In 1906 the buildings and streets were filled with gas lines and gas lamps and when they ruptured the city went up in flames. As soon as the fires were out, reconstruction began. Cooperation between all groups became essential for survival and the rebuilding of the city once again reflected the diversity of the community, its tolerance for new ideas, its love of opulence and its appreciation of risk-takers. Extraordinary ethnic diversity San Francisco is a city of neighborhoods that overlap. It's not always easy to mark the spot where one ends and another begins, but once you've arrived, it's easy to see that each neighborhood has its own distinct ethnic history, religion, culture and food.
North Beach is the ancestral home of the Italian community.
During the 1830s it was a cattle ranch that supplied fresh meat to trading ships that sailed into San Francisco for provisions. Many of those ships were from the Italian city of Genoa. When gold was discovered, hundreds of Italian sailors decided to shift from rigging to digging and sent word about the gold back to their relatives in northern Italy. Hundreds more made the exhausting five-month trip, only to discover that the good stuff was already gone. Yet life in San Francisco was better than what it was in the old country.