1960s
1960
Candlestick Park opens; Bank of America opens massive “computer center” at 1 South Van Ness and Market to provide technological support for its new BankAmericard credit card.
1961
USF goes coeducational; construction begins in Diamond Heights Redevelopment area; San Mateo County Board of Supervisors votes to withdraw from BART planning; Father Peyton’s Rosary Crusade in Golden Gate Park draws a crowd of 500,000 in San Francisco’s largest-ever planned event.
1962
Rare snowfall in San Francisco; Marin County withdraws from BART planning; Relocation of Lowell High School to Eucalyptus Drive; St. Mary’s Cathedral destroyed by fire; BART bonds approved by voters in San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties; Irving Theatre closed and demolished, replaced with apartments; San Francisco Giants lose to New York Yankees in seventh game of World Series.
1963
Fox Theatre demolished; Alcatraz Prison closes; Crocker-Anglo Bank merges with Los Angeles–based Citizens National Bank to form Crocker-Citizens Bank.
1964
Temple Judea opens on Brotherhood Way, the first new Reform synagogue built in San Francisco in nearly 125 years; Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church opens on Brotherhood Way; construction of new Holy Name Church at 40th Avenue and Lawton Street (affectionately referred to as the “circus tent”), the first San Francisco Catholic church built to the new standards adopted by the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
1965
Another major expansion of SFO, including a massive parking structure; the White House, a San Francisco department store since 1854, goes out of business; dedication of Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Cathedral on Geary Boulevard at 26th Avenue; bribery scandal involving long-serving city assessor Russell Wolden, who allegedly received kickbacks for under-assessing commercial properties, dominates the news; afternoon newspaper News-Call Bulletin goes out of business; morning newspaper the Examiner becomes an afternoon paper and signs a joint operating agreement with the Chronicle, leaving the city with only two daily newspapers—one morning and one afternoon; Mary’s Help Hospital, operating in the Mission District since 1893, relocates to a new facility in Day City, later changing its name to Seton Medical Center.
1966
Sutro Baths closes and is destroyed by fire; Lowell High School becomes the city’s academic college prep school, with a GPA/test-based admission policy.
1967
Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury marks beginnings of social change in San Francisco; Security First National Bank merges with Pacific National Bank to form Security-Pacific Bank; Golden Gate Park begins program of vehicle-free portions of certain roadways on Sunday afternoons.
1968
St. Ignatius annual tuition increases from $300 to $400, a 33 percent increase; first killing by “Zodiac,” which continued through 1969—officially still unsolved; Mayor Alioto hosts one of the largest-ever predawn celebrations of the anniversary of the 1906 earthquake, with the film San Francisco displayed on a giant screen in front of city hall; KBHK-TV begins broadcasting on UHF Channel 44 in San Francisco, opening the way for additional programming.
1969
San Francisco College for Women goes coeducational and is renamed Lone Mountain College; relocation of St. Ignatius College Prep to 37th Avenue; Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island; Beth Israel, a Conservative Jewish congregation, merges with Reform Temple Judea, moving from Geary and Fillmore to Brotherhood Way; basic MUNI adult fare of $0.15, in place since 1961, increases to $0.20, a 33 percent increase—it is now $2.25, a 1,400 percent increase over 1969, or an average of 31 percent per year up to 2014. The fare for cable cars, $0.15 in 1969, is now $6.00—a 3,900 percent increase, or an average 86 percent increase per year from 1969 to 2014.
1970s
1970
San Francisco Zoo initiates admission fee; University of California Regents implement tuition schedule; a horrendous two-car crash on Doyle Drive approach to Golden Gate Bridge leaves ten dead, two seriously injured—mostly teens from the Western Neighborhoods—and leads to calls for construction of safer roadway (on which construction would finally begin a mere thirty-nine years later—in late 2009).
