead vocalist and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist and backing vocalist Mike Dirnt, drummer Tré Cool and guitarist and backing vocalist Jason White, who became a full member after playing in the band as a session and touring guitarist for 13 years. Cool replaced former drummer John Kiffmeyer in 1990, prior to the recording of the band's second studio album, Kerplunk (1992).
Green Day was originally part of the punk scene at the DIY 924 Gilman Street club in Berkeley, California. The band's early releases were from the independent record label Lookout! Records. In 1994, its major label debut Dookie released through Reprise Records became a breakout success and eventually sold over 10 million copies in the U.S. Green Day was widely credited, alongside fellow California punk bands Sublime, Bad Religion, The Offspring and Rancid, with popularizing and reviving mainstream interest in punk rock in the United States. (more...)
The history of the city of San Francisco and its development as a center of maritime trade, have been greatly influenced by its location at the entrance to one of the world's best natural harbors. San Francisco is the name of both the city and the county, which share the same boundaries.
The first Native Americans to settle this region found the bay to be a vast natural resource for hunting and gathering their provisions and for the establishment of many small villages. Collectively, these early Native Americans were known as the Ohlone, and the language they spoke belonged to the Miwok family. Their trade patterns included places as far away as Baja California, the Mojave Desert and Yosemite.
The first Europeans in the vicinity of what would become San Francisco were members of a Spanish exploratory voyage led by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. Cabrillo, sailing north from Mexico, explored the coast as far north as present-day Point Reyes, but failed to discover the entrance to San Francisco Bay. An English expedition led by Sir Francis Drake may also have sailed past the bay entrance, in 1579. Drake mapped the coast farther north at Drake's Bay, naming the area "Nova Albion", but made little effort to claim or settle the land. (more...)
Levi Strauss & Co. /ˌliːvaɪ ˈstrɔːs/ is a privately held American clothing company known worldwide for its Levi's brand of denim jeans. It was founded in 1853 when Levi Strauss came from Buttenheim, Bavaria, to San Francisco, California to open a west coast branch of his brothers' New York dry goods business. The company's corporate headquarters is located at Levi's Plaza in San Francisco.
Levi Strauss started the business at the 90 Sacramento Street address in San Francisco. He next moved the location to 62 Sacramento Street then 63 & 65 Sacramento Street. Jacob Davis, a Latvian Jewish immigrant, was a Reno, Nevada tailor who frequently purchased bolts of cloth made from denim from Levi Strauss & Co.'s wholesale house. After one of Davis' customers kept purchasing cloth to reinforce torn pants, he had an idea to use copper rivets to reinforce the points of strain, such as on the pocket corners and at the base of the button fly. Davis did not have the required money to purchase a patent, so he wrote to Strauss suggesting that they go into business together. After Levi accepted Jacob's offer, on May 20, 1873, the two men received U.S. patent 139,121 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patented rivet was later incorporated into the company's jean design and advertisements. Contrary to an advertising campaign suggesting that Levi Strauss sold his first jeans to gold miners during the California Gold Rush (which peaked in 1849), the manufacturing of denim overalls only began in the 1870s. The company created their first pair of Levis 501 Jeans in the 1890s, a style that went on to become the world's best selling item of clothing. (more...)
Mount Diablo is a mountain in Contra Costa County, California in the San Francisco Bay Area, located south of Clayton and northeast of Danville. It is an isolated upthrust peak of 3,864 feet (1,178 m), visible from most of the San Francisco Bay Area and much of northern California. Mount Diablo appears from many angles to be a double pyramid and includes many subsidiary peaks, the largest and closest of which is the other half of the double pyramid, North Peak, nearly as high in elevation at 3,557 feet (1,084 m) and about one mile northeast of the main summit.
The peak is the centerpiece of Mount Diablo State Park, a state park of about 20,000 acres (8,000 ha) in area. The park was the first public open space of a complex—according to Save Mount Diablo—now including 38 preserves, including nearby city open spaces, regional parks, watersheds, etc., buffered in some areas with private lands protected with conservation easements. Preserved lands on and around Mount Diablo total more than 90,000 acres (36,000 ha). (more...)
Napa Valley AVA is an American Viticultural Area located in Napa County, California, United States. It is considered one of the world's premier wine regions, not just in terms of quality but in terms of high prices. Records of commercial wine production in the region date back to the nineteenth century, but premium wine production dates back only to the 1960s.
The combination of Mediterranean climate, geography and geology of the region are conducive to growing quality wine grapes. John Patchett established the Napa Valley's first commercial vineyard in 1858. In 1861 Charles Krug established another of Napa Valley's first commercial wineries in St. Helena. Viticulture in Napa suffered several setbacks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including an outbreak of the vine disease phylloxera, the institution of Prohibition, and the Great Depression. The wine industry in Napa Valley recovered, and helped by the results of the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, came to be seen as capable of producing the best quality wine - equal to that of Old World wine regions. Napa Valley is now a major enotourism destination.(more...)
Ohlone people, also known as the Costanoan, are a Native American people of the central and northern California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 18th century, the Ohlone inhabited the area along the coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley. At that time they spoke a variety of languages, the Ohlone languages, belonging to the Costanoan sub-family of the Utian language family, which itself belongs to the proposed Penutian language phylum. The term "Ohlone" has been used in place of "Costanoan" since the 1970s by some descendant groups and by most ethnographers, historians, and writers of popular literature. In pre-colonial times, the Ohlone lived in more than 50 distinct landholding groups, and did not view themselves as a distinct group. They lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering, in the typical ethnographic California pattern. The members of these various bands interacted freely with one another as they built friendships and marriages, traded tools and other necessities, and partook in cultural practices. The Ohlone people practiced the Kuksu religion. Before the Spanish came, the northern California region was one of the most densely populated regions north of Mexico. However in the years 1769 to 1833, the Spanish missions in California had a devastating effect on Ohlone culture. The Ohlone population declined steeply during this period.(more...)
Oracle Corporation is a U.S. based multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Redwood City, California, United States. The company specializes in developing and marketing computer hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly its own brands of database management systems. Oracle is the second-largest software maker by revenue, after Microsoft.
The company also builds tools for database development and systems of middle-tier software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software and supply chain management (SCM) software.
Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle, has served as Oracle's CEO throughout its history. He also served as the Chairman of the Board until his replacement by Jeffrey O. Henley in 2004. On August 22, 2008, the Associated Press ranked Ellison as the top-paid chief executive in the world. (more...)
San Jose State University (often abbreviated San Jose State or SJSU) is a comprehensive public university located in San Jose, California, United States. It is the founding school of the 23 campus California State University (CSU) system, and holds the distinction of being the oldest public institution of higher education on the West Coast of the United States.
Located in downtown San Jose, the SJSU main campus is situated on 154 acres (62 ha), or roughly 19 square blocks. SJSU offers 134 bachelor's and master's degrees with 110 concentrations and five credential programs with 19 concentrations. The university also offers three joint doctoral degree programs and will launch its first independent doctoral program in 2014. SJSU is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). (more...)
San Quentin State Prison is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men located in unincorporated San Quentin, Marin County, California, United States. Opened in July 1852, it is the oldest prison in the state. California's only death row for male inmates, the largest in the United States, is located at the prison. It has a gas chamber, but since 1996, executions at the prison have been carried out by lethal injection. The prison has been featured on film, video, and television; is the subject of many books; has hosted concerts; and has housed many notorious inmates. (more...)
