English Bulldog Puppies for Sale in San Francisco, CA

Also known as: Frisco

Written by Gladys Cox Hansen, Barnaby Conrad•All

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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San Francisco's new mayor is starting to unite the fractured city • Apr. 17, 2025, 3:03 PM ET (AP)

Government

Unlike any other California city, San Francisco (incorporated 1850) has a consolidated city-county government. The 1932 freeholders’ charter, under which the city-county still operates, provides the mayor with strong executive powers but delegates substantial authority to a chief administrative officer (appointed by the mayor) and a controller. The legislative authority is lodged with an elected board of supervisors. The other key officials, who are both appointed, are the superintendent of schools and the manager of utilities.

Public utilities

Since 1934 San Francisco’s principal source of water has been the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, 167 miles (269 km) away, in the Sierra Nevada. Other sources are the Calaveras and San Antonio reservoirs in Alameda and Santa Clara counties and reservoirs in San Mateo county to the south. The Hetch Hetchy project required the damming of a scenic valley in Yosemite National Park and the construction of tunnels, one 25 miles (40 km) long, through the Coast Range. In 1902 the first high-voltage line transmitting hydroelectric power was completed between a powerhouse on the Mokelumne River and San Francisco, some 180 miles (290 km) in length. Since then, the Bay Area has developed a network of hydroelectric plants on the rivers of the interior, as well as a steam-powered plant on Monterey Bay.

Education

The Bay Area is one of the country’s centres of higher learning. Although strictly speaking they cannot be counted as San Francisco institutions, two of the region’s universities—the University of California, located across the bay in Berkeley (campus opened 1873), and Stanford University (opened 1891), neighbour to Palo Alto down the peninsula—are among the nation’s most prestigious schools. Within San Francisco itself are the University of San Francisco, originally a Jesuit academy established in 1855, and San Francisco State University, which was founded as a normal school in 1899, became a four-year college in 1935, and achieved university status in 1972. Other institutions include Golden Gate University (1853), the City College of San Francisco (1935; a two-year public college), and the San Francisco Art Institute (1871).

Cultural life

Arts

A great part of San Francisco’s appeal has been its well-established image as a cultural centre. By 1880 it boasted one of the largest opera houses in the country, the largest hotel, a public park, great churches and synagogues, and a skyline bristling with the mansions of millionaires. Drama and music flourished there, with appearances by such luminaries as Sarah Bernhardt, Edwin Booth, Luisa Tetrazzini, James O’Neill, Lillie Langtry, and Lotta Crabtree. Isadora Duncan, in fact, began teaching modern dance in San Francisco.

The city’s true artistic calling, however, has been as a mecca for writers. One of the first was Mark Twain, who arrived in time for the great silver boom that came some 10 years after the gold boom faded. Other noted writers were Ambrose Bierce, who came to the city after horrendous experiences in the American Civil War, Jack London, Bret Harte, Frank Norris, Gertrude Atherton, and Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived in great poverty in a boarding house; later came Dashiell Hammett, Stewart Edward White, Kathleen Norris, Erskine Caldwell, William Saroyan, and Wallace Stegner. During the mid-1950s, San Francisco became known as a centre of the Beat movement, and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, which was the country’s first to sell paperbacks, became one of the movement’s best-known gathering places. More recent Bay Area authors are Amy Tan, Herbert Gold, Anne Lamott, Ethan Canin, Danielle Steele, and Dave Eggers.

San Francisco is home to two major musical institutions. The San Francisco Symphony performs in the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall and gives pop concerts in the summer. The San Francisco Opera stages an early season to allow its leading singers to fulfill their commitments at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. With the exception of American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), a resident repertory group, the professional theatre is virtually nonexistent in the city. The surviving downtown theatres are largely occupied by the touring casts of successful Broadway shows.

San Franciscans believe their city is a haven for the artist. While this would hold true for those who value architecture and public sculpture, the painting collections do not rival those of Los Angeles or the East Coast. Notable, however, are the jades and porcelains in the Asian Museum, the Rodin sculptures at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the downtown Museum of Modern Art, and the many treasures in such small museums as the Fire Department Pioneer Memorial Museum. While San Francisco’s artistic community does not approach the prominence of its writing establishment, it has produced such notable figures as Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn.

Also known as: Frisco

Written by Kenneth Lamott, Barnaby Conrad•All

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Trump asks the Supreme Court to allow his government downsizing plans to proceed • May 16, 2025, 2:10 PM ET (AP)

Several cultural institutions were constructed after the 1906 earthquake, among them the Civic Center (a lovely square sparkling with fountains surrounded by such Renaissance revival-style buildings as City Hall), the public library, and the civic auditorium. Publisher M.H. de Young helped fund the building of the de Young Museum (now under the aegis of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, as is the Legion of Honor) in Golden Gate Park, and Adolph and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels sponsored the stately California Palace of the Legion of Honor, which overlooks the Golden Gate Bridge. A spectacular reminder of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition is found in the monumental Palace of Fine Arts, located in a little park near the waterfront in the Marina District. Housing the Exploratorium (a science museum), the palace is a giant Neoclassical rotunda, which was designed by the architect Bernard Maybeck and completely restored in the 1960s. The Walt Disney Family Museum, celebrating the life and work of the animation pioneer, producer, and showman, was opened in 2009 in the Presidio.