1971
Fleishhacker Pool closes; completion of Interstate 280 between San Francisco and San Jose; the start of busing in the San Francisco Unified School District; JCPenney store at 5th and Market Streets closes, as the company ceases to do business in San Francisco; San Francisco’s largest parade ever, a peace march protesting the war in Vietnam, consisting of 156,000 people, marches from Civic Center out Geary Boulevard to the polo field in Golden Gate Park.
1972
BART begins revenue service; City of Paris goes out of business; Playland closes; voters approve creation of Golden Gate National Recreation Area; Polytechnic High School closes; Sutro Tower begins broadcast transmission from atop Mount Sutro; the last Foster’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, part of a chain once numbering two dozen local outlets, goes out of business; Board of Supervisors passes ban on smoking in department stores.
1973
First of twenty-two “Zebra” murders that continue for six months. Suspects were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1976 in the then-longest criminal trial in California history; McAteer High School opens as replacement for Polytechnic; government closure of the Hunters Point Naval base, with origins dating back to a commercial shipyard founded at the site in 1870.
1974
Liberty House opens a new store at Stockton and O’Farrell, on a portion of the site once occupied by City of Paris.
1975
Assassination attempt is made against President Gerald Ford outside St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, seventeen days after another unsuccessful attempt on his life in Sacramento; Blum’s, a candy and confection maker since the 1870s, with a chain of retail shops and restaurants, goes out of business.
1976
Rare snowfall in San Francisco; Parkside Theatre, built on Taraval Street in 1928, closes and is replaced by a daycare/preschool; Embarcadero Station opens, serving both BART and MUNI, as the system’s first additional station since BART service began in 1972.
1977
Golden Dragon massacre in Chinatown, resulting in five deaths and eleven injuries; El Rey Theatre on Ocean Avenue closes and the building is taken over by Voice of Pentecost Church; Harvey Milk elected to the Board of Supervisors as first openly gay member; Bank of America builds a massive data center at 1455 Market Street, replacing various electronics and surplus stores that went out of business.
1978
People’s Temple Massacre in Guyana; city hall murders; passage of Proposition 13 to control property tax increases; Lone Mountain College closes, with property acquired by nearby Jesuit-run University of San Francisco and thereafter known as the Lone Mountain Campus of USF.
1979
White-Night Riots; implementation of residential rent control; resales of one-thousand-square-foot homes in the Western Neighborhoods break the $100,000 price point consistently; Carnaval San Francisco debuts in the Mission District.
1980s
1980
MUNI Metro subway opens; first documented AIDS case in San Francisco, resulting in the deaths of more than twenty thousand San Franciscans over the next three decades.
1981
Opening of Moscone Convention Center; British-based Midlands Bank purchases the institution then known as Crocker Bank; Bernstein’s Fish Grotto, a Powell Street seafood restaurant with a ship’s prow as its façade since 1912, goes out of business; Neiman-Marcus constructs new postmodern building at Stockton and Geary on the site of the old City of Paris, with the old store’s stained-glass dome incorporated into the new store’s design.
1982
San Francisco 49ers win Super Bowl XVI in January; cable car system shuts down for two years for a major rebuilding of the system and vintage streetcars are returned to Market Street the following year as a s
ubstitute for tourists in a “Trolley Festival.”
1983
Bank of America expands outside California with acquisition of Seattle First National Bank (Seafirst).
1984
Democratic National Convention is held at Moscone Center; Joseph Magnin goes out of business; Grison’s restaurant, located at Van Ness and Pacific since 1936, goes out of business; Liberty House goes out of business.
1985
Mortuary Carew and English, in business since the late 1800s, merges with Halsted-N. Gray, a firm that traces its origins to the gold rush; 49ers win Super Bowl XIX in January.
1986
Star of the Sea Academy closes; Wells Fargo takes over Crocker Bank; the original outdoor Stonestown Mall is rebuilt and expanded as enclosed “Stonestown Galleria”; old SI on Stanyan Street—USF’s Loyola Hall since 1969—is demolished for USF’s Koret Health and Recreation Center.