SRI International (SRI), founded as Stanford Research Institute, is an American nonprofit research institute headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. SRI is now one of the largest contract research institutes in the world.
The institute formally separated from Stanford University in 1970 and became known as SRI International in 1977. SRI describes its mission as discovery and the application of science and technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace. It performs client-sponsored research and development for government agencies, commercial businesses, and private foundations. It also licenses its technologies, and creates spin-off companies.
SRI's headquarters are located near the Stanford University campus. Physicist Curtis Carlson has been SRI's president and CEO since 1998. SRI's annual revenue in 2013 was approximately $540 million. SRI employs about 2,300 people. Sarnoff Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of SRI since 1988, was fully integrated into SRI in January 2011. SRI International Sarnoff is used as a brand name for business activities based in Princeton, New Jersey.
SRI's focus areas include biomedical sciences, chemistry and materials, computing, Earth and space systems, economic development, education and learning, energy and environmental technology, security and national defense, as well as sensing and devices. SRI has received more than 1,000 patents and patent applications worldwide. (more...)
Leland Stanford Junior University or more commonly Stanford University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. It is one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
The university was founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford, former governor of and U.S. senator from California and leading railroad tycoon, and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid fever two months before his 16th birthday in 1884. Stanford was opened on October 1, 1891 as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Tuition was free until the 1930s. The university struggled financially after Leland Stanford's 1893 death and after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would become known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, and was one of the original four ARPANET nodes (precursor to the Internet). (more...)
The Sunol Water Temple is located at 505 Paloma Way in Sunol, California. Designed by Willis Polk, the 59 foot high classical pavilion is made up of twelve concrete Corinthian columns and a concrete ring girder that supports the conical wood and tile roof. Inside the temple, water originally from the Pleasanton well fields and Arroyo de la Laguna flowed into a white tiled cistern before plunging into a deeper water channel carrying water from the filter galleries to the Niles Aqueduct in Niles Canyon and across San Francisco Bay near the Dumbarton Bridge. The roof covering the cistern has paintings depicting Indian maidens carrying water vessels. The temple is open to the public. (more...)
Tesla Motors, Inc. is an American company that designs, manufactures, and sells electric cars and electric vehicle powertrain components. Tesla Motors is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TSLA. In the first quarter of 2013, Tesla posted profits for the first time in its ten year history.
Tesla Motors first gained widespread attention following their production of the Tesla Roadster, the first fully electric sports car. The company's second vehicle is the Model S, a fully electric luxury sedan. Tesla also markets electric powertrain components, including lithium-ion battery packs to automakers including Daimler and Toyota. Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, has said that he envisions Tesla as an independent automaker, aimed at eventually offering electric cars at prices affordable to the average consumer.
Tesla Motors is named after electrical engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla. The Tesla Roadster uses an AC motor descended directly from Tesla's original 1882 design. The Tesla Roadster, the company's first vehicle, is the first production automobile to use lithium-ion battery cells and the first production EV with a range greater than 200 miles (320 km) per charge. Between 2008 and March 2012, Tesla sold more than 2,250 Roadsters in 31 countries. Tesla stopped taking orders for the Roadster in the U.S. market in August 2011. Tesla unveiled the Tesla Model S all-electric sedan on March 26, 2009. In December 2012, Tesla employed almost 3,000 full-time employees. By January 2014, this number had grown to 6,000 employees. (more...)
The University of California, Berkeley (also referred to as UC Berkeley; Berkeley; California; or simply Cal), is a public research university located in Berkeley, California. The university occupies 1,232 acres (499 ha) on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay with the central campus resting on 178 acres (72 ha). Berkeley is the flagship institution of the 10 campus University of California system and one of only two UC campuses operating on a semester calendar, the other being UC Merced.
Established in 1868 as the result of the merger of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in Oakland, Berkeley is the oldest institution in the UC system and offers approximately 350 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. Berkeley has been charged with providing both "classical" and "practical" education for the state's people. Berkeley co-manages three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy. (more...)
The Vaillancourt Fountain, sometimes called Quebec libre!, is a large fountain located in Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco, designed by the Québécois artist Armand Vaillancourt in 1971. It is about 40 feet (12 m) high and is constructed out of precast concrete square tubes. Long considered controversial because of its stark, modernist appearance, there have been several unsuccessful proposals to demolish the fountain over the years. It was the site of a free concert by U2 in 1987, when lead singer Bono spray painted graffiti on the fountain and was both praised and criticized for the action.
The fountain is located in a highly visible spot on the downtown San Francisco waterfront, in Justin Herman Plaza, where Market Street meets The Embarcadero. The Hyatt Regency Hotel is at the edge of the plaza, adjacent to the other four highrise towers of the Embarcadero Center. Across The Embarcadero is the Ferry Building, and the eastern end of the California Street cable car line is on the other side of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. When the fountain was constructed, the two-level Embarcadero Freeway separated Justin Herman Plaza from the waterfront, creating a massive backdrop for the fountain. (more...)
Ashurbanipal, also known as the Ashurbanipal Monument or the Statue of Ashurbanipal, is a bronze sculpture by Fred Parhad, an Iraqi-born artist of Assyrian descent. It is located in the Civic Center of San Francisco, California, in the United States. The 15-foot (4.6 m) statue depicting the Assyrian king of the same name was commissioned by the Assyrian Foundation for the Arts and presented to the City of San Francisco in 1988 as a gift from the Assyrian people. The sculpture reportedly cost $100,000 and was the first "sizable" bronze statue of Ashurbanipal. It is administered by the City and County of San Francisco and the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Parhad's work was met with some criticism by local Assyrians, who argued it was inaccurate to portray Ashurbanipal holding a book and a lion, or wearing a skirt. The critics thought the statue looked more like the Sumerian king Gilgamesh; Renee Kovacs, a "scholar and self-stated Assyriologist", believed the sculpture depicted neither figure, but rather a Mesopotamian "protective figure". Parhad defended the accuracy of his work, while also admitting that he took artistic liberties. (more...)
The Centennial Light is the world's longest-lasting light bulb. It is at 4550 East Avenue, Livermore, California, and maintained by the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department. The fire department says that the bulb is at least 113 years old and has been turned off only a handful of times. Due to its longevity, the bulb has been noted by The Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, and General Electric. It is often cited as evidence for the existence of planned obsolescence in later-produced light bulbs. (more...)
McAllister Tower Apartments is a 28-story, 94 m (308 ft) residential apartment skyscraper at 100 McAllister Street in San Francisco, California. The property is owned and operated by the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. The tower includes mixed-use offices on various floors, and the Art Deco-styled "Sky Room" with a panoramic view on the 24th floor.
Conceived as an unusual combination of a large church surmounted by a hotel, construction of the building brought architectural dispute. Initially designed by Timothy L. Pflueger in the style of Gothic Revival, the investors fired his firm and hired Lewis P. Hobart, who changed little of Pflueger's design. In a resulting lawsuit, Pflueger won nearly half the damages he asked for. The building opened in 1930 as the William Taylor Hotel and Temple Methodist Episcopal Church. However, extra construction expenses had put the congregation at greater financial risk, and the church-hotel concept did not prove popular. No profit was made in six years, and the church left, losing their investment. In the late 1930s the building housed the Empire Hotel, known for its Sky Room lounge, then from World War II to the 1970s, 100 McAllister served as U.S. government offices. (more...)
