A visitor to San Francisco, as to any city, takes in the scene and accepts it at face value. But San Francisco, like any other city, is one of realms: specialized business districts, racialized neighborhoods, rich and poor, manufacture and finance. It has a certain order, built up over time and fixed in large buildings, streets, and transit lines--all seemingly permanent and immutable.

But the human eye can be fooled. Cities are constantly in motion and upheaval thanks to the dynamism of capital investment, shifting foundations of technology and markets, and the struggle over urban space by class, race, and interest. San Francisco is no exception. Indeed, given its position at the crossroads of the Pacific, as the historical center of finance in the western United States, and near the world center of high tech, one can expect that it would be rather more prone to change than many other places. And given its density and its restless populace, with a justifiable reputation for political moxie, it is no surprise that this is a fiercely contested city.

The city you see around you is the sixth major iteration of urbanism on the San Francisco peninsula (let alone indigenous settlements for several thousand years before). A Spanish/Mexican town, with requisite plaza, was erased by the Gold Rush, but not entirely; Portsmouth Plaza is still there, the lot sizes are of Spanish dimensions, and the street grid breaks at Market Street to integrate the town and the Mission Delores out by Twin Peaks. The Gold Rush city, a jackstraw city of wooden buildings looking like any mining town, was draped at the feet of Telegraph, Nob, and Rincon Hills--the latter now barely visible under the weight of the Bay Bridge and approaching freeways. It was during this era that Yerba Buena cove was filled. The area east of Kearny Street sits atop graves of the cove's abandoned ships and wharves. The center of that city though is still visible in the small brick buildings now called Jackson Square, just north of the Transamerica Pyramid. Later, this was the notorious Barbary Coast, the playground of America's most sinful and second most cosmopolitan city--two other legacies of the great migrations of the 49ers. All along the bay was the busiest waterfront on the west coast.

A proper Victorian city took shape after the Civil War, as San Francisco became a regular center of commerce and finance for the Pacific slope. A business district developed along Montgomery Street, South of the heart of the previous city. A shopping district for fine ladies and gentlemen opened up along Bush and Sutter Streets and later filled in around Union Square. The streets and blocks were regularized, and the city extended through the Western Addition and out to the Mission district. Cable cars climbed the hills and opened up new suburbs. A great park was begun on the dunes that still blew sand in drifts all the way to where the Civic Center now sits solidly paved. Proper city houses were constructed by the thousand in stately rows all the way to the Haight, with false fronts to make them look higher and more urbane. But all was not orderly. Industry grew along the bay waterfront from North Point to Potrero Point, and rough and tumble Irish and German working class neighborhoods sprang up behind. The South of Market area was an especially dense warren of boarding houses and small homes for large families. A volatile working class challenged the city burghers in the Workingmen's Party of the 1870s and again in the Union Labor Party of 1900-06, and got a new Constitution for California in 1881; but their most notorious legacy was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

When the city shook and fell down in the earthquake of 1906, many of those working class people met quick deaths-- which were hushed up by the city fathers so as not to further besmirch the good name of the city by the Golden Gate. Two-thirds of the city was lost to the fires that burned for days, leaving a necklace of Victorian districts to the west and nothing in the heart of the city. The great mansions of the silver "kings" and railroad barons on Nob Hill were erased as surely as the humble dwellings of Chinese, Italian, and Irish workers. San Francisco was rebuilt as fast as possible. It was a new and different city that rose from the ashes. Most of the San Francisco beloved of tourists is not the Victorian city, but the reconstructed Edwardian city built in 1906-15 and made up of mid-rise apartments and residential hotels which still prevail east of Van Ness Avenue (it is this incarnation of the city where Dashiell Hammett wrote the Maltese Falcon). San Francisco ended up with more such rental units per capita than any other city in the United States. The prosperous working class got small homes to the south in the Mission, on Potrero Hill and out beyond Bernal Heights, and in North Beach. The rich moved west along the ridge tops of Pacific Heights, and into new suburban enclaves on Twin Peaks, near the Presidio, down the Peninsula. The city celebrated its rebirth in the 1915 world's fair, the Panama- Pacific Exposition, on an area of bay fill along the northern shore. The area was afterward converted by real estate developers into the Marina District. Elsewhere, a grand new City Hall was constructed, complete with gilded dome.