1987
Bank of America suffers huge overseas loan losses, eliminates dividend, sells headquarters building, closes nearly two hundred branches, lays off employees for the first time in its eighty-three-year history and fires President Sam Armacost; Livingston Brothers, a high-end women’s clothing store operating in San Francisco since 1876, goes out of business; fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Golden Gate Bridge draws a crowd of 300,000 onto the span, causing it to sag noticeably for several hours under the weight.
1988
Hibernia Bank closes, with customer accounts merged into Security-Pacific National Bank, and while the 1892 building at 1 Jones Street at Market is used temporarily as a police department substation, it remains essentially boarded up for the next twenty-five-plus years until it reopens as an event venue in 2016.
1989
Loma Prieta earthquake; St. Ignatius College Prep goes coeducational; Petrini’s, an upscale San Francisco–based grocery chain with anchor stores at Fulton and Masonic and in the Stonestown Shopping Center on 19th Avenue, goes out of business; 49ers win Super Bowl XXIII in January.
1990s
1990
St. Rose Academy closes; Sears Roebuck store at Geary and Masonic closes and company ceases to do business in San Francisco; 49ers win Super Bowl XXIV in January.
1991
Presentation High School closes, property acquired by USF; Embarcadero Freeway demolished; Roos-Atkins, high-end men’s clothing store that began operating in 1865, goes out of business.
1992
First major expansion of Moscone Center; Security Pacific National Bank is taken over by Bank of America.
1994
I. Magnin goes out of business.
1995
The Emporium goes out of business; Zim’s goes out of business; 49ers win Super Bowl XXIX in January; F-Market streetcar line commences revenue service between Castro Street and the Embarcadero, using a fleet of restored vintage cars.
1996
New Main Library opens in Civic Center.
1997
Herb Caen dies; British Crown Colony of Hong Kong is returned to China, with increasing immigration to the United States; Woolworth’s goes out of business.
1998
Bank of America is acquired by North Carolina National Bank, which takes the B of A name and moves the new firm’s headquarters to Charlotte, North Carolina; Board of Supervisors creates three-hundred-acre Mission Bay Redevelopment project on old railroad property adjacent to downtown; Wells Fargo acquires Minneapolis-based Norwest Bank.
1999
Beginning of dot-com bubble; end of previous building restrictions on skyscrapers in downtown area and start of new downtown building boom that will span the next fifteen-plus years.
THE NEW MILLENNIUM
2000s
2000
SFO’s International Terminal, costing $1 billion, opens for business; San Francisco Chronicle sold to Hearst Corporation, becoming San Francisco’s only remaining daily broadsheet newspaper, with the Examiner being sold and converted to a free six-day-per-week tabloid; F-line streetcar terminal extended to Fisherman’s Wharf area.
2001
End of original dot-com bubble; Giants baseball games move to new SBC (later, PacBell and now AT&T) Park.
2002
McAteer High School closes, replaced by Ruth Asawa School of the Arts at the McAteer campus.
2003
Second major expansion of Moscone Center; BART extension to SFO begins revenue service; Asian Art Museum opens in old Main Library building in the civic center.
2004
Joanne Hayes-White becomes first female chief of a major city fire department, and Heather Fong becomes first female chief of a major city police department. Both women are San Francisco natives who attended school in the Western Neighborhoods; Mayor Gavin Newsom authorizes issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
2005
New de Young Museum opens in Golden Gate Park; San Francisco State University expands, as it acquires several blocks of the Parkmerced apartment complex and all of the nearby Stonestown apartments, renaming the areas University Park–South and University Park–North; Coronet Theatre on Geary Boulevard, built in 1949, is closed, demolished and replaced by a senior housing complex; the Museum of the African Diaspora opens its doors near the Moscone Convention Center.
2006
Western Neighborhoods Project commemorates the events of 1906 by restoring one of the 5,610 earthquake shacks built to house refugees from the disaster, putting the structure on permanent display at the San Francisco Zoo’s Conservation Corner.