The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware—software system called the oN-Line System or more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s. (more...)
Leuschner Observatory, originally called the Students' Observatory, is an observatory jointly operated by the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University. The observatory was built in 1886 on the Berkeley campus. For many years, it was directed by Armin Otto Leuschner, for whom the observatory was renamed in 1951. In 1965, it was relocated to its present home in Lafayette, California, approximately 10 miles (16 km) east of the Berkeley campus. In 2012, the physics and astronomy department of San Francisco State University became a partner.
Presently, Leuschner Observatory has two operating telescopes. One is a 30-inch (760 mm) optical telescope, equipped with a CCD for observations in visible light and an infrared detector used for infrared astronomy. The other is a 12-foot (3.7 m) radio dish used for an undergraduate radio astronomy course. The observatory has been used to perform professional astronomy research, such as orbit determination of small Solar System bodies in the early 1900s and supernova surveys in the 1980s and 1990s. It has also served as a primary tool in the education of graduate and undergraduate students at UC Berkeley. (more...)
Monster Inc. is an American company that manufactures and markets 6,000 different products, but is best known for audio and video cables. It also produces speakers, headphones, power strips, mobile accessories and audio devices for automobiles. The company was founded by an audiophile and engineer, Noel Lee, in 1979 by experimenting with different ways to build audio cables. It grew by doing demonstrations to convince the industry that audio cables made a difference in audio quality and by establishing relationships with retailers that were attracted to the cable's profit margins.
Over the years it created new divisions like Monster Music, Monster Game, Monster Mobile, Monster Photo and Monster Power. In the 2000s, Monster had legal trademark disputes regarding other companies or products that have "Monster" in their name, such as Monster.com and the film Monsters, Inc. Monster said it needed to defend its premium brand, while critics said it was pursuing litigation against companies that do not have confusingly similar products. It began manufacturing headphones in a partnership with Dr. Dre in 2008, which ended in 2012, and it created other celebrity branded or Monster-branded headphone products. (more...)
One Rincon Hill is an upscale residential complex on the apex of Rincon Hill in San Francisco, California, United States. The complex, designed by Solomon, Cordwell, Buenz and Associates and developed by Urban West Associates, consists of two skyscrapers that share a common townhouse podium.
One tower, One Rincon Hill North Tower, is under construction as of 2013 and will reach a height of 541 feet (165 m) with 50 stories. The other tower, One Rincon Hill South Tower, is 60 stories and stands 641 feet (195 m) tall. The South Tower contains high-speed elevators with special features for moving residents effectively, and a large water tank designed to help the skyscraper withstand strong winds and earthquakes. Both skyscrapers and the townhomes contain a total of 709 residential units.
The building site, located right next to the western approach of the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge, formerly contained a clock tower. The clock tower was demolished shortly after the city approved the One Rincon Hill project. Construction of the townhomes and the South Tower lasted from 2005 to 2008, but was stopped for brief periods of time due to seismic concerns and a construction accident. As the South Tower neared completion, it generated controversy concerning view encroachment, high pricing, and architectural style. (more...)
Pixar Animation Studios or simply Pixar (/ˈpɪksɑːr/), is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio is best known for its CGI-animated feature films created with PhotoRealistic RenderMan, its own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface used to generate high-quality images. Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the computer division of Lucasfilm before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986 with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion, a transaction which made Jobs Disney's largest shareholder. Luxo Jr., a character from an early Pixar film, is the mascot of the studio. (more...)
"Skinner's Room" is a short story by William Gibson originally composed for Visionary San Francisco, a 1990 museum exhibition exploring the future of San Francisco. It features the first appearance in Gibson's fiction of "the Bridge", which Gibson revisited as the setting of his acclaimed Bridge trilogy of novels. In the story, the Bridge is overrun by squatters, among them Skinner, who occupies a shack atop a bridgetower. An altered version of the story was published in Omni magazine and subsequently anthologized. "Skinner's Room" was nominated for the 1992 Locus Award for Best Short Story. (more...)
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YouTube is a video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005 and has been owned by Google since late 2006. The site allows users to upload, view, and share videos, and it makes use of Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. Available content includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, and amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.
Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via YouTube, as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can watch videos, and registered users can upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old. YouTube, LLC was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion in November 2006 and now operates as a Google subsidiary. (more...)
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 struck San Francisco and the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. Devastating fires broke out in the city that lasted for several days. As a result of the quake and fires, about 3,000 people died and over 80% of San Francisco was destroyed.
The earthquake and resulting fire are remembered as one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States alongside the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The death toll from the earthquake and resulting fire is the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California's history. (more...)
Alcatraz Island is located in the San Francisco Bay, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) offshore from San Francisco, California, United States. Often referred to as "The Rock", the small island was developed with facilities for a lighthouse, a military fortification, a military prison (1868), and a federal prison from 1933 until 1963. Beginning in November 1969, the island was occupied for more than 19 months by a group of Native Americans from San Francisco who were part of a wave of Native activism across the nation with public protests through the 1970s. In 1972, Alcatraz became a national recreation area and received designation as a National Historic Landmark in 1986.
Today, the island's facilities are managed by the National Park Service as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area; it is open to tours. Visitors can reach the island by ferry ride from Pier 33, near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco. Hornblower Cruises and Events, operating under the name Alcatraz Cruises, is the official ferry provider to and from the island. Hornblower launched the nation's first hybrid propulsion ferry in 2008, the Hornblower Hybrid, which now serves the island, docking at the Alcatraz Wharf. (more...)
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP (styled as lower case on its official logo) is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. It provides hardware, software and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises, including customers in the government, health and education sectors.
The company was founded in a one-car garage in Palo Alto by William "Bill" Redington Hewlett and Dave Packard. HP is the world's leading PC manufacturer and has been since 2007, fending off a challenge by Chinese manufacturer Lenovo, according to Gartner. It specializes in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware, designing software and delivering services. Major product lines include personal computing devices, enterprise and industry standard servers, related storage devices, networking products, software and a diverse range of printers and other imaging products. HP markets its products to households, small- to medium-sized businesses and enterprises directly as well as via online distribution, consumer-electronics and office-supply retailers, software partners and major technology vendors. HP also has services and consulting business around its products and partner products. In 2013 it was the world's second-largest PC vendor by unit sales. (more...)
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, LBL), also known as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in the Berkeley Hills near Berkeley, California that conducts unclassified scientific research on behalf of the United States Department of Energy (DOE). It is managed and operated by the University of California, whose oldest campus, the University of California, Berkeley's main campus, it overlooks. Plans announced by the university in 2012 called for a second Berkeley Lab campus to be built on land it owns nearby at Richmond Field Station. (more...)
Mount Hamilton is a mountain in California's Diablo Range, in Santa Clara County, California. Mount Hamilton, at 4,216 feet (1,285 m) is mountain overlooking Silicon Valley, and is the site of Lick Observatory, the first permanently occupied mountain-top observatory. The other summits along its mile-long summit ridge are known by astronomy-related names.
