San Francisco Culture

For a city of under a million people, San Francisco has an improbable cultural record.

The Beats

North Beach in the 1950s: City Lights, founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 as the first all-paperback bookshop in America, published Ginsberg’s Howl and won the obscenity trial that followed, which materially changed what could be printed in the United States. The shop is still there and still open late.

The Haight

The 1967 Summer of Love drew tens of thousands to a few blocks around Haight and Ashbury, and the music that came with it — the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin — defined a decade.

The Castro

From the 1970s the centre of gay life in America. Harvey Milk was elected city supervisor in 1977, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the country, and assassinated in 1978. The neighbourhood then bore the brunt of the AIDS epidemic, and the response organised there shaped public health worldwide.

Chinese America

Chinatown has been continuously inhabited since the 1850s and survived exclusion laws and the 1906 fire; it is a working neighbourhood, not a display.

Technology and counterculture

The two are more entangled here than the outside view suggests: the Whole Earth Catalog, the Homebrew Computer Club and the early personal-computer movement came out of the same Bay Area milieu as the communes and the acid tests, and the language of the early internet borrowed heavily from it. The industry that resulted has since transformed the city’s economy and its housing costs.

Food

Sourdough, cioppino, the Mission burrito, and a farm-to-table movement that began across the bay and reshaped American cooking.