San Francisco Municipal Manual and Map
You can read the growth of San Francisco through maps, even when a single manual is not in front of you. The Wikipedia page does not publish the contents of a San Francisco municipal manual, its city map or its ward boundaries. You will learn instead how the harbor, the Spanish sites, the change from Yerba Buena and the Gold Rush population rise explain what such a map would need to show.
What does the harbor explain about the city?
If you start with geography, you start in the right place. The page presents the city and county of San Francisco as sharing the same boundaries, placed at the entrance to a large natural harbor. That position shaped its development as a center of maritime trade. Settlement by European Americans was light at first. After the city became the base for the gold rush of 1849, it grew quickly into a populous, commercial, naval and financial center in the American West. Later points in the same overview include the earthquake and fire of 1906 and the rebuilding, the opening of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Branch in 1914, the hippie movement from the second half of the 1960s, and recent decades as a center of finance and technology with high housing demand linked to proximity to Silicon Valley and limited availability.
Who lived around the bay before Europeans arrived?
You need the earlier layer before you look at streets and wards. The earliest evidence of human habitation in what is now the city dates to 3000 BC. Native Americans found the bay a resource for hunting and gathering, which led to many small villages. Collectively these early Native Americans are now known as the Ohlone, and the language they spoke belonged to the Miwok family. Their trade networks extended to places as far away as Baja California, the Mojave Desert and Yosemite. One anthropologist cited on the page gives Ahwaste, meaning "place at the bay," as an indigenous name for San Francisco. When the Spanish arrived, they found the area inhabited by the Yelamu tribe, grouped later with Ohlone speakers. The traditional territory described on the page stretched from Big Sur to San Francisco Bay, although the trading area was much larger.
How did Spain select the Mission and the Presidio?
You can trace the Spanish imprint in names you still meet on a city plan. A Spanish exploratory party led overland from Mexico by Don Gaspar de Portola and Fra. Joan Crespi reached the site in 1769. The Spanish recognized the large natural harbor as important for strategy. A later expedition led by Juan Bautista de Anza selected sites for military and religious settlement in 1774. The Presidio of San Francisco served the military, while Mission San Francisco de Asis began the cultural and religious conversion of some 10,000 Ohlone who lived in the area. The mission became known as Mission Dolores because of its proximity to a creek named after Our Lady of Sorrows. The first anchorage stood at a small inlet on the northeast end of the peninsula, later filled and now lower Market Street. The nearby settlement was named Yerba Buena after the herb that grew there in abundance. The original plaza remains as Portsmouth Square. For context on reading such imprints plate-by-plate studies of landmark maps show you how to separate a maker, a date and what a sheet actually records.
When did Yerba Buena become San Francisco?
If you follow the name, you follow sovereignty and street naming. The Portola expedition arrived on November 2, 1769, and claimed the area for Spain as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. A second group of soldiers with settlers arrived in June 1776, led by Juan Bautista De Anza, with Jose Joaquin Moraga given the task of building the mission and the Presidio. A supply ship arrived about two months later. Later visitors included the Comte de La Perouse in 1786 and George Vancouver in 1792, while Russian traders were active from 1770 until about 1841 as far south as Fort Ross. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the area became part of Mexico. In 1835 Englishman William Richardson built outside the immediate vicinity of Mission Dolores near a boat anchorage around what is now Portsmouth Square and with Alcalde Francisco de Haro laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement. On July 31, 1846, about 240 Mormon pioneers arrived on the ship Brooklyn, led by Sam Brannan. After claims during the Mexican-American War by Commodore John D. Sloat and by Captain John Berrien Montgomery and Second Lieutenant Henry Bulls Watson of the USS Portsmouth, Lt. Washington A. Bartlett was named alcalde of Yerba Buena and his proclamation of January 30, 1847, changed the name to San Francisco. The city and the rest of California became American in 1848 by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and California was admitted as a state on September 9, 1850.
Why did the Gold Rush reshape lots and streets?
