San Francisco

The Presidio of San Francisco is a park on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, within the Golden Gate... National Recreation Area. It has been a fortified location since 1776 when the Spanish made it the military center of their expansion in the area. It passed to Mexico, which in turn passed it to the United States in 1847. As part of a military reduction program, Congress voted in 1989 to end the Presidio's status as an active military installation and on October 1, 1994, it was transferred to the National Park Service, ending 219 years of military use and beginning its next phase of mixed commercial and public use. In 1996, the United States Congress created the Presidio Trust to oversee and manage the interior 80% of the park's lands, with the National Park Service managing the coastal 20%. In a first-of-its-kind structure, Congress mandated that the Presidio Trust make the Presidio financially self-sufficient by 2013, something it achieved 8 years early.
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Alcatraz Island is an island located in the San Francisco Bay, 1.5 miles offshore from San Francisco, California. Often referred to as The... Rock, the small island early-on served as a lighthouse, a military fortification, a military prison, and a Federal Bureau of Prisons federal prison until 1963. Later, in 1972, Alcatraz became a national recreation area and received landmarking designations in 1976 and 1986. Today, the island is a historic site operated by the National Park Service as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and is open to tours. Visitors can reach the island by ferry ride from Pier 33, near Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. In 2008 the nation's first hybrid propulsion ferry started serving the island. Alcatraz has been featured in many movies, TV shows, cartoons, books, comics, and games. The first Spaniard to document the island was Juan Manuel de Ayala in 1775, who charted San Francisco Bay and named the island "La Isla de los Alcatraces," which translates as "The Island of the Pelicans," from the archaic Spanish alcatraz, "pelican", a word which was borrowed originally from Arabic: القطرس al-qaṭrās, meaning sea eagle.
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Coit Tower is a 210-foot tower located in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The tower, located in the city's Pioneer... Park, was built in 1933 at the bequest of Lillie Hitchcock Coit to beautify the City of San Francisco; Lillie bequeathed one-third of her estate to the City of San Francisco "to be expended in an appropriate manner for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city which I have always loved". The art deco tower, 210 feet of unpainted reinforced concrete, was designed by architects Arthur Brown, Jr. and Henry Howard with murals by 26 different artists and numerous assistants. The tower was not designed to resemble a fire hose nozzle, despite Lillie Hitchcock Coit's affinity with the San Francisco fire fighters of the day, in particular with Knickerbocker Engine Company Number 5. Coit Tower is a monument to the firefighters of San Francisco. Paid for by Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a wealthy socialite who loved to chase fires in the early days of the city's history, the tower took five years to construct.
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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 is actually a replacement for 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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The California Palace of the Legion of Honor is a fine art museum in San Francisco, California. The name is used both for the museum collection and... for the building in which it is housed. The Legion of Honor was the gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of the sugar magnate and Thoroughbred racehorse owner/breeder Adolph B. Spreckels. The building is a three-quarters scale imitation of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur in Paris. The design, by George Applegarth and H. Guillaume, was also based on a model of the Hôtel de Salm that appeared at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition, so it is not an exact copy. It was completed in 1924. The museum building occupies an elevated site in Lincoln Park in the northwest of the city, with views over the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of the surrounding Lincoln Park Golf Course is on the site of a potter's field called the "Golden Gate Cemetery" that the City had bought in 1867. The cemetery was closed in 1908 and the bodies were relocated to Colma. During seismic retrofitting in the 1990s, however, coffins and skeletal remains were unearthed.
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The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an... internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art. The museum’s current collection includes over 26,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts. SFMOMA's Research Library was established in 1935 and contains extensive resources pertaining to modern and contemporary art, including books, periodicals, artists’ files, and lecture recordings. The museum also houses a restaurant, Caffè Museo, and a coffee bar run by the Blue Bottle Coffee Company. SFMOMA was founded in 1935 under director Grace L. McCann Morley as the San Francisco Museum of Art. For its first sixty years, the museum occupied the fourth floor of the War Memorial Veterans Building on Van Ness Avenue in the Civic Center. A gift of 36 artworks from Albert M. Bender, including The Flower Carrier by Diego Rivera, established the basis of the permanent collection.
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Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is a contemporary arts center in San Francisco, California, United States. Located in Yerba Buena Gardens, YBCA... features visual art, performance, and film/video that celebrates local, national, and international artists and the Bay Area's diverse communities. YBCA programs year-round in two landmark buildings—the Galleries and Forum by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and Theater by American architect James Stewart Polshek. The center is often used for the launch of new products by Apple Inc.