2007
T–Third Street MUNI streetcar line begins revenue operations; Mayor Gavin Newsom is reelected mayor that fall with nearly 74 percent of the votes cast.
2008
New California Academy of Sciences opens in Golden Gate Park; Wells Fargo acquires Charlotte-based Wachovia, thus becoming one of the country’s “Big 4” banks; Contemporary Jewish Museum moves into the restored Jessie Street Power Substation, a classic 1907 brick building adjacent to St. Patrick’s Church on Mission Street; Congregation Beth Sholom builds new ultra-modern synagogue at 14th Avenue and Clement; Ellis Brooks Chevrolet closes its new car showroom on Van Ness Avenue after seventy years in business, leaving only nearby Ford-Lincoln-Mercury as the last San Francisco dealership selling new American-made vehicles.
2009
Reconstruction of the Doyle Drive approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, as a series of tunnels and parkway, commences in December.
2010s
2010
San Francisco population hits a record high of 805,235 residents, but that is only 10 percent of the total Bay Area populations of 8-plus million people; ground-breaking for MUNI’s new $1.5 billion Central Subway, a nine-year project that will link Mission Bay to Chinatown, via the existing T–Third Street line with stops at 4th and Brannan, then Moscone Center, then Union Square/Market Street and then on to Stockton and Washington Streets in Chinatown; Giants win their first World Series title since moving to San Francisco in 1958.
2011
Archbishop Riordan High School institutes boarding program for students from overseas; the Ford-Lincoln-Mercury auto dealership on Van Ness Avenue goes out of business, leaving nowhere in San Francisco to buy a new American-made automobile; San Francisco officially has more dogs (120,000) than children (107,000); Doyle Drive rebuilding project begins.
2012
Giants win second World Series title; Caesar’s, a North Beach Italian restaurant since 1956, goes out of business; San Francisco joins six other of the country’s fifteen largest cities with “minority-majority” populations, including Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Antonio, San Diego and San Jose; U.S. News & World Report indicates that among San Francisco’s public high schools, only Lowell has a student pass rate of greater than 50 percent (87.7 percent pass rate for Lowell) in advanced placement courses, a determinant of college-readiness; century-old Chinatown restaurant Sam Wo goes out of business.
2013
Vivia
n Brown, elder sibling of the famous “San Francisco Twins,” dies at eighty-five; the new eastern span of Bay Bridge opens to traffic; Internet company Yelp becomes the primary tenant in the high-rise located at 140 New Montgomery Street, built in 1925 as headquarters for AT&T and popularly known for nearly ninety years as “the telephone company building,” which had been sitting vacant for nearly six years; the firm of Freed, Teller & Freed, coffee and tea merchants since 1899, goes out of business.
2014
Marian Brown, younger sibling of the famous “San Francisco Twins,” dies at eighty-seven; popular Joe’s of Westlake restaurant closes for “remodeling”; Candlestick Park closes and 49er football games move to new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara; median price (half cost more and half cost less) of San Francisco homes breaks the $1 million price point; the Giants win third World Series title.
2015
Roberts-at-the-Beach Motel closes and is demolished for a new condo-retail complex at Sloat Boulevard and Great Highway, the 1955 motel structure being the last element in a real estate empire owned by “Shorty” Roberts, who began his business in 1897 with a roadhouse known as the Sea Breeze (later, Roberts-at-the-Beach and, under new owners in the 1960s, music venue Donovan’s Reef) on Great Highway and Rivera; massive Doyle Drive construction project on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge is completed nearly forty-five years to the day after the city’s most deadly traffic accident on the old approach; demolition work completed on Candlestick Park; MUNI begins weekend revenue service on the new E-Embarcadero streetcar line, featuring a direct route from AT&T Park to Fisherman’s Wharf; Sam Wo restaurant reopens in a new location.
Growing Up in San Francisco Page 14