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A fresh wind from the bay swept through the waterfront streets of San Francisco and then died among the skyscrapers near the Bay Bridge connecting the city to Oakland. The tall buildings of the city’s downtown business district were all packed into a narrow space not far from the port: a throng of lanes, walls, roofs, and windows soaring into the sky above the wharves, warehouses, terminals, and multistory parking garages, and of high-speed expressways and onramps on concrete supports high over the earth.
The waterfront formed a wide arc around the lower city as far as the Golden Gate Bridge. The area was heavily built up with jutting piers where local ferries, ocean liners, and pleasure boats docked. At the foot of the huge Russian Hill, fishermen’s wharfs, yacht clubs, innumerable t
