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Giant Propeller, Financial District
San Francisco's Financial District was build on shipping, literally. Today's high rise office buildings are built on the ghosts of rotting, abandoned sailing ships from the 1800s which were filled in with dirt and built upon. Early San Francisco financiers provided capital (at shocking rates) to miners, sailors, loggers, railroad workers, farmers, and builders for the goods that the new city needed. In addition they financed steamship and stagecoach lines as well as companies like Southern Pacific Railway, Western Union, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, Pacific Gas and Electric, Levi Strauss, Gumps, and Shreve and Company. The brokerages, bankers, and insurance companies of "Wall Street West" suffered a huge setback during the Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire but emerged to make San Francisco a financial giant on the Pacific Rim.
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MAP G-15 ]
1 Comments:
Oh yeah, I know where that giant propeller is... It's quite impressive...
Your story reminded me of when they were digging for the foundations of the Transamerica Building -- they found a whole group of ships still sitting there...
Obviously that was the edge of the bay right there -- I guess we can assume that any transition from slope to flat-land in that area marks the early shoreline... Kind of amazing, because the T.A. Building is quite a ways from the Embarcadero...
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