Treasures & Digressions Yerba Buena Cove, Telegraph Hill & Chinatown

This walk will be a very historical trek as you’ll see from the excerpt below. We’ll take our time and really enjoy all the nuggets and gems on this adventure. See you then!’
Early-18th-century Spanish explorers designated three important foci in the city: religious, Mission Dolores; military, the Presidio; and commercial, Yerba Buena Cove. On this walk, we’ll explore the commercial area.
You will see buildings that were erected on the edge of the shoreline along the middle third of Yerba Buena Cove, now the financial and commercial section of San Francisco. You walk toward Portsmouth Square, which was the center of the Pueblo of Yerba Buena and now is the center of Chinatown; you continue to the slopes of Telegraph Hill where the 19th-century waterfront workers lived. You may feel you are traveling through a land of plaques in this walk and Walk 2. The northeast part of the city is a small, concentrated area where the early Spanish commercial history of San Francisco began. The well-written plaques don’t overburden you with a multitude of facts; they include just enough to stir up your imagination. The Gold Rush to California was the Outward Bound of the 1800s, the 19th-century rite of passage. It took all of a person’s ingenuity, statesmanship, business acumen, and physical stamina to survive. San Francisco, the entry point for people coming overland by wagon and around Cape Horn by ship, had a population of approximately 450 at the first census count in 1847 and approximately 20,000 by the end of 1849. Gradually, as more families arrived in the city, social services were organized; schools, libraries, and churches were opened; lectures, operas, concerts, readings, and theater were offered.
Telegraph Hill, at 284 feet in elevation, used to extend east to Battery, near the edge of the Bay, making it difficult to unload cargo. After the east slope of the hill was quarried, it extended just to the west side of Sansome. Dock workers living in the small cottages along the hillside used a stairway to go to and from work. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, artists, writers, and actors lived on the hill. Junius Booth of the famous theater family lived at No. 5 Calhoun Terrace. Writer Charles Warren Stoddard spent part of his childhood here at “No. 287 Union. The hill became a special province due in part to its isolated site.

Excerpt From
Stairway Walks in San Francisco
Adah Bakalinsky & Mary Burk
https://books.apple.com/us/book/stairway-walks-in-san-francisco/id909999690
This material may be protected by copyright