South Park - London Square to Dot-Com Hub
Photo: Lexi Mattick, CC BY 4.0 (cropped)
A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.
This oval green between Second and Third Streets, off Brannan, was once the most exclusive address in the city. In the 1850s George Gordon laid it out like a London square, with townhouses facing a private garden, and it had some of the city's first paved streets.
When the Second Street cut opened the area to traffic and industry, the wealthy left for Nob Hill. The city took over the park in 1897, and the 1906 fire destroyed the old houses. Around the turn of the century South Park was also a center of Japanese immigrant life, with hotels, boarding houses, baths and shops, before that community moved to the Western Addition.
In the late 1990s, cheap offices around the park made it a hub of early internet companies, sometimes called ground zero of the dot-com boom, and tech and design firms still fill the surrounding buildings.
More on Wikipedia: South Park, San Francisco · Dot-com bubble
Stops on this tour
- Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
- Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
- Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
- North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
- Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
- Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
- The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
- Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
- Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
- Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
- The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
- The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
- Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
- South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom