Gateway City: The Makings and Meanings of San Francisco's "Golden Gate," 1846-1906.

Abstract

“Gateway City” tells the story of how San Franciscans transformed an international hamlet into an American town and then an imperial city. Debates over what type of city San Francisco should be often played out in and over the waterfront and port, as various groups sought access to and control over the entry and exit point of the city. In 1846, American imperialist and explorer, John C. Frémont, anointed the mouth of the bay the Golden Gate to signify the commercial significance he predicted for the trading outpost. With the discovery of gold, the moniker found lasting resonance. Over the next sixty years, San Franciscans envisioned different means of attaining the commercial prominence Frémont had promised, often drawing on the city's “gateway” identity to support their various visions and projects. Because of the port´s symbolic, commercial, industrial, and maritime significance, many regarded it as prized real estate. In many respects, this threshold became the key site where Californians struggled over inclusion and exclusion, defining both the promises and the beneficiaries of the “Golden Gate.” By tracing the makings and meanings of San Francisco’s evolving port, I seek to illuminate multiple groups´ competing aspirations and argue that place-making happened in material and discursive ways that were inextricably linked and always ongoing.

In taking up the waterfront as contested space, I seek to build upon and interweave western and environmental historiographies, which have traced fights over land and natural resources, as well as urban, cultural, and economic history approaches, which have examined public and commercial spaces to illuminate the creation and contestation of social hierarchies. Drawing together these multiple modes of questioning, my project investigates small-scale interactions among San Franciscans and large-scale flows of people, goods, and capital. By focusing on San Francisco as the preeminent western port of the nineteenth century, I examine local, regional, national, and global processes in concert, highlighting the ways in which San Franciscans sought to negotiate the tensions and reciprocities between cultural meanings and political economy, individual choices and structural transformations.