The highest Copernicus Peak at 4363+ feet (1330+ m) is named for Nicolaus Copernicus. Kepler Peak, named for Johannes Kepler, and 4,213-foot (1,284 m) Observatory Peak follow. The latter was more than 30 feet (9.1 m) taller before it was leveled during the construction of the observatory in the 1880s. The asteroid 452 Hamiltonia, discovered in 1899, is named after the mountain. Golden Eagle nesting sites are found on the slopes of Mount Hamilton. On clear days, the Santa Cruz Mountains, Monterey Bay, and even the Monterey Peninsula are visible from the summit of the mountain. (more...)
Mount Tamalpais (/tæməlˈpaɪ.ɪs/; known locally as Mount Tam) is a peak in Marin County, California, United States, often considered symbolic of Marin County. Much of Mount Tamalpais is protected within public lands such as Mount Tamalpais State Park and the Mount Tamalpais Watershed.
Mount Tamalpais is the highest peak in the Marin Hills, which are part of the Northern California Coast Ranges. The elevation at the East Peak, its highest point, is 2,574 feet (785 m). The West Peak, the mountain's second highest peak, where a radar dome currently stands, is at about 2,563 feet (781 m). It stood over 2,600 feet (792 m) before the summit was flattened for the radar dome construction. The mountain is clearly visible from the city of San Francisco and the East Bay region. (more...)
San Francisco International Airport (IATA: SFO, ICAO: KSFO, FAA LID: SFO) is an international airport located 13 miles (21 km) south of downtown San Francisco, California, near Millbrae and San Bruno in unincorporated San Mateo County. It has flights to points throughout North America and is a major gateway to Europe and Asia.
SFO is the largest airport in the Bay Area and the second busiest in California, after Los Angeles International Airport. In 2013, it was the seventh busiest in the United States and the twenty-second busiest airport in the world by passenger count. It is United Airlines' fifth largest hub. It also serves as Virgin America's principal base of operations. It is the sole maintenance hub of United Airlines, and houses the Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum.
SFO is owned and policed by the City and County of San Francisco, but is located in and entirely surrounded by adjacent San Mateo County. Between 1999 and 2004, the San Francisco Airport Commission operated city-owned SFO Enterprises, Inc., to oversee its business purchases and operations of ventures such as operating Honduran airports. (more...)
Islais Creek or Islais Creek Channel (previously known as Du Vrees Creek, Islais Channel and Islais Swamp) is a small creek in San Francisco, California. The name of the creek is derived from a Salinan Native American word "slay" or "islay", the name for the Prunus ilicifolia wild cherries.
Around the time of the Gold Rush, the area became an industrial hub, and the condition of the creek worsened. After the devastating earthquake in 1906, the city decided to reclaim the creek using earthquake debris, reducing the waterbody to its present size. Though much of Islais Creek has been converted to an underground culvert, remnants still exist today at both Glen Canyon Park and Third Street. Several community organizations are dedicated to preserve these remnants, as they are important wildlife habitats. (more...)
The Rejected (1961) is a made-for-television documentary film about homosexuality, produced for KQED in San Francisco by John W. Reavis. The Rejected was the first documentary program on homosexuality broadcast on American television. It initially ran on KQED on September 11, 1961, and was later syndicated to National Educational Television (NET) stations across the country. The Rejected received positive critical reviews upon airing. Reavis, an independent producer who was apparently unconnected to the homophile movement, wrote up his idea for The Rejected in 1960. Reavis originally titled the documentary The Gay Ones. He explained his goals for the program in his proposal:
The object of the program will be to present as objective analysis of the subject as possible, without being overly clinical. The questions will be basic ones: who are the gay ones, how did they become gay, how do they live in a heterosexual society, what treatment is there by medicine or psychotherapy, how are they treated by society, and how would they like to be treated?
Oscar Grant III was fatally shot by BART Police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California, United States, in the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009. Responding to reports of a fight on a crowded Bay Area Rapid Transit train returning from San Francisco, BART Police officers detained Grant and several other passengers on the platform at the Fruitvale BART Station. Officer Johannes Mehserle and another officer were restraining Grant, who was lying face down and allegedly resisting arrest. Officer Mehserle stood and, according to his attorney, said: "Get back, I'm gonna Tase him." Then Mehserle drew his gun and shot Grant once in the back. During his court testimony, Mehserle said that Grant then exclaimed, "You shot me!" Grant was unarmed; he was pronounced dead the next morning at Highland Hospital in Oakland.
The events were captured on multiple digital video and cell phone cameras. The footage was disseminated to media outlets and to various websites, where it was watched millions of times. The following days saw both peaceful and violent protests. (more...)
The Presidio of San Francisco (originally, El Presidio Real de San Francisco or The Royal Fortress of Saint Francis) is a park and former military base on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, and is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It had been a fortified location since September 17, 1776, when New Spain established it to gain a foothold on Alta California and the San Francisco Bay. It passed to Mexico, which in turn passed it to the United States in 1848. As part of a 1989 military reduction program under the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, Congress voted to end the Presidio's status as an active military installation of the U.S. Army. On October 1, 1994, it was transferred to the National Park Service, ending 219 years of military use and beginning its next phase of mixed commercial and public use.
In 1996, the United States Congress created the Presidio Trust to oversee and manage the interior 80% of the park's lands, with the National Park Service managing the coastal 20%. In a first-of-its-kind structure, Congress mandated that the Presidio Trust make the Presidio financially self-sufficient by 2013, which it achieved 8 years ahead of the scheduled deadline.
The park is characterized by many wooded areas, hills, and scenic vistas overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. It was recognized as a California Historical Landmark in 1933 and as a National Historic Landmark in 1962. (more...)
The Richmond–San Rafael Bridge (officially, the John F. McCarthy Memorial Bridge) is the northernmost of the east–west crossings of the San Francisco Bay in California, USA, connecting Richmond on the east to San Rafael on the west end. It opened in 1956, replacing ferry service by the Richmond–San Rafael Ferry Company. The bridge—including approaches—measures 5.5 miles (29,040 feet / 8,851.39 m / 8.9 km) long. At the time it was built, it was one of the world's longest bridges. The bridge spans two principal ship channels and has two separate major spans, each of the cantilever type. To save money, both main cantilever sections were designed identically, including the angles, necessitating the "dip" in the central section, giving the bridge a "roller coaster" appearance and also the nickname "roller coaster span". This appearance has also been referred to as a "bent coat hanger". After it was completed, many were disappointed by the aesthetics of the low budget bridge, especially when compared to the engineering and historical marvels of the neighboring Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. (more...)
The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that extends roughly 810 miles (1,300 km) through California in the United States. It forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, and its motion is right-lateral strike-slip (horizontal). The fault divides into three segments, each with different characteristics, and a different degree of earthquake risk. Although the most significant (Southern) segment only dates back about 5 million years, the oldest sections were formed by the subduction of a spreading ridge 30 million years ago.
The fault was first identified in 1895 by Professor of geology Andrew Lawson from UC Berkeley who discovered the northern zone. It is named after a small lake which was formed in a valley between the two plates. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Lawson concluded that the fault extended all the way into southern California. In 1953, geologist Thomas Dibblee astounded the scientific establishment with his conclusion that hundreds of miles of lateral movement could occur along the San Andreas Fault.
