San Francisco

Within a generation San Francisco grew from an isolated Mexican trading post with more hills than people into America's major Pacific coast city. Shaped by entrepreneurs, eccentrics, and visionaries, it became renowned for accommodating those who dared to be different. Mick Sinclair explores gold-rush San Francisco and the early free-for-all to corruption, vigilantism, and public hangings. From the nineteenth-century mansions of Nob Hill and the Barbary Coast with its spiked drinks, he charts the 1950s San Francisco Poetry Renaissance that sired the Beat Generation. Through literature, music, and popular culture, he considers the rise of Berkeley's student activism, the genesis of hippie culture and Haight-Ashbury's legendary Summer of Love. Explaining how the Castro became the world's most famous gay neighborhood, he also reveals how a booming internet economy transformed and then threatened to destroy the city. -- From publisher's description.