Popular culture

A vital part of San Francisco culture is found in its restaurants, bars, and hotels. To this must be added the popular culture of the ethnic enclaves—Chinatown, the Italian community of North Beach, Japantown, the Russian colony along Clement Street, and the Hispanic Mission District.

San Francisco’s first topflight professional sports team was the football 49ers, who began play in 1946. The team became one of the most successful in National Football League history, winning five Super Bowl titles. San Francisco became, along with Los Angeles, one of the first two West Coast cities to be home to a Major League Baseball franchise when the Giants relocated to San Francisco from New York City in 1958. San Francisco was home to the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association from 1962 until 1971, when the team relocated across the bay to Oakland; the franchise returned to San Francisco in 2019.

In the minds of many, however, San Francisco’s most memorable contribution to the nation’s culture is its past. It was in the late 1960s that the city’s Haight-Ashbury District became a haven for the “flower children” and “hippies” who declared themselves in headlong flight from the established society and who preached the saving graces of peace, love, and hallucinogens. However, by the 1970s Haight-Ashbury had become an ugly and dangerous marketplace for drugs and vice. More recently, with the rise in real estate prices all over the city, a gentrification took place in the district, and Haight-Ashbury now boasts a middle-class population and specialty boutiques, upscale restaurants, used bookstores, and the ubiquitous coffeehouses.

History

Exploration and early settlement

It is extraordinary that the site of San Francisco should have been explored first by land instead of from the sea, for San Francisco Bay is one of the most splendid natural harbours of the world, yet great captains and explorers—Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (1542–43), Sir Francis Drake (1579), and Sebastián Vizcaíno (1602)—sailed unheeding past the entrance. In 1769 a scouting party from an expedition led by the Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolá looked down from a hilltop onto a broad body of water; they were the first Europeans known to have seen San Francisco Bay. It was not until August 5, 1775, that the first Spanish ship, the San Carlos, commanded by Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala, turned eastward between the headlands, breasted the ebbing tide, and dropped anchor just inside the harbour mouth. It is possible that Drake may have entered the bay, but most evidence suggests otherwise.

Settlers from Monterey, under Lieutenant José Joaquin Moraga and the Reverend Francisco Palóu, established themselves at the tip of the San Francisco peninsula the following year. The military post, which remained in service as the Presidio of San Francisco until 1994, was founded in September 1776, and the Mission San Francisco de Asis, popularly called the Mission Dolores, was opened in October.

Almost half a century later, a village sprang up on the shore of Yerba Buena Cove, 2 miles (3 km) east of the mission. The pioneer settler was an Englishman, Captain William Anthony Richardson, who in 1835 cleared a plot of land and erected San Francisco’s first dwelling—a tent made of four pieces of redwood and a ship’s foresail. In the same year, the United States tried unsuccessfully to buy San Francisco Bay from the Mexican government, having heard reports from whalers and captains in the hide-and-tallow trade that the great harbour held bright commercial possibilities. Richard Henry Dana, whose ship entered the bay in 1835, wrote in Two Years Before the Mast (1840) that “If California ever becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the centre of its prosperity.”

The Americans had to wait only another 11 years. After fighting began along the Rio Grande, Captain John B. Montgomery sailed the sloop of war Portsmouth into the bay on June 3, 1846, anchored in Yerba Buena Cove, and later went ashore with a party of sailors and marines to raise the U.S. flag in the plaza. On January 30, 1847, Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco, which was regarded as a more propitious name.

The permanent European population of Yerba Buena in 1844 did not exceed 50 persons. By 1846 the settlement had a population of 375, in addition to 83 African Americans, Native Americans, and Sandwich Islanders (Hawaiians). Two years later, just before the discovery of gold on the American River, the town had grown to about 200 shacks and adobes inhabited by about 800 settlers.

May 8 - July 3, 2025, Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00am - 5:30pm

Modernism's 9th survey of seminal French contemporary artist Jacques Villegle [1926-2022] examines 25 decollage masterpieces by the influential Nouveau Realiste, through the lens of typography.

Villegle spent most of his life wandering the streets of Paris, pulling torn advertising posters off the ancient walls and pronouncing them Art. "In seizing a poster, I seize history, he says. "What I gather is the reflection of an era."