A project called the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) is drilling into the fault to improve prediction and recording of future quakes. (more...)
San Francisco Municipal Railway (SF Muni or Muni) is the public transit system for the city and county of San Francisco, California. In 2006, it served 46.7 square miles (121 km2) with an operating budget of about $700 million. In ridership Muni is the seventh largest transit system in the United States, with 210,848,310 rides in 2006 and the second largest in California behind Metro in Los Angeles. With a fleet average speed of 8.1 mph (13.0 km/h), it is also the slowest major transit system in America.
Muni is an integral part of public transit in the city of San Francisco, operating 365 days a year and connecting with regional transportation services, such as Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), Caltrain, SamTrans, and AC Transit. Its network consists of 54 bus lines, 17 trolley bus lines, 7 light rail lines that operate above ground and in the city's lone subway tube (called Muni Metro), 3 cable car lines, and a heritage streetcar line known as the F Market & Wharves. Many weekday riders are commuters, as the daytime weekday population in San Francisco exceeds its normal residential population. Muni shares four metro stations with BART. Travelers can connect to San Francisco International Airport and Oakland International Airport via BART. (more...)
Transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area is reliant on a complex multimodal infrastructure consisting of roads, bridges, highways, rail, tunnels, airports, and bike and pedestrian paths. The development, maintenance, and operation of these different modes of transportation are overseen by various agencies, including the Association of Bay Area Governments, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. These and other organizations collectively manage several interstate highways and state routes, two subway networks, two commuter rail agencies, eight trans-bay bridges, a ferry, local bus service, three international airports, and an extensive network of roads, tunnels, and bike paths. A 2011 Brookings Institute study ranked the San Francisco MSA and the San Jose MSA sixteenth and second, respectively, on transit coverage to job access. (more...)
Treasure Island is a man-made landform in San Francisco Bay and a neighborhood of the City of San Francisco. Built 1936-7 for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, the island's World’s Fair site is a California Historical Landmark with buildings having been listed on the NRHP, and the island's historical naval station and auxiliary air facility (for airships, blimps, dirigibles, planes and seaplanes) are designated in the Geographic Names Information System.
The San Francisco neighborhood that includes Treasure Island extends far into San Francisco Bay and includes a tip of Alameda Island. Yerba Buena and Treasure islands together have a land area of 576.7 acres (233.4 ha) with a 2010 total population of 2,500. Treasure Island and its 900 ft (270 m) causeway total 535 acres (217 ha) connected by roadway (e.g., San Francisco Muni's "108 Treasure Island") to Yerba Buena Island which has the Transbay Terminal ramps to the middle of Interstate 80's San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The island has a marina and will have a bikeway connecting to the Eastern span replacement of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge when it is completed. (more...)
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), is a center of health sciences research, patient care, and education; located in San Francisco, California. UCSF is widely regarded as one of the world's leading universities in health sciences. Though one of the 10 campuses of the University of California, it is unique for being the only University of California campus dedicated solely to graduate education, and in health and biomedical sciences. Some of UCSF's treatment centers include kidney transplants and liver transplantation, radiology, neurosurgery, neurology, oncology, ophthalmology, gene therapy, women's health, fetal surgery, pediatrics, and internal medicine.
Founded in 1873, the mission of UCSF is to serve as a "public university dedicated to saving lives and improving health." The UCSF Medical Center is consistently ranked among the top 10 hospitals in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, who also ranked UCSF's medical school as one of the top 10 in a number of specialties, including a specialty program in AIDS medical care ranked first in the country.
UCSF is administered separately from Hastings College of Law, another UC institution located in San Francisco. In recent years, UCSF and UC Hastings have increased their collaboration, including the formation of the UCSF/Hastings Consortium on Law, Science, and Health Policy. (more...)
Golden Gate Park, located in San Francisco, California, United States, is a large urban park consisting of 1,017 acres (412 ha) of public grounds. Configured as a rectangle, it is similar in shape but 20 percent larger than Central Park in New York, to which it is often compared. It is over three miles (4.8 km) long east to west, and about half a mile (0.8 km) north to south. With 13 million visitors annually, Golden Gate is the fifth most-visited city park in the United States after Central Park in New York City, Lincoln Park in Chicago, and Balboa Park and Mission Bay Park in San Diego. (more...)
Caltrain (reporting mark JPBX) is a California commuter rail line on the San Francisco Peninsula and in the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley). The north end of the line is San Francisco, at 4th and King streets; its south end is Gilroy. Trains leave San Francisco and San Jose about hourly on weekdays, or more frequently during commute hours and for special events (such as sporting events). Service between San Jose and Gilroy is limited to three weekday commute-hour round trips. Weekday ridership in February 2013 averaged 47,060, up 11.1% from February 2012, with ridership at Baby Bullet stations making up 83.5% of total boardings.
Caltrain is governed by the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board (PCJPB), which consists of agencies from the three Caltrain counties. Each member agency has three representatives on a nine member Board of Directors. The member agencies are the City and County of San Francisco, SamTrans and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority
Caltrain has 29 regular stops, one football-only stop (Stanford Stadium), and two weekend-only stops (Broadway and Atherton). As of October 2012 Caltrain runs 92 weekday trains (22 Baby Bullet), 36 Saturday (4 Baby Bullet), and 32 Sunday (4 Baby Bullet). (more...)
The 34th America's Cup was a series of boat races held on San Francisco Bay between the defender Oracle Team USA representing the Golden Gate Yacht Club, and the challenger Emirates Team New Zealand representing the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. Oracle Team USA defended the America's Cup by a score of 9 to 8. Oracle had to win the last eight races to come from behind to once again win the oldest trophy in international sport. Team New Zealand won the right to challenge for the Cup by winning the 2013 Louis Vuitton Cup. The 34th America's Cup was the longest ever Cup by both number of days and races, and the first since the 25th America's Cup to feature a winner-take-all final race. (more...)
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Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was a scheduled transpacific passenger flight from Incheon International Airport near Seoul, South Korea, to San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in the United States. On the morning of July 6, 2013, the Boeing 777-200ER aircraft operating the flight crashed on final approach into SFO. Of the 307 people aboard, two passengers died at the crash scene (one from being run over by an airport crash tender), and a third died in a hospital several days later. 181 others were injured, 12 of them critically. Among the injured were three flight attendants who were thrown onto the runway while still strapped in their seats when the tail section broke off after striking the seawall short of the runway. It was the first crash of a Boeing 777 that resulted in fatalities since its entry to service in 1995. (more...)
Ames Research Center (ARC), commonly known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. Named after Joseph Sweetman Ames and founded on December 20, 1939, as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laboratory, ARC became part of NASA in 1958 as part of the turnover from the dissolution of NACA, having (at the last estimate) over US$3.0 billion in capital equipment, 2,300 research personnel and a US$600 million annual budget.
Ames was founded to engage in wind-tunnel research on the aerodynamics of propeller-driven aircraft; however, its role has developed to encompass spaceflight and information technology. Ames plays a role in many of NASA missions in support of America's space and aeronautics programs. It provides leadership in astrobiology; small satellites; robotic lunar exploration; the search for habitable planets; supercomputing; intelligent/adaptive systems; advanced thermal protection; and airborne astronomy. Ames also develops tools for a safer, more efficient national airspace and unique partnerships benefiting NASA’s mission. The center's director is Dr. Simon P. "Pete" Worden (Brigadier General, USAF retired). (more...)
