1. The Summer of Love started at the Golden Gate Park in 1967, but not during the summer months. It began in January.
2. The Beatles gave their last full concert at Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966.
3. In 1867
San Francisco instituted America’s first “ugly law,” prohibiting unsightly people from showing their faces in public. The law has since been repealed.
4. Francis Ford Coppola wrote large portions of The Godfather Trilogy at San Francisco’s first coffee shop, Cafe Trieste.
5. You may know that Al Capone spent prison time at Alcatraz, but it’s less known that he played the banjo on Sunday concerts with the inmate band, the Rock Islanders.
6. In San Francisco, you need a license to practice necromancy. The city offers fortune telling permits with a definition of fortune telling that includes necromancy, or the manipulation of the dead.
7. Denim jeans were invented here, but not as a fashion statement. They were created for Gold Rush miners who needed tough, durable, comfortable clothing that would protect their skin and be long lasting.
8. In September 1859, San Francisco’s favorite eccentric resident, Joshua Abraham Norton, declared himself Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I, and proclaimed himself to be the ‘Emperor of the United States’ and ‘The Protector of Mexico’. Emperor Norton had a following: Nearly 30,000 people packed the streets for his funeral in 1880.
9. Behind New York, Moscow and London, San Francisco is fourth in the world in terms of numbers of billionaires living within its city limits. It also has less than 10 percent of the population of the the other three cities.
10. Marilyn Monroe married baseball star Joe DiMaggio in City Hall in 1954 and they lived in the Marina at 2150 Beach Street.
11. The crookedest street is not Lombard Street, contrary to popular belief. Vermont Street between 22nd and 23rd is the crookedest, but it doesn’t have the flowers or the fanfare.
12. Filbert between Hyde and Leavenworth is the steepest street at 31.5 degrees.
13. Public nudity was perfectly legal in San Francisco until February 2013.
14. The song "I Left My Heart In San Francisco", although made famous by Tony Bennett in 1962, was written by Douglass Cross and his partner George Cory in 1954.
15. San Francisco has the highest number of homeless inhabitants per capita of any major city in the United States.
16. It is illegal to beat a rug clean outside your home in San Francisco.
17. The modern fortune cookie made with vanilla and butter was invented in San Francisco by Japanese resident, Makoto Hagiwara, to serve at the Japanese Tea Garden. There was a dispute in the 1980’s that a restaurant owner in Los Angeles invented the cookie and the case went to court, but the courts ruled in favor of the cookie being invented in San Francisco.
18. Washington Square Park at Columbus & Union is basically all contradictions. It’s not actually a square; it has five sides. The statue in the middle of the park isn’t George Washington, it’s Benjamin Franklin. It’s also located in North Beach, which isn’t a beach.
19. The U.S. Navy originally planned on painting the Golden Gate Bridge black with yellow stripes, but the Bridge District would not allow it. The bridge isn’t named after its color, which is definitely not gold—it’s named after the body of water the bridge is built above, the Golden Gate Strait.
20. The Golden Gate Bridge has to be continuously painted, because by the time the paint crew gets from one end to the other, it's time to start over again!
21. The Auxiliary Water Supply System (AWSS) for fire protection in the city – a separate and distinct water supply system for fire protection use only - is capable of covering a city block (100,000 square feet) with water to a depth of 25 feet in one day.
22. There are only three cemeteries left in San Francisco. The city outlawed burials in 1901. If you look closely you can find old tombstones throughout the city.
23. San Francisco was part of Mexico until the Mexican-American War in 1848.
24. The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company, located in Ross Alley, the oldest alley in the city, supplies Chinatown and much of the world with it’s fortune cookies.
25. San Francisco has a ban on toy giveaways with children's meals at fast-food restaurants unless the meal meets San Francisco's strict nutritional standards. That means the ‘happy meals’ don’t come with toys. Parents can still buy them for 10 cents, though.
26. The bear on California’s state flag is modeled after a California grizzly named Monarch, who was held at Golden Gate Park.
27. The neighborhoods of Marina, Mission Bay, and Hunters Point are all built atop a landfill.
28. San Francisco is the only place in the nation that you can ride a moving National Historical Monument, the cable cars.
29. San Francisco Bay is considered the world's largest landlocked harbor.
30. Irish coffee was first served in the United States in 1952 at the Buena Vista Cafe.
31. San Francisco is home to the largest Chinese community in the world, outside of China.
32. The original United Nations charter was drafted and signed in San Francisco.
33. The Saloon on Grant Avenue is the oldest bar in the city. Built in the 1860s as a bordello, it was saved from the raging fires of the 1906 earthquake by local men who treasured it. Today it’s a hot spot for some of the best jazz and blues in the city.
34. The bison in Golden Gate Park are the only animals left from a free-range zoo that the park’s designer created. There used to be elk, goats and bears, too.
35. Not surprisingly, the first cable car in America was invented right here at Kearny and Clay and climbed five blocks up the Clay Street Hill for the first time on August 2, 1873.
36. The Liberty Bell, yes THE Liberty Bell, made a train trip to San Francisco once in 1915 for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
37. North America’s first and most popular gayborhood, the Castro, was once a working-class Scandinavian and Irish area.
38. San Francisco banks weren’t hurt by the Depression at all. Seriously, not a single bank went out of business during the Depression. In fact, business was so great that the city built both the Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate during the Depression.
39. The very first road across America was the Lincoln Highway. It stretched from SF’s Lincoln Park to New York’s Times Square. Lincoln Park has the Western Terminus historical marker.
40. The first television image was transmitted in San Francisco on September 7, 1927 by Philo Taylor Farnsworth.
41. The names of the streets in San Francisco are stamped into the sidewalks after the 1906 earthquake so that people can navigate their way around if per chance there is another big earthquake that destroys the street signs, buildings and landmarks - or so the story goes. Regardless of the reason, if you look hard enough you can find misspellings and letters stamped backwards.
What's your favorite fun San Francisco fact? Tell us in the comments below!