You see the physical city change once gold draws people faster than houses, water and sewers can follow. The page places the California gold rush starting in 1848 and reports an increase from 1,000 to 25,000 in San Francisco between January 1848 and December 1849, with about 1,500 Chileans arriving in the second half of 1848 and continued growth influenced by the 1859 Comstock Lode silver discovery. Rapid growth complicated planning and left narrow streets. The town sat at the tip of a windswept peninsula without water or firewood, so residents had to bring water, fuel and food to the site. Much of the present downtown is built over the former Yerba Buena Cove, granted to the city by military governor Stephen Watts Kearny in 1847, and filled marshland was used for real estate. The detailed chronology of San Francisco sets these changes beside later districts and public works. Workers from China came to work in the gold mines and later on the Transcontinental Railroad, and the Chinatown district dates from that legacy. Businesses founded to serve the growing population and named on the page include Levi Strauss and Co. clothing, Ghirardelli chocolate and Wells Fargo bank, while railroad, banking and mining figures such as Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington and Leland Stanford settled in the Nob Hill neighborhood.
How did order, county lines and health rules respond?
If you wonder why ward and county boundaries matter, look at law and disease in a crowded port. Committees of Vigilance formed in 1851 and again in 1856 in response to crime and government corruption, and the page reports 12 men arrested, tried and executed, with hundreds arrested and several elected officials forced to resign. Later action against Chinese immigrants culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which was not repealed until 1943 with the Magnuson Act. San Francisco was the county seat of San Francisco County, one of the 18 original counties from statehood in 1850. Until 1856, the city limits extended west to Divisadero Street and Castro Street and south to 20th Street. In response to lawlessness and vigilantism between 1855 and 1856, the state divided the county along a straight line across the tip of the peninsula just north of San Bruno Mountain. Everything south became San Mateo County, and everything north became the consolidated City and County of San Francisco. In autumn 1855, a ship bearing refugees from a cholera epidemic in the Far East docked in the city, and rapid Gold Rush growth had outstripped sanitation. The state devolved care for the indigent sick to counties, and the Sisters of Mercy ran the first county hospital, the State Marine and County Hospital, then opened St. Mary's Hospital on Stockton Street by 1857. A cross-dressing law passed in 1863 is also discussed as part of policing bodies and dress in the city. You can use such episodes for teaching with historic maps by asking students what a ward map hides about lodging, work and policing.
What came with cable cars, parks and the 1906 fire?
You can close this part of the story with expansion, reform and disaster. From the 1860s to the 1880s, the city expanded in all directions, with new neighborhoods such as the Western Addition, Haight Ashbury, Eureka Valley and the Mission District, culminating in Golden Gate Park in 1887. In 1864, Hugh H. Toland founded Toland Medical College, later one of three affiliated colleges that developed into the University of California, San Francisco, with a new site at Parnassus Heights overlooking Golden Gate Park opening in fall 1898 after a gift of 13 acres by Mayor Adolph Sutro. The cable cars devised by Andrew Smith Hallidie connected steep hills and new residential development. Writers including Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde spent time in the city. The San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange was founded in 1882. Reform efforts included Sutro as mayor in 1894 and James D. Phelan from 1896, with a new charter and bonds for sewers, schools, parks, a hospital and a main library. Burials were banned within the city after the plague from 1900 to 1904, and cemeteries moved to what is now Colma. The graft inquiry led to bribery charges against Abe Ruef and Mayor Eugene Schmitz, with Schmitz found guilty of extortion on June 13, 1907, and Ruef later imprisoned. On April 18, 1906, rupture of over 270 miles of the San Andreas Fault produced a shock estimated at magnitude 7.8, water mains ruptured, fire burned for days and destroyed approximately 80 percent of the city, including almost all of the downtown core, with an official toll revised in 2005 to more than 3,000. Replanning included Daniel Burnham proposals, restoration of the street grid, a civic center complex, wider streets, a subway under Market Street and Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill.
The History of San Francisco page on Wikipedia is an overview of the city and county from early habitation to recent budgets, housing and technology. You find there the Spanish period, Yerba Buena, Gold Rush growth, county division, cultural districts, earthquakes, expositions, bridges, wartime change and postwar planning, with population figures and linked timelines and bibliographies. You can open it to check a date or a name before you measure distances and read lot lines on any San Francisco sheet.