The Daughters of Bilitis /bɪˈliːtɪs/, also called the DOB or the Daughters, was the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the United States. The organization, formed in San Francisco in 1955, was conceived as a social alternative to lesbian bars, which were subject to raids and police harassment. As the DOB gained members, their focus shifted to providing support to women who were afraid to come out. The DOB educated them about their rights, and about gay history. Historian Lillian Faderman declared, "Its very establishment in the midst of witch-hunts and police harassment was an act of courage, since members always had to fear that they were under attack, not because of what they did, but merely because of who they were." The Daughters of Bilitis endured for 14 years, becoming an educational resource for lesbians, gay men, researchers and mental health professionals. (more...)
Earth Abides is a 1949 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer George R. Stewart. It tells the story of the fall of civilization from deadly disease and its rebirth. The story was set in the United States in the 1940s, in Berkeley, California.
Isherwood Williams (Ish), a graduate student at Berkeley, studying the geography of an area in the mountains, somewhere in California, emerges from isolation in the mountains to find almost everyone dead.
Earth Abides won the inaugural International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was included in Locus Magazine's list of best All Time Science Fiction in 1987 and 1998 and was a nominee to be entered into the Prometheus Hall of Fame. In November 1950, it was adapted for the CBS radio program Escape as a two-part drama starring John Dehner. (more...)
The Exploratorium is a museum in San Francisco whose stated mission is to change the way the world learns. It has been described by the New York Times as the most important science museum to have opened since the mid-20th century, an achievement attributed to "the nature of its exhibits, its wide-ranging influence and its sophisticated teacher training program". Characterized as "a mad scientist's penny arcade, a scientific funhouse, and an experimental laboratory all rolled into one", the participatory nature of its exhibits and its self-identification as a center for informal learning has led to it being cited as the prototype for participatory museums around the world.
The Exploratorium was founded by physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer and opened in 1969 at the Palace of Fine Arts, its home until January 2, 2013. On April 17, 2013, the Exploratorium reopened at Piers 15 and 17 on San Francisco's Embarcadero. The historic interior and exterior of Pier 15 was renovated extensively prior to the move, and is divided into several galleries mainly separated by content, including the physics of seeing and listening (Light and Sound), Human Behavior, Living Systems, Tinkering (including electricity and magnetism), the Outdoor Gallery, and the Bay Observatory Gallery, which focuses on local environment, weather, and landscape.(more...)
Journey is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1973 by former members of Santana and Frumious Bandersnatch. The band has gone through several phases; its strongest commercial success occurred between 1978 and 1987, after which it temporarily disbanded. During that period, the band released a series of hit songs, including 1981's "Don't Stop Believin'", which in 2009 became the top-selling catalog track in iTunes history. Its parent studio album, Escape, the band's eighth and most successful, reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and yielded another of their most popular singles, "Open Arms". Its 1983 follow-up, Frontiers, was almost as successful in the United States, reaching No. 2 and spawning several successful singles; it broadened the band's appeal in the United Kingdom, where it reached No. 6 on the UK Albums Chart. Journey enjoyed a successful reunion in the mid-1990s, and later regrouped with a series of lead singers. (more...)
Kaiser Permanente is an integrated managed care consortium, based in Oakland, California, United States, founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and physician Sidney Garfield. Kaiser Permanente is made up of three distinct groups of entities: the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and its regional operating subsidiaries; Kaiser Foundation Hospitals; and the autonomous regional Permanente Medical Groups. As of 2006, Kaiser Permanente operates in nine states and the District of Columbia, and is the largest managed care organization in the United States.
Kaiser Permanente has 9.3 million health plan members, 167,300 employees, 14,600 physicians, 37 medical centers, and 611 medical offices. For 2011, the non-profit Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals entities reported a combined $1.6 billion in net income on $47.9 billion in operating revenues. Each independent Permanente Medical Group operates as a separate for-profit partnership or professional corporation in its individual territory, and while none publicly report their financial results, each is primarily funded by reimbursements from its respective regional Kaiser Foundation Health Plan entity. (more...)
Levi's Stadium is a football stadium in Santa Clara, California and is the home of the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League.
The 49ers initially proposed in 2006 to construct a new stadium at Candlestick Point in San Francisco, the site of their former home, Candlestick Park. The project, which included plans for retail space and housing improvements, was considered to have been of great potential benefit to the nearby historically blighted neighborhood of Hunters Point. After negotiations with the city of San Francisco fell through, the 49ers focused their attention on a site near their administrative offices and training facility in Santa Clara, California.
In June 2010, Santa Clara voters approved a measure allowing the city to lease land to the 49ers Stadium Authority to construct a new football stadium. The necessary funds were secured in December 2011, allowing construction to start in April 2012. (more...)
Milk is a 2008 American biographical film based on the life of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Dustin Lance Black, the film stars Sean Penn as Milk and Josh Brolin as Dan White, a city supervisor who assassinated Milk. The film was released to much acclaim and earned numerous accolades from film critics and guilds. Ultimately, it received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, winning two for Best Actor in a Leading Role for Penn and Best Original Screenplay for Black.
Attempts to put Milk's life to film followed a 1984 documentary of his life and the aftermath of his assassination, titled The Times of Harvey Milk, which was loosely based upon Randy Shilts's biography, The Mayor of Castro Street (the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for 1984, and was awarded Special Jury Prize at the first Sundance Film Festival, among other awards). Various scripts were considered in the early 1990s, but projects fell through for different reasons, until 2007. Much of Milk was filmed on Castro Street and other locations in San Francisco, including Milk's former storefront, Castro Camera. (more...)
The Mission Blue (Aricia icarioides missionensis) is a blue or lycaenid butterfly subspecies native to the San Francisco Bay Area of the United States. The butterfly has been declared as endangered by the US Federal Government. It is a subspecies of Boisduval's Blue (Aricia icarioides).
The Mission Blue depends on a very specific host plant called the lupine. As such, its habitat is restricted solely to the U.S. state of California. More specifically, it is limited to a range of five known areas where Mission Blue colonies have been confirmed. Those areas are subject to a range of conservation and habitat restoration action.
P. i. missionensis is federally endangered and found in only a few locations. Its habitat is restricted to the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically six areas, the Twin Peaks area in San Francisco County, Fort Baker, a former military installation managed by the National Park Service (NPS), in Marin County, the San Bruno Mountain area in San Mateo County, the Marin Headlands, in Golden Gate National Recreation Area (another NPS entity), Laurelwood Park & Sugarloaf Open Space in the city of San Mateo, and Skyline Ridge, also in San Mateo County. (more...)
A Mission burrito (also known as a San Francisco burrito or a Mission-style burrito) is a type of burrito that first became popular during the 1960s in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. It is distinguished from other burritos by its large size and inclusion of extra rice and other ingredients. It has been referred to as one of three major styles of burritos in the United States, following the earlier, simple burrito consisting of beans, rice, and meat and preceding the California burrito containing cheese and potatoes that was developed in the 1980s.
