As the last stop for American westward expansion on the continent, San Francisco has always been a haven for those seeking to escape the conservative traditions of the East Coast and Midwest. Long before the “flower children” of the 1960s, a culture of provincial rebellion was created during the Gold Rush, when individuality, excess and lawlessness prevailed. In the Barbary Coast, each day was a wild pageant, each man (woman) made his (her) own destiny and The City was wide open to all sorts of characters and ideas. To many who call it home today, and much of the rest of the world, it still seems to be. 

The '50s Beat movement, and the '60s "counter-culture" brought more raucous social rebellion, which powerfully influenced most aspects of The City's -- and sometimes the country's -- culture.  The beatniks wrote and performed their rebellion.  The hippies and flower children  followed  Dr. Timothy Leary's exhortations to “tune in, turn on, and drop out," carried along by San Francisco’s unique contributions to Rock & Roll and the anti-war movement.  Feminism, protests against the war in Vietnam and free love made San Francisco the font of the counter-culture. It was during these years that the Black Panthers formed nearby in Oakland, and Haight-Ashbury rose to replace North Beach as the epicenter of cultural upheaval and the hip "movement". San Francisco remains the nation’s avante garde major city to this day, often creating new trends (if no longer "movements") that later spread  to other areas of the country.

The influx of young people from the Summer of Love rippled throughout the city. And in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York, too, a budding gay population began to establish itself in San Francisco's Castro District. Harvey Milk, who would be known first as "The Mayor of Castro Street," and then as an elected city supervisor, opened his camera store there in 1975. The Castro District became known around the country and the world, and the gay population became an integral part of the city's culture, traditions, attractions and politics.

Literature

The City's open-mindedness and originality soon found a voice in authors and artists whose muse, if not their permanent home, was here.  Ambrose Bierce wrote from San Francisco, for a time.  It was in San Francisco that Samuel Clemens first took the pen name of Mark Twain, and it was here that he developed his raw colloquial style of writing that would shock literary tradition and forever change American literature.  Jack London, John Steinbeck and Robert Louis Stevenson orbited.  Another author inspired by The City was Jack Kerouac; his American vision of freedom and hope in On the Road were based on the hot jazz joints and foggy nights of San Francisco. Kerouac - along with poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder - ignited the non-conformist “Beat Generation,” based out of the City Lights Bookstore in North Beach.

Although not exactly literature (well maybe), no discussion of writing in San Francisco -- or of its culture, for that matter -- would be complete without paying homage to one who defined it as much as anyone in its history. The San Francisco Chronicle's Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist: Herb Caen.  Herb Caen provided a daily monograph of his "Baghdad by the Bay" for fifty years,  via his characteristic "three-dot journalism," linking "items and sight 'ems" in a readable, entertaining way. Caen's column was as vital to a morning in San Francisco as coffee.   (Members of the City's social set who skipped it, did so at their peril.)  Many would bypass the first section of the San Francisco Chronicle, and go directly to the front of the second where Caen's column resided, next to the Macy's ad. The space next to his column was the newspaper's premier advertising space.  He invented the terms "beatnik" and "hippie".  His rhapsodies on San Francisco, the Bay, the Fog and the Bridges could easily and effectively supplant what is written here.  There was a city-wide tribute and massively-attended parade in his honor on Herb Caen Day in 1996, when he retired after learning he had cancer.  His parting public words were, "If I make it to heaven, I'm probably going to look around like any San Franciscan and say, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco...' " ...  

Today, Amy Tan, Anne Lamott and a host of other female and male creators find their muse in San Francisco.

Music

In the classical vein, the San Francisco Symphony,  the San Francisco Ballet, and San Francisco Opera are acclaimed in The City's own venerable performance venues, and world-wide.  Opening Night at the Opera is the traditional beginning of the social season, and extravaganza at the newly-refurbished War Memorial Opera House, is world-class.  Here, haute couture still matters.  And  it is here, on many smaller stages, other classical groups thrive, from the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra to choral men's group, Chanticleer.