The Edwardian city was rounded out in the 1920s with an Opera House and Civic Center, bold new skyscrapers downtown, and a brand new waterfront walled off from the city. Then came the stagnation of the Great Depression and the immense building program of the New Deal, which gave the city dozens of schools, an aquatic park and a wealth of social realist murals (as at Coit Tower). But World War II turned everything on its head again. San Francisco prospered from the Pacific war, and its leading capitalists were poised to remake the city as a postwar gateway to the American century. Urban renewal was to be the vanguard of an expanded corporate downtown with feeder lines of freeways and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to bring in business commuters from the burgeoning suburbs. The Yerba Buena project broke across the barrier of Market Street to take out the Third Street skid row, Embarcadero Center replaced the wholesale produce market, and the Western Addition's thousands of Victorians were leveled--chiefly to remove the city's first ghetto, created by wartime shipyard workers filling vacant homes in the Fillmore neighborhood after Japanese removal. Corporate towers in the international style soared to new heights, led by Bank of America in 1969, and a new downtown began to take shape. Manufacturing and the working class city fell back to the south. But revolt broke out, stopping the freeways, saving Chinatown, Jackson Square, and the Tenderloin, and halting Yerba Buena for years. San Francisco was not torn down as completely as many U.S. cities, and remained a redoubt for beats, hippies, and queers as well as banks.

By the 1980s, the urban world was on the move again. Popular struggles were blunted (not least by the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1977) and the counterculture was transformed into consumer culture in the era of the yuppie. San Francisco looked richer and sleeker than ever, restaurants and hotels sprouted everywhere, and the tourists and global shoppers poured in. Skyscrapers sprouting South of Market sported postmodern jackets and commercial design grew flashier. The wheels of commerce were greased by immigrants, especially Chinese, Filipinos, and Central Americans, who formed the new class of workers and small business owners. But San Francisco?s old-line banks and corporations were stumbling. The financial district was moving into a new era of securities trading, investment banking and venture capital, led by the likes of Charles Schwab, and was growing more tied to East Asia. But the real earthquake was the rise of Silicon Valley and its companies to preeminence within the Bay Area and the international world of high tech, leaving San Francisco more of a cultural museum and tourist destination than the heart of the regional economy.

In the great boom of the 1990s, propelled by the NASDAQ stock bubble, San Francisco joined the high tech party through investment bankers like Montgomery Securities, dot-com startups by the hundreds (from Webvan to Pets.com), and Internet vanguardists such as Craigslist, Wired, and The Industry Standard. The city became a leading symbol of the New Economy, trumpeted around the world as the neo-liberal answer to fading social democracy. In the process, the urban landscape continued its metamorphosis to a land of finance and fantasy. The shopping and entertainment district from Union Square to Yerba Buena were remade, a new ballpark went up at China Basin, and the whole South of Market was changed forever from a humble place of work and mixed uses into a scene of loft-living for the young and well-paid. The dot-coms seized all available warehouse space, transforming it into hip offices and driving out artists and working families. At the peak of the boom, San Francisco office space briefly topped Manhattan, at over $100 per square foot. The tidal wave of development crashed against the Mission District, grabbed the old rail yards of Mission Bay, and transformed the waterfront. Battles over space broke out all over the city, as Latinos, artists, renters, and others made common cause against developers and their friend in City Hall, Mayor Willie Brown.

In 2000, however, the NASDAQ party fell silent, a victim of its own speculative excesses. The dot-coms disappeared, the investment banks folded, commercial rents collapsed, and the New Economy breathed its last. San Francisco got a reprieve, as "for rent" notices sprouted like weeds, trendy restaurants went belly up by the score, and the creative class slunk back to Ohio. But the city paid yet again, as it was hit by the worst local downturn in fifty years. The Bay Area bled profits, suffered mass bankruptcy, and sacrificed 10% of all jobs lost in the recession nationally. On top of this, tourism collapsed in the wake of the Twin Towers coming down, a gut check to the city's biggest jobs generator. Homelessness swelled, the civic coffers emptied out, and the "Governator" came calling.

The economy started to revive by 2004 on the back of the housing boom triggered by the Federal Reserve Bank's draconian cuts in interests rates (to save the national economy from a nose-dive). But in a new irony, San Francisco homes became the most expensive in the nation (after Palo Alto held that honor in the 1990s), unaffordable to 90% of its populace. Gentrification pushed deeper into former working class redoubts such as the Outer Mission and Potrero Hill, and young families bailed out to the burbs, some commuting two hours each way from the Central Valley. In turn, developers shifted from commercial offices to high-rise condo construction around the central city, and fiftystory condo towers for the elite are sprouting at the foot of the Bay Bridge, forever changing the city's skyline. Tourism rebounded and hotels filled, but hotel workers were locked out for wanting a better share of the profits from selling the city.

If great cities never sleep, neither does the restless flux of capital, a world on the move, or the spirit of the people, and you can see them at work all around you in San Francisco, turning the hardscape of the city back into sand, only to build new castles on the Pacific shore.

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