Milk

The Castro District, commonly referenced as The Castro, is a neighborhood in Eureka Valley in San Francisco, California. The Castro is one of the United States' first and best-known gay neighborhoods, and it is currently its largest. Having transformed from a working-class neighborhood through the... 1960s and 1970s, the Castro remains one of the most prominent symbols of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activism and events. The local news media view the intersection of Market and Castro as ground zero location for interviews when prominent news impacting the gay community occurs. San Francisco's gay village is mostly concentrated in the business district that is located on Castro Street from Market Street to 19th Street. It extends down Market Street toward Church Street and on both sides of the Castro neighborhood from Church Street to Eureka Street. Although the greater gay community was, and is, concentrated in the Castro, many gay people live in the surrounding residential areas bordered by Corona Heights, the Mission District, Noe Valley, Twin Peaks, and Haight-Ashbury neighborhoods.
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San Francisco City Hall, re-opened in 1915, in its open space area in the city's Civic Center, is a Beaux-Arts monument to the City Beautiful movement that epitomized the high-minded American Renaissance of the 1880s to 1917. The structure's dome is the fifth largest in the world. The present... building replaced an earlier City Hall that was completely destroyed during the 1906 earthquake. The principal architect was Arthur Brown, Jr., of Bakewell & Brown, whose attention to the finishing details extended to the doorknobs and the typeface to be used in signage. Brown's blueprints of the building are preserved at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Brown also designed the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, Veterans Building, Temple Emanuel, Coit Tower and the Federal office building at 50 United Nations Plaza. The building's vast open space is more than 500,000 square feet and occupying two full city blocks. It is 390 ft between on Van Ness Avenue and Polk Street, and 273 ft between Grove and McAllister Streets.
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Noe Valley is a neighborhood in the central part of San Francisco, California. Its borders are generally considered to be 22nd Street to the north, Randall Street to the south, Dolores Street to the east, and Grand View Avenue to the west. These borders are informal, nothing more, and continue to... expand, thanks to real estate agents. The Castro is directly to Noe Valley's north, although the border is not well defined and can stretch into Noe Valley, and The Mission is to its east. The neighborhood is named after José de Jesús Noé, the last Mexican alcalde of Yerba Buena , who owned this land as part of his Rancho San Miguel. Noé sold the land, later to be known as Noe Valley, to John Meirs Horner in 1854, and at this time the land was called Horner's Addition. The original Noé adobe house was located in the vicinity of the present day intersection of 23rd Street and Douglass Street. Noe Valley was primarily developed at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the years just after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
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