In jazz, The Dave Brubeck Quartet and "Take Five" (one of the few pieces ever written in 5/4 time) led the "West Coast Cool Jazz Movement".

In popular music, Tony Bennett’s "I left My Heart in San Francisco" quickly became the icon (though, for true San Franciscans, the bawdier "San Francisco," as sung by Jeanette McDonald, is the signature song of the city). Pop music fans may nostalgically remember Eric Burdon & the Animals’ "San Francisco Nights" and Otis Redding’s "Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay".  Were these THE signal San Francisco contributions to popular music?  Remember "The San Francisco Sound?" The work of The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, Big Brother & the Holding Co., Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe & the Fish ...or "The Santana Blues Band"? Certainly, Fillmore West and Winterland were the creative fonts in their heyday -- hats off to impresario par excellence Bill Graham. Together, they helped to make San Francisco Rock & Roll's western bookend opposite Liverpool and London until 1969, "the day the music died", when the Rolling Stones' concert across the bay at the Altamont Speedway symbolically turned the tide.  The music hasn't died, of course, but this did mark the passing of the days of innocence, if they ever existed. 

Architecture

San Francisco's oldest surviving structures are the Mission San Francisco de Asís (aka "Dolores") and the building that was long the Officers' Club at the Presidio, now its Visitor's Center.  They are splendid and well-kept examples of old Spanish mission and garrison adobe and terra cotta architecture.

San Francisco’s subsequent bold expressiveness can be experienced in its contributions to architecture, beginning with the fanciful  Palace of Fine Arts (a domed vestige of the virtual city of buildings built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition); the Beaux Arts style City Hall; the Palace of the Legion of Honor framing Rodin’s "The Thinker" in its grand courtyard; the modern St. Mary’s Cathedral glowing in a mantle of white marble; the stately Grace Cathedral, reminiscent of European cathedrals and minsters; and streets full of three-color Painted Ladies in The City’s Victorian neighborhoods -- some giving wedding cakes a run for their money.  On Telegraph Hill, there is the over-the-top Coit Tower, which may or may not be designed to look like a fire hose nozzle, which was financed by the heiress Lillie Hitchcock Coit, who may or may not have really liked firemen.  What do you want to believe?  Hints:  She really did like firemen, and this is San Francisco.

Across from City Hall, the old Main Library was stunningly remade in 2003 into the Asian Art Museum, one of the few institutions of its kind in the country, boasting one of the most comprehensive collections in the world. Designed by Italian architect Gae Auletti, her adaptive reuse of the former library recalls her work on the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. The new San Francisco Public Library, incidentally, is right next door and mirrors some of the design elements the original building, but is wholly a modern structure.

The dark-colored former Bank of America World Headquarters - San Francisco's tallest building at 52 stories - when first built in 1969, defied The City's then-nickname, "The White City" (so-called for its predominently white and pastel buildings).  It was surpassed in height by the Transamerica Pyramid in 1972. The pyramid's structure defied both classic right-angle design, as well as San Francisco's earthquake potential, with its unusual foundation-on-rollers engineered design.  Both buildings defied Herb Caen, who liked to publicly ponder whether the large purple stone sculpture in front of the B of A building was really meant to represent a banker's heart.  And the pyramid?  It earned a VERY special place in the mast head atop his column. Alas, both buildings no longer serve as headquarters for the companies that built them. Bank of America, first founded in San Francisco by A.P. Giannini as the Bank of Italy, was bought by NationsBank, and the headquarters moved to North Carolina.

The Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall dazzles passersby as well as patrons. The dramatic chandeliers of its foyer are shown off by its massive glass facade facing Van Ness Ave. And its concert hall is breathtaking in view as well as acoustics. The Museum of Modern Art is a new city icon, for its design as well as its exhibitions.  SFMOMA is the most visited attraction in the City, bringing exciting modern and contemporary art exhibits to tourists, conventioneers, and locals alike.  And the new home of the San Francisco Giants at the side of the bay (which has had several corporate monikers in quick succession) impresses passersby -- landlubbers and boaters -- as well as baseball aficionados. What other ballpark has its own bay inlet ("McCovey Cove") where boaters can vie for homerun balls?

