Portal:San Francisco Bay Area

The Black Cat Bar or Black Cat Café was a bar in San Francisco. It originally opened in 1906 and closed in 1921. The Black Cat re-opened in 1933 and operated for another 30 years. During its second run of operation, it was a hangout for Beats and bohemians but over time began attracting more and more of a gay clientele.

Because it catered to gays, the bar became a flashpoint for the nascent homophile movement. The Black Cat was at the center of a legal fight that was one of the earliest court cases to establish legal protections for gay people in the United States. Despite this victory, continued pressure from law enforcement agencies eventually forced the bar's closure in 1964.

The Black Cat opened in 1906, shortly after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. When entrepreneur Charles Ridley acquired the bar in 1911, he turned it into a showplace for vaudeville-style acts. Over the next several years, Ridley and the Black Cat came under increased police scrutiny as a possible center of prostitution. In 1921, the bar lost its dance permit and closed down. (more...)

Ina Coolbrith (March 10, 1841 – February 29, 1928) was an American poet, writer, librarian, and a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. Called the "Sweet Singer of California", she was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state.

Coolbrith, born the niece of Latter Day Saint movement founder Joseph Smith, Jr., left the Mormon community as a child to enter her teens in Los Angeles, California, where she began to publish poetry. She terminated a youthful failed marriage to make her home in San Francisco, and met writers Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard with whom she formed the "Golden Gate Trinity" closely associated with the literary journal Overland Monthly. Her poetry received positive notice from critics and established poets such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Alfred Lord Tennyson. She held literary salons at her home—in this way she introduced new writers to publishers. Coolbrith befriended the poet Joaquin Miller and helped him gain global fame. (more...)

San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the largest in Northern California and the county seat of Santa Clara County. Once a small farming city, by 1950 San Jose was a magnet for suburban newcomers in new housing developments (1960s to the 1990s) and became a large thriving urban center of Northern California. Originally El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, it was founded in 1777 in the Spanish colony of Nueva California. After over 150 years as an agricultural center, San Jose underwent aggressive expansion during the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1990s, San Jose's central location within the booming technology industry earned the city the nickname Capital of Silicon Valley. (more...)

• Beringer Vineyards (pictured) in the Napa Valley is established
• The State Asylum for the Insane in Napa is established
• Point Montara Light in Montara begins operating using a kerosene lantern
• Luther Burbank moves to Santa Rosa from Massachusetts, with money from selling the rights to a potato cultivar (Russet Burbank potatoes pictured)

• ... that the vivid colors of the San Francisco Bay Salt Ponds (pictured), ranging from magenta to blue-green, come from the brine shrimp and microorganisms that thrive in the water?
• ... that the Laguna Creek watershed debouches into the San Francisco Bay near the site of the ghost town of Drawbridge?
• ... that the chase scene from the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt starts on Cesar Chavez Street (then Army Street) before continuing through San Francisco?
• ... that the title of There There, a 2018 novel about urban Indians in Oakland, California, mirrors Gertrude Stein's quip about the city that "There is no there there"?

• ... that an early incarnation of Bimbo's 365 Club (pictured) in San Francisco included Dolfina, a nude woman who appeared to swim inside a large aquarium over the bar?
• ... that the Council on Religion and the Homosexual once held a fundraiser dance despite intimidation from San Francisco police?
• ... that William C. McInnes, one of the first Jesuits to study business administration, simultaneously served as the president of both Fairfield University and the University of San Francisco for four months?
• ... that eclectic and non-traditional Quartet San Francisco has been nominated five times for Grammy Awards, most recently for QSF Plays Brubeck, the first all-Dave Brubeck string quartet recording?
• ... that the Bolinas, California-based unconventional winemaker Sean Thackrey was previously an art dealer?

January - March - 2010

Bay to Breakers is an annual footrace in San Francisco on the third Sunday of May. The name reflects the fact that the race starts at the The Embarcadero adjacent to San Francisco Bay and finishes at the Great Highway adjacent to Ocean Beach and its "breaking waves". It is well known for many participants wearing costumes, and a few engaging in public nudity. The event was officially the world's largest footrace from 1986 (with 110,000 participants) until it was surpassed in 2010 by City2Surf in Sydney, Australia.

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