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The Cartoon Art Museum is a California art museum specializing in the art of comics and cartoons. Located at 655 Mission Street in San Francisco, it... is the only museum in the Western United States dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of all forms of cartoon art. The permanent collection features some 6,000 pieces, including original animation cels, comic book pages and early newspaper comic strips. The Museum was founded in 1984 by comic art enthusiasts, with its primary founder being Malcolm Whyte, a former publisher. Its first incarnation had no fixed location, instead organizing showings at other local museums and corporate spaces. In 1987, with the help of an endowment from cartoonist Charles Schulz, it established a home on the second floor of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin Building in the South of Market area. In 2001, it moved to the ground-floor location at 655 Mission Street, which had been vacated by the Friends of Photography Ansel Adams Center. The Museum hosts nine to 12 major exhibitions annually, along with classes for children and adults. It also offers lectures and operates a research library, a classroom and a bookstore.
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Frederick Lincoln "Link" Wray Jr was an American rock and roll guitarist, songwriter and occasional singer. Wray was noted for pioneering a new... sound for electric guitars, as exemplified in his hit 1958 instrumental "Rumble", by Link Wray and his Ray Men, which pioneered an overdriven, distorted electric guitar sound, and also for having, "invented the power chord, the major modus operandi of modern rock guitarist," "and in doing so fathering," or making possible, "punk and heavy rock". Rolling Stone included Link at number 67 on their list of the 100 greatest guitarist of all time. Wray was born in Dunn, North Carolina to Lillie M. Coats and Frederick Lincoln Wray. It was there that Link first heard slide guitar at age eight from a traveling carnival worker, an African-American man named "Hambone." Link and his family later moved to Norfolk, Virginia as his father got work in the Navy shipyards. Link served a hitch in the US Army and was a Korean War veteran. In 1956, his family later moved to Washington, D.C., and from there, they moved to a farm in Accokeek, Maryland.
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Joseph Paul "Joe" DiMaggio , was an Italian American baseball player for the New York Yankees. He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955.... He was the middle of three brothers who each became major league center fielders, the others being Vince and Dom. DiMaggio was a 3-time MVP winner and 13-time All-Star . In his thirteen year career, the Yankees won ten pennants and nine world championships. At the time of his retirement, he had the fifth-most career home runs and sixth-highest slugging percentage in history. He is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak , a record that still stands. A 1969 poll conducted to coincide with the centennial of professional baseball voted him the sport's greatest living player. DiMaggio was born in Martinez, California, the eighth of nine children born to immigrants from Italy, Giuseppe and Rosalia DiMaggio . He was delivered by a midwife identified on his birth certificate as Mrs. J. Pico.
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Barbara Bouchet, is an actress and entrepreneur currently resident in Rome, Italy of German ancestry. She has acted in more than 80 films and... television episodes and founded a production company that has produced fitness videos and books as well as owning a fitness studio. Some of her roles include playing Miss Moneypenny in Casino Royale , Kelinda in Star Trek: "By Any Other Name", as Patrizia in Non si sevizia un paperino and Mrs Schermerhorn in Gangs of New York. She was born in Reichenberg, in the Sudetenland, in what was then Germany. After World War II her family was placed, along with many others, in a resettlement camp in the American occupation zone in Germany, from where they were, in time, able to apply for, and be granted, permission to emigrate. The family discovered that they were eligible to migrate to the United States, as a result of the humanitarian provisions of the Displaced Persons Act which had been legislated by Congress in 1948. After arriving in America her family was eventually able to settle in San Francisco, California.
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Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi is the 60th and current Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Before being elected Speaker in the... 110th Congress, she was the House Minority Leader from 2003 to 2007, holding the post during the 108th and 109th Congresses. A member of the Democratic Party, Pelosi has represented the 8th Congressional District of California, which consists of four-fifths of the City and County of San Francisco, since 1987. The district was numbered as the 5th during Pelosi's first three terms in the House. Pelosi is the first female Speaker of the House. She is also the first Californian and first Italian-American to hold the post. As Speaker, Pelosi is second in the line of presidential succession, following Vice President Joe Biden, which makes her the highest-ranking female politician in American history. Pelosi is Italian-American and was born Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro in Baltimore, Maryland, the youngest of six children of Anunciata M. and Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., who was a Democratic party U.S. Congressman from Maryland and a Mayor of Baltimore.
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A native of San Francisco, California, Patrick Thomas has had roles in several different TV shows and movies. He has also done voice acting. He also... goes by the aliases Pat Thomas, Puppy Thomas, and Courtney Burr.