And most recently, the brand new copper-clad M.H. de Young Museum emerges monolithically from the gardens of Golden Gate Park, startling in its size and monotonal exterior, as well as its massive light and airy interior galleries.  The museum, if not the structure, is one of San Francisco's oldest and most venerated institutions.  The new structure replaces its neo-classical home that had to be razed before an earthquake did it.  The critics are circling the new structure, and the juries are just forming.  All can say this: "It's not your father's de Young." 

Oh -- there are those two bridges!  The Golden Gate Bridge --  named for the sheltered entry to the bay, not the color of the bridge -- is a marvelous visual and engineering feat whose limits have been tested only once.  That was, ironically, the day of its golden anniversary when it was it was closed to vehicle traffic.  The weight of nearly 600,000 celebrants, who filled it shoulder-to-shoulder, end-to-end, unexpectedly flattened the span -- prompting engineers to do some "real-time" calculations.  More recently, the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake tested the limits of the cantilevered (eastern) span of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge, and it was decided that that section should be replaced.  Controversy arose, which delayed bids and construction because East Bay politicians believed the eastern span should be as inspiring as the western side span that leads to San Francisco. They rejected the more utilitarian design from engineers of Caltrans, the state's Department of Transportation and a design competition was held. Another controversy arose once the construction began, which held up work for months before it was resolved and the state Department of Transportation allowed to rebid and start anew. For trivia fans, the full name of the bridge is the Sunny Jim Rolph Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. You'll find that plaque on the Sterling Street on-ramp to the bridge in San Francisco.  Who was he? One of San Francisco's past mayors.

Big and Small Screens

For all the above reasons, cinema has always loved San Francisco:  "The Maltese Falcon", "Dark Passage", "All About Eve", "The Caine Mutiny", "The Birdman of Alcatraz", "Vertigo", "Bullitt", Coppola’s early "The Conversation", "Days of Wine and Roses", "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?", "Escape from Alcatraz", "Take the Money and Run", "Play It Again, Sam", "Dirty Harry", "Magnum Force", "A View to a Kill", "The Presidio", "Basic Instinct", "Mrs. Doubtfire", "Joy Luck Club", "Sweet November", "The Wedding Planner", "The Parrots of Telegraph Hill" are not all the films that have been made here.   ...And George Lucas has just opened his massive but humbly named Letterman Digital Arts Center where the old Letterman Army Hospital once stood on the Presidio, bringing together his once-dispersed Lucasfilms and Industrial Light & Magic special effects empire.

For the same reasons, San Francisco has been the setting of many television shows since the early days of TV. From "San Francisco Beat" to "The Streets of San Francisco" and "Nash Bridges" to "Monk". From "The Doris Day Show" and "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" to "Suddenly Susan" ...The City has been at least the backdrop, and often the star of the show.

It could be argued with today’s perspective and terminology that, while the decades leading up to the 1990s were San Francisco’s and the Bay Area’s "content" golden eras, the more recent creative impulse and energy has produced much more on the "platform" side -- e.g., Apple, Intel, and the "Four Horsemen of the Technology Revolution":  Cisco, EMC, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, which are all just down the road apiece.  But that’s a whole 'nother story...

Counter-cultural currents continue to energize The City. The famous annual "Bay to Breakers Race", The City’s "longest running party", brings ALL manner of contestant and costume - and some with none at all - and even some first-rate runners.  And Critical Mass, the monthly bicycle ride which vigorously asserts cyclists’ right to share the road, began in The City in 1992. In true San Francisco spirit, Critical Mass has no leaders and no central organization, yet has spread throughout the world.

Here at the far edge of the continent, San Franciscans continue to break and make traditions on many frontiers.