In 1949, Villegle began scavenging advertising from billboards on the grand boulevards, snatching political posters in the financial district, and pillaging Left Bank walls plastered with flyers for jazz concerts and art exhibitions. Villegle recalled, "In those days, the cinema and concert posters rarely had images, just words, and they had been torn and shredded to where they became something else, with a post-cubist look to them. Early on I believed that letters gave structure to posters on an abstract level, and I looked for that in the posters I took." Mounting them on canvas, he presented them as a new kind of art. Between 1949 and 2003, Villegle plucked more than 4,500 works from all twenty of Paris's arrondissements, carefully labeling each with the exact date and street address of the poster's origin. Each work became a unique time capsule of the ever-changing city.

"I realized right from the start that lettering would change, that new colors would be developed, that photography would be employed someday. Electric blue didn't exist, for instance. So right from the beginning I saw this material would be historic and would constitute an archive, a ragged memory of our era."

Villegle's work has been exhibited internationally, and is the collections of many museums worldwide (MOMA, NY; MOCA, LA; Detroit Institute of Arts; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musee d'Israel, Jerusalem). In 2008 a major retrospective of his works was exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

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SAN FRANCISCO, May 19 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab self-driving unit Waymo said on Monday it received approval from California to expand its robotaxi operations in more areas of the San Francisco Peninsula and further south, including San Jose.

Waymo's permission from California comes as Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab gears up to roll out a paid robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, next month. CEO Elon Musk has said the electric vehicle maker will expand the service to California later this year.

Sign up here.

Waymo requested authorization to expand its operations in March and received 23 responses in support and no protests from stakeholders, California Public Utilities Commission said in a statement.

Waymo, however, said it would not expand the services in the San Francisco Bay Area immediately.

"We want to bring Waymo One to more of the Bay Area, and any expansion of the service will happen methodically over time," a company spokesperson said. The spokesperson did not provide any reason for that decision and said there were "no imminent plans or timeline to share."

Waymo is the only U.S. firm to run uncrewed robotaxi services carrying paying passengers. The company has more than 1,500 vehicles on the road across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, Texas, and runs over 250,000 rides a week.

Self-driving vehicle companies have been under increased regulatory scrutiny following a major accident in 2023 in San Francisco involving a robotaxi from General Motors' (GM.N), opens new tab Cruise, which later shut operations.

Waymo, which has been growing its presence steadily, is recalling more than 1,200 self-driving vehicles to update software and address risks of collisions with chains, gates and other roadway barriers, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said last week. U.S. auto safety investigators had opened a probe last year.

NHTSA has been investigating Tesla's full self-driving collisions in reduced roadway visibility conditions since October and asked the company last week to answer questions on its robotaxi launch plans to assess how the vehicles would perform in poor weather.

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Purchase Licensing Rights

Charlie Christensen offers expert insights into the evolving mortgage renewal landscape, helping San Francisco homeowners prepare for rising rates and changing lender expectations.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / May 19, 2025 / As the 2025 housing market kicks into gear, Charlie Christensen, Mortgage Banker NMLS# 233543, is urging San Francisco homeowners with upcoming mortgage renewals to take action early. With interest rates still in flux and lenders tightening underwriting standards, understanding what to expect during the renewal process is critical for borrowers looking to stay ahead of costly surprises.

"Many borrowers assume renewals are automatic," says Charlie Christensen, a trusted mortgage broker in San Francisco, CA. "But with today's economic conditions, lenders are reassessing risk more carefully. Your income, debt levels, and credit history all matter at renewal time."

Unlike the initial mortgage process, renewals typically don't involve home shopping - but they do require strategic planning. Christensen explains that borrowers may face higher rates than their original term, especially if they locked in during historic lows. He advises clients to review their financial situation 4-6 months before their term ends and shop around for better terms, rather than simply accepting their current lender's offer.

Renewal Trends to Watch in 2025

Recent shifts in the lending landscape mean that more borrowers are turning to mortgage brokers for support navigating renewals. Christensen, who works with dozens of lenders, notes that many banks are offering shorter terms or stricter debt-to-income ratios. This could affect self-employed individuals or anyone who has experienced a recent credit change.

San Francisco's high home values also make local advice even more important. "Renewals aren't one-size-fits-all," says Christensen. "A mortgage lender in San Francisco, CA needs to understand local housing market dynamics and how to structure your loan to maximize equity and savings."

Planning Ahead: Your Mortgage Renewal Checklist

Christensen recommends the following steps for borrowers ahead of their 2025 renewal:

About Charlie Christensen

Charlie Christensen, Mortgage Banker NMLS# 233543, is a seasoned mortgage broker based in San Francisco, CA, with decades of experience helping homeowners and buyers secure competitive financing. Known for his client-first approach, Charlie offers personalized guidance throughout the homeownership journey, from purchase to renewal and refinancing. His mission is to simplify the mortgage process and empower borrowers with the knowledge and tools they need to make smart financial decisions.

Media Contact:

Email: charlie@charliechristensen.comPhone: +1 (415) 517-5926

SOURCE: Charlie Christensen, Mortgage Banker NMLS# 233543