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Joan Chong Chen is a Chinese American actress, film director, screenwriter and film producer. She became famous in China for her performance in the... 1979 film Little Flower and came to international attention for her performance in the 1987 Academy Award-winning film The Last Emperor. She is also known for her roles in Twin Peaks, Red Rose White Rose, Saving Face and The Home Song Stories, and for directing the feature film Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. Chen Chong was born in Shanghai, China to a family of pharmacologists. . She and her older brother, Chase, were raised during the Cultural Revolution. At the age of 14, Chen was discovered on the school rifle range by Jiang Qing, as she was excelling at marksmanship.
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Monica Samille Lewinsky is an American woman with whom then-United States President Bill Clinton admitted to having had an "improper relationship"... while Lewinsky worked at the White House in 1995 and 1996. The affair and its repercussions, especially the impeachment of Bill Clinton, became known as the Lewinsky scandal. Monica Lewinsky was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up in an affluent family in Southern California in the Westside Brentwood area of Los Angeles and in Beverly Hills. She is of Jewish descent. Her father is Bernhard Lewinsky, an oncologist, and her mother, Marcia Lewis, is an author; her parents' acrimonious separation and divorce during 1987 and 1988 had a significant effect on Monica. Growing up, the family attended Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and she attended Sinai Akiba Academy, its religious school. For her primary education she attended the John Thomas Dye School in Bel-Air.
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Paul Desmond , born Paul Emil Breitenfeld, was a jazz alto saxophonist and composer born in San Francisco, best known for the work he did in the Dave... Brubeck Quartet and for penning that group's greatest hit, "Take Five". He was not only one of the most popular musicians to come out of the West Coast's "cool jazz" scene, but also the possessor of a legendary and idiosyncratic wit. In addition to his work with Brubeck he led several of his own groups and did significant collaborations with artists such as Gerry Mulligan, Jim Hall and Chet Baker. After years of chain smoking and general poor health, Desmond succumbed to lung cancer in 1977 following one last tour with Brubeck. Paul Desmond was born Paul Emil Breitenfeld in San Francisco, California in 1924. His father was an organist who played in movie theaters during silent films, and his mother was emotionally unstable during his upbringing. During childhood he spent years living with relatives in New York City due to problems at home. Desmond began playing violin at a young age, though his father forbade him to play it. He played clarinet at the age of twelve at San Francisco Polytechnic High.
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Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial... speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, to journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr., and Isabelle Moodie. His mother was of Scottish descent, and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana. Frost's father was a teacher and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin , and an unsuccessful candidate for city tax collector. After his death on May 5, 1885, in due time the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts, under the patronage of William Frost, Sr., who was an overseer at a New England mill.
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William Randolph Hearst was an American newspaper magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after... taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father. Moving to New York City, he acquired The New York Journal and engaged in a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World which led to the creation of yellow journalism — sensationalized stories of dubious veracity. Acquiring more newspapers, Hearst created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at its peak. He later expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world. He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives, but ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909, for Governor of New York in 1906, and for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1910. Nonetheless, through his newspapers and magazines, he exercised enormous political influence, and is sometimes credited with pushing public opinion in the United States into a war with Spain in 1898.
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Lindsey Adams Buckingham is an American guitarist, singer, composer and producer, most notable for being the guitarist and male lead singer of the... musical group Fleetwood Mac. Aside from his tenure with Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham has also released five solo albums and a live album. As a member of Fleetwood Mac, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. Born in Palo Alto, California, Buckingham was the third and youngest child of Rutheda and Morris Bialecke. He had two older brothers, Jeff and Greg. Growing up in the Bay Area community of Atherton, California, Buckingham and his brothers were encouraged to swim competitively. Though Buckingham dropped out of athletics to pursue music, his brother Greg went on to win a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Lindsey's first forays into guitar playing took place on a toy Mickey Mouse guitar, playing along to his brother Jeff's extensive collection of 45s. Noticing his talent, Buckingham's parents bought their son a $35 Harmony guitar. Buckingham never took guitar lessons and does not read music.
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Bruce Lee ; 27 November 1940 – 20 July 1973 was a Chinese American actor, martial arts instructor, philosopher, film director, film... producer, screenwriter, and founder of the Jeet Kune Do martial arts movement. He is considered one of the most influential martial artists of the 20th century, and a cultural icon. Lee was born in San Francisco, California in the United States, to parents of Hong Kong heritage but raised in Hong Kong until his late teens. Upon reaching the age of 18, Lee emigrated to the United States to claim his U.S. Citizenship and receive his higher education. It was during this time he began teaching martial arts, which soon led to film and television roles. His Hong Kong and Hollywood-produced films elevated the traditional Hong Kong martial arts film to a new level of popularity and acclaim, and sparked a major surge of interest in Chinese martial arts in the West in the 1970s. The direction and tone of his films changed and influenced martial arts and martial arts films in Hong Kong and the rest of the world as well.
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