San Francisco is a city in western California, coextensive with San Francisco County. Renowned for its spectacular setting, San Francisco is mainly situated on the northern tip of a peninsula at the entrance to San Francisco Bay. It is bordered by the Pacific Ocean around the west, the strait referred to as Golden Gate on the north, San Francisco Bay on the east, and San Bruno Mountain around the south. Alcatraz, Angel, Farallon, Treasure, and Yerba Buena islands are part of the city.
The community was settled in 1776, when the Spanish officer Juan Bautista de Anza founded a fort (presidio) here to defend the entrance to San Francisco Bay. Later that year Father Junípero Serra established nearby the Misión San Francisco de Asís (today called Mission Dolores). Little happened either in location, and in the 1830s a third settlement started at Yerba Buena Cove, at the present site of Portsmouth Square in the northeastern part of the city. The United States took Yerba Buena from Mexico in 1846, renaming it San Francisco in 1847. Around 1848 gold was discovered in the interior of California, next to Sacramento, and the ensuing gold rush rapidly transformed San Francisco into a flourishing community. San Francisco was incorporated as a city in 1850. The city established as a port and supply point and became an early governmental and cultural center. It was renowned for its cosmopolitan population and for the lawlessness of some portions, particularly the so-called Barbary Coast area. Throughout 1869 the transcontinental railroad reached the Bay Area. By 1900 San Francisco had around 340,000 inhabitants.
On April 18, 1906, an earthquake shook the city and caused a fire that raged for three days, destroying the majority of San Francisco's downtown and much of the residential area. The city was refurbished quickly, and in 1915 it played host to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. During 1934 a strike by 12,000 San Francisco longshoremen spread to a dozen Pacific Coast cities and resulted in a three-day general strike in which paralyzed the city. During World War II (1939-1945), San Francisco was a main shipbuilding center, and in 1945, at the end of the war, the city was the site of an international conference that drafted the charter of the United Nations. Within the 1960s and 1970s several large, modern buildings were developed around the city, along with a number of residential areas were revitalized. In the late 1950s the literary advancement of the Beat Generation was centered in San Francisco's North Beach area. The city was again terribly ruined by an earthquake in 1989, but has since recovered. The city's significant homosexual population makes it a center of gay civil rights activism since the 1970s.
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