RON HENGGELER

“It has been said that all great cities of history have been built on bodies of water-Rome on the Tiber, Paris on the Seine, London on the Thames, New York on the Hudson. If this is the criterion of a city’s greatness, surely San Francisco ranks in the first magnitude among cities of the world. For never was a metropolis more dominated by any natural feature than San Francisco by its bay.” Harold Gillian

“San Francisco was not just a wide open town. It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward–spreading puritan tradition. . .
It had been settled mostly, in spite of the romances of the overland migration, by gamblers, prostitutes, rascals, immigrants, and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn. They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather. “ Kenneth Rexroth, Beat poet

San Francisco. "That City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand.” Robert Louis Stevenson

“The bay of San Francisco has been celebrated from the time of its first discovery as one of the finest in the world. It rises into an importance far above that of a mere harbor...Its latitudinal position is that of Lisbon, its climate that of Southern Italy, settlements attest to its healthfulness, bold shores and mountains give it grandeur, the extent and fertility of its dependent country give it great resources for agriculture, commerce and population...To this gate I gave the name Chrysopylae or Golden Gate. . .John Fremont