San Francisco in 1906 was the largest city and most important port on the Pacific Coast, the financial center of the West, the ninth-largest city in the United States. The Palace was the biggest hotel in the West.
San Francisco had the most populous Chinatown outside of Asia, the U.S. Mint at Fifth and Mission streets was the largest in the world, and in its vaults was $222 million in gold, one-third of the country's gold supplies.
San Francisco had been a U.S. city for not quite 60 years, but by the turn of the 20th century, it was world famous.
Link.
And let's not forget this:
Rich San Franciscans drank pisco punches, and poor ones drank steam beer. San Francisco was on the cutting edge of drinking, and bartenders claimed they had invented a gin and vermouth concoction they called the Martinez cocktail, a drink now known as the martini.
Or this:
In 1906, San Francisco had five daily newspapers and half a dozen others in foreign languages, 42 banks and 120 places of worship, but also 3,117 places where liquor was sold.
Last post on the 1906 earthquake here.
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