Portal:San Francisco Bay Area

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The San Francisco Bay Area Portal

California Bay Area county map
California Bay Area county map

The San Francisco Bay Area (referred to locally as the Bay Area) is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses the major cities and metropolitan areas of San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland, along with smaller urban and rural areas. The Bay Area's nine counties are Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma. Home to approximately 7.68 million people, the nine-county Bay Area contains many cities, towns, airports, and associated regional, state, and national parks, connected by a network of roads, highways, railroads, bridges, tunnels, and commuter rail. The combined statistical area of the region is the second-largest in California (after the Greater Los Angeles area), the fifth-largest in the United States, and the 43rd-largest urban area in the world with 8.80 million people.

The Bay Area has the second-most Fortune 500 companies in the United States, after the New York metropolitan area, and is known for its natural beauty, liberal politics, entrepreneurship, and diversity. The area ranks second in highest density of college graduates, after the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and performs above the state median household income in the 2010 census; it includes the five highest California counties by per capita income and two of the top 25 wealthiest counties in the United States. Based on a 2013 population report from the California Department of Finance, the Bay Area is the only region in California where the rate of people migrating in from other areas in the United States is greater than the rate of those leaving the region, led by Alameda and Contra Costa counties. (more...)

Selected article

McAllister Tower Apartments is a 28-story, 94 m (308 ft) residential apartment skyscraper at 100 McAllister Street in San Francisco, California. The property is owned and operated by the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. The tower includes mixed-use offices on various floors, and the Art Deco-styled "Sky Room" with a panoramic view on the 24th floor.

Conceived as an unusual combination of a large church surmounted by a hotel, construction of the building brought architectural dispute. Initially designed by Timothy L. Pflueger in the style of Gothic Revival, the investors fired his firm and hired Lewis P. Hobart, who changed little of Pflueger's design. In a resulting lawsuit, Pflueger won nearly half the damages he asked for. The building opened in 1930 as the William Taylor Hotel and Temple Methodist Episcopal Church. However, extra construction expenses had put the congregation at greater financial risk, and the church-hotel concept did not prove popular. No profit was made in six years, and the church left, losing their investment. In the late 1930s the building housed the Empire Hotel, known for its Sky Room lounge, then from World War II to the 1970s, 100 McAllister served as U.S. government offices. (more...)

Selected biography

Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was a pioneering American nuclear scientist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is also known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, and for founding the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

A graduate of the University of South Dakota and University of Minnesota, Lawrence completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics at Yale in 1925. In 1928, he was hired as an associate professor of physics at the University of California, becoming the youngest full professor there two years later. In its library one evening, Lawrence was intrigued by a diagram of an accelerator that produced high-energy particles. He contemplated how it could be made compact, and came up with an idea for a circular accelerating chamber between the poles of an electromagnet. The result was the first cyclotron. Lawrence went on to build a series of ever larger and more expensive cyclotrons. His Radiation Laboratory became an official department of the University of California in 1936, with Lawrence as its director. (more...)

Selected city

A view of Mission Peak from Fremont Central Park
A view of Mission Peak from Fremont Central Park
Fremont /ˈfrmɒnt/ is a city in Alameda County, California. It was incorporated on January 23, 1956, from the merger of five smaller communities: Centerville, Niles, Irvington, Mission San Jose, and Warm Springs. The city is named after American explorer John Charles Frémont, "the Great Pathfinder."

Located in the southeast section of the San Francisco Bay Area in the East Bay region primarily, Fremont had a population of around 220,000. It is the fourth most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the largest suburb in the metropolis. It is the closest East Bay city to Silicon Valley, and is thus sometimes associated with it.

The area consisting of Fremont, Newark (an enclave of Fremont), and Union City (formed from the communities of Alvarado and DeCoto), is now known as the Tri-City Area. (more...)

Selected image

San Francisco ocean shoreline
image credit: Brocken Inaglory


The Bay Area by year

2009

Selected historical image

Promotional photograph of one day's output at the Chevrolet factory in Oakland, California, circa 1917. Photograph commissioned by Oakland Chamber of Commerce, Publicity Bureau. Photographer from Cheney Photo Advertising Co. Original photo part of Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room
image credit: Oakland Chamber of Commerce, Publicity Bureau

Did you know...

San Francisco Bay Salt Ponds
San Francisco Bay Salt Ponds

Previous Did you know...

October - December 2010

Selected periodic event

Police Officer on duty at the fair
Police Officer on duty at the fair

The Castro Street Fair is a San Francisco lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender LGBT street festival and fair usually held on the first Sunday in October in the Castro neighborhood, the main LGBT neighborhood in the city. The fair was founded by Harvey Milk, and the group he led, the Castro Valley Association, in 1974. (San Francisco Police Officer on duty pictured)

Quote

~ Cecil Beaton

Selected multimedia file

1898 launch of the Imperial Japanese Navy cruiser Chitose , filmed by Thomas Edison Co.

Bay Area regions, geographic features and protected areas

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