Many taquerías in the Mission and in the greater San Francisco Bay Area specialize in Mission burritos. It is typically served in a piece of aluminum foil around a large flour tortilla which is wrapped and folded around a variety of ingredients. A food critic working for the San Francisco Chronicle counted hundreds of taquerias in the Bay Area, and noted that the question of which taqueria makes the best burrito can "encourage fierce loyalty and ferocious debate". New York-based writer Calvin Trillin said that the burrito in San Francisco "has been refined and embellished in much the same way that the pizza has been refined and embellished in Chicago." Since its commercial availability began in the 1960s, the style has spread widely throughout the United States. (more...)
Mission San Francisco de Asís, or Mission Dolores, is the oldest surviving structure in San Francisco and the sixth religious settlement established as part of the California chain of missions. The Mission was founded on June 29, 1776, by Lieutenant José Joaquin Moraga and Father Francisco Palóu (a companion of Father Junipero Serra), both members of the de Anza Expedition, which had been charged with bringing Spanish settlers to Alta (upper) California, and evangelizing the local Natives, the Ohlone. The settlement was named for St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, but was also commonly known as "Mission Dolores" owing to the presence of a nearby creek named Arroyo de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, meaning "Our Lady of Sorrows Creek."
The original Mission consisted of a log and thatch structure dedicated on October 9, 1776 after the required church documents arrived. It was located near what is today the intersection of Camp and Albion Streets, about a block-and-a-half east of the surviving adobe Mission building, and on the shores of a lake (supposedly long since filled) called Laguna de los Dolores.
The present Mission church, near what is now the intersection of Dolores and 16th Streets, was dedicated in 1791. At the time of dedication a mural painted by native labor adorned the focal wall of the chapel. The Mission was constructed of adobe and part of a complex of buildings used for housing, agricultural and manufacturing enterprises (see architecture of the California missions). Though most of the Mission complex, including the quadrangle and convento, has either been altered or demolished outright during the intervening years, the façade of the Mission chapel has remained relatively unchanged since its construction in 1782–1791. (more...)
Mission San José is a Spanish mission located in the present-day city of Fremont, California. It was founded on June 11, 1797 by the Franciscan order and was the fourteenth Spanish mission established in California. The mission is the namesake of the Mission San José district of Fremont, which was an independent town subsumed into the city when it was incorporated in 1957.
The Mission entered a long period of gradual decline after secularization in 1834, though numerous restoration efforts in the intervening periods have reconstructed many of the original structures. The old mission church remains in use as a chapel of Saint Joseph Catholic Church, a parish of the Diocese of Oakland. The museum also features a visitor center, museum, and slide show telling the history of the mission. (more...)
People's Park in Berkeley, California, US, is a park located off Telegraph Avenue, bounded by Haste and Bowditch streets and Dwight Way, near the University of California, Berkeley. The park was created during the radical political activism of the late 1960s.
Today, People's Park is a free public park. Although open to all, it is mainly a daytime sanctuary for Berkeley's large homeless population who, along with others, receive meals from East Bay Food Not Bombs. Public toilets are available, and the park offers demonstration gardens, including organic community gardening beds and areas landscaped with California native plants, all of which were created by volunteer gardeners. Students use the basketball courts. A wider audience is attracted by occasional rallies, concerts, and hip-hop events conducted at the People's Stage, a wooden bandstand designed and built on the western end of the park by volunteers organized by the People's Park Council. Nearby residents, and those who try to use the park for recreation, sometimes experience conflict with the more aggressive homeless people.
The local Southside neighborhood was the scene of a major confrontation between student protesters and police in May 1969. A mural near the park, painted by Berkeley artist O'Brien Thiele and lawyer/artist Osha Neumann, depicts the shooting of James Rector, a student who died from shotgun wounds inflicted by the police on May 15, 1969. (more...)
The Residents are an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. Since their first official release, Meet The Residents (1974), the group has since released over sixty albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects, and ten DVDs. They have undertaken seven major world tours and scored multiple films. Pioneers in exploring the potential of CD-ROM and similar technologies, the Residents have won several awards for their multimedia projects. Ralph Records, a record label focusing on avant-garde music, was started by the band.
Throughout the group's existence, the individual members have ostensibly attempted to operate under anonymity, preferring instead to have attention focused on their art output. Much outside speculation and rumor has focused on this aspect of the group. In public, the group appears silent and costumed, often wearing eyeball helmets, top hats and tuxedos — a long-lasting costume now recognized as its signature iconography.
Its albums generally fall into two categories: deconstructions of Western popular music, or complex conceptual pieces, composed around a theme, theory or plot. The group is noted for surrealistic lyrics and sound, disregard for conventional music composition, and the over the top, theatrical spectacle of their live performances. (more...)
Richardson Bay (originally Richardson's Bay) is a shallow, ecologically rich arm of San Francisco Bay, managed under a Joint Powers Agency of four Northern California cities. The 911-acre (369 ha) Richardson Bay Sanctuary was acquired in the early 1960s by the National Audubon Society. The bay was named for William A. Richardson, early 19th century sea captain and builder in San Francisco.
Richardson Bay is one of the most pristine estuaries on the Pacific Coast in spite of its urbanized periphery, since it supports extensive eelgrass areas and sizable undisturbed intertidal habitats. It is a feeding and resting area for a panoply of estuarine and pelagic birds, while its associated marshes and littoral zones support a variety of animal and plant life. Richardson Bay has been designated as an Important Bird Area (IBA), based upon its large number of annual bird visitors and residents, its sightings of California clapper rail and its strategic location in the flyway. The bay's waters are subject to a "no discharge" rule to protect the elaborate and fragile ecosystems present, including a complex fishery, diverse mollusk populations and even marine mammals such as the harbor seal. (more...)
San Francisco Bay is a shallow, productive estuary that drains water from approximately forty percent of California. Water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and from the Sierra Nevada mountains passes through the Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Specifically, both rivers flow into Suisun Bay, which flows through the Carquinez Strait to meet with the Napa River at the entrance to San Pablo Bay, which connects at its south end to San Francisco Bay. However, the entire group of interconnected bays is often called the San Francisco Bay.
San Francisco Bay is in the U.S. state of California, surrounded by a contiguous region known as the San Francisco Bay Area (often simply "the Bay Area"), dominated by the large cities San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. The waterway entrance to San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean is called the Golden Gate. Across the strait spans the Golden Gate Bridge. The bay was designated a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance on February 2, 2013. (more...)
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), also called Order of Perpetual Indulgence (OPI) is a charity, protest, and street performance organization that uses drag and religious imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance and satirize issues of gender and morality. At their inception in 1979, a small group of gay men in San Francisco began wearing the attire of nuns in visible situations using high camp to draw attention to social conflicts and problems in the Castro District.
The Sisters have grown throughout the U.S. and are currently organized as an international network of orders, which are mostly non-profit charity organizations that raise money for AIDS, LGBT-related causes, and mainstream community service organizations, while promoting safer sex and educating others about the harmful effects of drug use and other risky behaviors. In San Francisco alone where they continue to be the most active, between 1979 and 2007 the Sisters are credited with raising over $1 million for various causes, or almost $40,000 on average per year. (more...)
The Castro District commonly referenced as The Castro, is a neighborhood in Eureka Valley in San Francisco, California. The Castro was one of the first gay neighborhoods in the United States and has been one of the most lively for several decades. Having transformed from a working-class neighborhood through the 1960s and 1970s, the Castro remains one of the most prominent symbols of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activism and events.
San Francisco's gay village is mostly concentrated in the business district that is located on Castro Street from Market Street to 19th Street. It extends down Market Street toward Church Street and on both sides of the Castro neighborhood from Church Street to Eureka Street. Although the greater gay community was, and is, concentrated in the Castro, many gay people live in the surrounding residential areas bordered by Corona Heights, the Mission District, Noe Valley, Twin Peaks, and Haight-Ashbury neighborhoods. Some consider it to include Duboce Triangle and Dolores Heights, which both have a strong LGBT presence. (more...)
KTVU, virtual channel 2 (UHF digital channel 44), is a Fox owned-and-operated television station serving the San Francisco Bay Area that is licensed to Oakland, California, United States. The station is owned by the Fox Television Stations subsidiary of 21st Century Fox, as part of a duopoly with independent station KICU-TV (channel 36). The two stations share studio facilities located at Jack London Square in Oakland; KTVU maintains transmitter facilities located at Sutro Tower in San Francisco.
KTVU presently broadcasts 47½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 7½ hours on weekdays and five hours each on Saturdays and Sundays); in regards to the number of hours devoted to news programming, it is the second-highest newscast output of any television station in the San Francisco Bay Area (behind MyNetworkTV affiliate KRON-TV, which carries 60 hours each week). In addition, the station produces the sports highlight program Sports Wrap, airing weekends at 10:45 p.m. (during the final 15 minutes of the 10:00 p.m. newscast), and the public affairs program Bay Area People, which airs Saturdays at 6:30 a.m. KTVU's Saturday 6:00 p.m. and Sunday 5:00 p.m. newscasts are subject to preemption or delay due to network sports telecasts overrunning into or starting within either timeslot. KTVU is the largest Fox station not owned by the network without a newscast in the traditional 11:00 p.m. timeslot (the station instead occupies the 11:00 half-hour with off-network syndicated sitcoms), and the fifth-largest Fox station overall without a newscast in a conventional late news timeslot. (Full article...)
Yelp is a multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops, hosts and markets Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses. Yelp also trains small businesses to respond to reviews responsibly; hosts social events for reviewers; and provides basic data about businesses, such as hours of operation.
Yelp was founded in 2004 by former Paypal employees at startup incubator MRL Ventures. It was initially an unsuccessful email-based referral service, but was re-launched on the basis of unsolicited online reviews. It grew quickly and raised several rounds of funding. It had $30 million in revenues by 2010 and had collected more than 4.5 million crowd-sourced reviews. From 2009–2012, Yelp expanded throughout Europe and Asia. In 2009 it entered negotiations with Google for a potential acquisition, but a deal was never reached. Yelp became a public company in March 2012 and became profitable for the first time in 2014.
As of 2014, Yelp.com had 132 million monthly visitors and 57 million reviews. The company's revenues come from businesses being reviewed on the site choosing to advertise.
According to BusinessWeek, Yelp has "always had a complicated relationship with small businesses." Yelp has had conflicts with business owners reviewed on the site, who often feel their reviews are unfair, fraudulently write reviews on their own business, or accuse Yelp of manipulating reviews. (Full article...)
The 2014 World Series was the 110th edition of Major League Baseball's championship series, a best-of-seven playoff between the National League champion San Francisco Giants and the American League champion Kansas City Royals.
The Royals had home field advantage for the series as a result of the American League's 5–3 victory in the All-Star Game. The Giants defeated the Royals, 4 games to 3, to clinch their third World Series championship in a five-season span and their third overall since their move to San Francisco from New York. This was also the Giants' eighth World Series championship in franchise history overall.
The Giants won Game 1 behind a strong pitching performance by Madison Bumgarner, while the Royals won Games 2 and 3, as their relief pitchers Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland limited the Giants' hitters. The Giants won Games 4 and 5, as they scored 11 runs in Game 4 and Bumgarner threw a complete game shutout in Game 5. The Royals came back to win Game 6 as they scored 10 runs and shut out the Giants, forcing a Game 7. The Giants won Game 7, 3–2, behind timely hits from Pablo Sandoval, Hunter Pence, and the game-winning RBI by Michael Morse. Bumgarner pitched five strong shutout innings in relief to clinch the championship on two days' rest. More...
The California Golden Bears football team is the college football team of the University of California, Berkeley. The team plays its home games at California Memorial Stadium. Memorial Stadium was built to honor Berkeley alumni, students, and other Californians who died in World War I and modeled after the Colosseum in Rome. Memorial Stadium was named one of the 40 best college football stadiums by the Sporting News. The team also has produced two of the oddest and most memorable plays in college football: Roy "Wrong Way" Riegels' fumble recovery and run toward the California goal line in the 1929 Rose Bowl, and The Play in the 1982 Big Game with the last play five lateral winning kickoff return. (more...)
Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts was a non-profit museum and educational center in downtown Napa, California, dedicated to wine, food and the arts of American culture. The center, planned and largely funded by vintners Robert and Margrit Mondavi, was open from 2001 to 2008. The museum had galleries, two theaters, classrooms, a demonstration kitchen, a restaurant, a rare book library, and a 3.5-acre (1.4 ha) vegetable and herb garden; there it hosted wine and food tasting programs, exhibitions, films, and concerts. The main and permanent exhibition of the museum, "Forks in the Road", explained the origins of cooking through to modern advances. The museum's establishment benefited the city of Napa and the development and gentrification of its downtown.
Copia hosted its opening celebration on November 18, 2001. Among other notable people, Julia Child helped fund the venture, which established a restaurant named Julia's Kitchen. Copia struggled to achieve its anticipated admissions, and had difficulty in repaying its debts. Proceeds from ticket sales, membership and donations attempted to support Copia's payoff of debt, educational programs and exhibitions, but eventually were not sufficient. After numerous changes to the museum to increase revenue, Copia closed on November 21, 2008. Its library was donated to Napa Valley College and its Julia Child cookware was sent to the National Museum of American History. The 12-acre (4.9 ha) property has been for sale since its closure; the Culinary Institute of America purchased the northern portion of the property in October 2015. (more...)
Vertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. The story was based on the 1954 novel D'entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Boileau-Narcejac. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.
The film stars James Stewart as former police detective John "Scottie" Ferguson. Scottie is forced into early retirement because an incident in the line of duty has caused him to develop acrophobia (an extreme fear of heights) and vertigo (a false sense of rotational movement). Scottie is hired by an acquaintance, Gavin Elster, as a private investigator to follow Gavin's wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who is behaving strangely.
The film was shot on location in San Francisco, California, and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. It is the first film to utilize the dolly zoom, an in-camera effect that distorts perspective to create disorientation, to convey Scottie's acrophobia. As a result of its use in this film, the effect is often referred to as "the Vertigo effect".
Vertigo received mixed reviews upon initial release, but is now often cited as a classic Hitchcock film and one of the defining works of his career. Attracting significant scholarly criticism, it replaced Citizen Kane (1941) as the best film ever made in the 2012 British Film Institute's Sight & Sound critics' poll. In 1996, the film underwent a major restoration to create a new 70mm print and DTS soundtrack. It has appeared repeatedly in polls of the best films by the American Film Institute, including a 2007 ranking as the ninth-greatest American movie of all time. (more...)
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