Portsmouth Square. Concrete plaza, a parking garage underneath, probably someone playing chess over there. If you're facing the park, the Financial District is behind you to the east, Chinatown is to your left.
In eighteen forty-seven, this was the center of a town of four hundred and ninety-two people. Four hundred and ninety-two. That's a large wedding. The bay came up to about Montgomery Street — two blocks east of here — and everything past that is landfill. The Embarcadero, the Financial District, the skyscrapers — all of it built on sand, garbage, and the hulls of abandoned ships.
Then Sam Brannan showed up.
On May twelfth, eighteen forty-eight, a man walked across this square holding a bottle of gold dust above his head and shouting: gold, gold, gold from the American River! His name was Samuel Brannan, he was a merchant and a newspaper publisher, and he was — I cannot stress this enough — the greatest opportunist in California history. Because Sam Brannan had heard about the
gold strike at Sutter's Mill weeks earlier. He didn't go mine it. What he did was ride up to the mill, confirm the gold was real, ride back to San Francisco, and quietly buy every single pickaxe, pan, and shovel in the city. EVERY one. He bought pans for twenty cents apiece. Then he stood in this square and told everyone about the gold.
Within two weeks, this town was empty. Ships in the harbor
