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This chapter examines eleven regions in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s that were all rich in resources—ideas, money, and skills—which might have led to the formation of life sciences clusters. Yet only three of the regions—the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and San Diego—developed into robust industrial districts for biotechnology. Most research on the emergence of high-tech cluster samples on successful cases and traces backward to find a developmental pattern. In contrast, rather than read in reverse from a positive outcome, the chapter builds networks forward from their early origins, revealing three crucial factors: organizational diversity, anchor tenant organizations that protect the norms of a community and provide relational glue across multiple affiliations, and a sequence of network formation that starts with local connections and subsequently expands to global linkages.

San Francisco Bay in the early 1850s presented a sight seldom seen in the history of the world: a veritable forest of masts rising from hundreds of abandoned ships. With the gradual stabilization of conditions for trade, however, maritime commerce was revived until the rapid increase in shipping made necessary the immediate building of extensive piers and docking facilities. Prior to the Gold Rush all cargoes had been lightered ashore in small boats, usually to the rocky promontory of Clark's Point at the foot of Telegraph Hill. When in the winter of 1848 the revenue steamer James K. Polk was run aground at the present intersection of Vallejo Street and Battery Street the narrow gangplank laid from deck to shore was considered a distinct advance in harbor facilities. The brig Belfast was the first vessel to unload at a pier: she docked in 1848 at the newly completed Broadway Wharf—a board structure ten feet wide.

More than 80 percent of San Francisco Bay's historic tidal marshes have disappeared due to human activities, and the remaining marshes have been fragmented and contaminated. High levels of contaminants have contributed to the degradation of their habitat quality. After the implementation of management actions and the restriction on the use of toxic chemicals, a significant decrease in contaminant loading occurred, and marsh-habitat quality is being improved slowly. However, levels of contaminants in some tidal marshes are still high enough to threaten the well-being of aquatic life and wildlife. This review summarizes the geographical distribution and temporal trends of contaminants, especially mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, and organochlorine pesticides, which are the most serious concerns for public health and environmental degradation in the San Francisco Bay.

Visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area often note the lack of a Jewish neighborhood similar to Los Angeles's Fairfax District or Chicago's Devon Avenue. But in earlier days there were four traditional Jewish areas: South of Market, the San Bruno Avenue area, Fillmore-McAllister, and West Oakland. There was also a rural Jewish colony composed of chicken farmers in Petaluma. These communities were filled with East European Jews—not the half Germans from Prussian Poland who had arrived in the decades after the Gold Rush, but Yiddish-speaking immigrants mostly from Russia, Austria-Hungary, or Rumania. In addition to housing a high concentration of Jews, the urban enclaves were home to synagogues and minyanim (worship groups that met in private homes), kosher butchers and bakeries, mutual aid societies, and Hebrew schools. Orthodox abounded, but there were also socialists, communists, Yiddishists, and Zionists. These Jewish neighborhoods added up to something greater than the sum of their parts, and children in these areas—whether they felt nurtured or smothered—grew up with a keen sense of Jewish identity.

After the arrival of Sir Francis Drake to America, the Indians timorously kept their distance from the new visitors, prepared to make—if necessary—proper obeisance. The story oges that for three days longer the spirits remained in their abode, which rested on the water, its wings folded. So came the first white men to set foot in the region of San Francisco Bay—men of Francis Drake's company in the Golden Hinde. They had left England a year and a half earlier in company with four other ships, bound round the world in the service of Queen Elizabeth to plunder the ships and cities of her enemy, Philip II of Spain. Now only the flagship remained. After two days ashore, they were visited by the awed inhabitants of the country, who brought gifts of feathers and tobacco. Thus having established his Queen's title to a new kingdom on the other side of the world, Francis Drake lifted anchor on 23rd July and sailed away.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to tell the story of the civic engagement of Filipino migrants through religion by showing how the Filipino migrant faithful Filipinize elements of the cultural, political, and economic arenas within the San Francisco Bay Area cities and towns in which they have settled. The book provides a contrarian case to the prevailing assumption that religion and spirituality are diminishing in the rich developed countries of the world and flourishing only in poor developing countries. The empirical evidence gathered during the research for this book suggests that religion and spirituality in rich developed countries, like the United States, are being boosted by new migrant faithful from poor developing countries, like the Philippines. The remainder of the chapter discusses why the Filipino migrant religious experience is important to America; where religion is situated in the life of a Filipino migrant; and how Filipinization should be understood in San Francisco history.

This chapter lists the annual events in the San Francisco Bay area, such as: the Shrine East-West Football Game, the California Dog Show, the National Match Play Open Golf Championship, the Open Golf Tournament, Chinese New Year, the Citrus Fair, the Easter Sunrise Services, Army Day, the Annual Pistol Shoot Food Show, the Spring Yacht Regatta, the Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival, the Wild Flower Show, the Iris Blooming Season, the Tamalpais Center Flower Show, the Spring Flower Show, the Children's May Day Festival, the Early Days Fiesta, the Rodeo, the Scandinavian Midsummer Day Celeration, the Fireworks and Motorboat Regatta, the Bastille Day Celebration, Admission Day celerbrations, the Labor Day Parade, the Columbus Day Festival and Motorboat Regatta, the Grand National Livestock Exposition, and the Parade of the Witches.

This paper describes the natural history of the remnant tidal salt marshes surrounding the San Francisco Bay estuary. These tidal marshes are ephemeral features, strongly influenced by sea-level rise and climate. Evidence contained in the sediments of the San Francisco Bay estuary show earlier incarnations of the estuary existed during glacial periods when the sea level was lower. Over the several-thousand-year history of the modern estuary, vegetation records contained in the tidal-marsh sediments show that tidal marshes have responded both to the long-term, postglacial trend in the rising sea level and to higher-frequency variations in freshwater inflows principally controlled by climate variations. In particular, the tidal marshes of the San Francisco Bay are affected by climatic conditions that dominate the larger watershed region of the estuary. Described here are significant climatic swings that affected the region during the last six thousand years as evidenced in the vegetation records.

San Francisco Bay and Delta tidal wetlands represent the most intact Mediterranean-climate wetlands in North America, yet only 10 percent survived the twentieth century. Wetland plant communities within the bay, as elsewhere, are structured by gradients in inundation and salinity, as well as competitive and positive interactions, resulting in a predictable pattern of tidal-freshwater, brackish, and salt-marsh systems. Inundation stress creates patterns of plant distribution within tidal wetlands, often with strong patterns of zonation. Plant-species diversity within tidal wetlands varies strongly across salinity gradients, with fewer than twenty species in bay and delta tidal salt marshes and sixty to one hundred species in tidal freshwater wetlands; productivity is also greatest in freshwater and brackish tidal wetlands.

This chapter lays out the case for understanding the transformation of the Bay Area as segregation, and for transforming our understanding of segregation. It begins with a brief introduction to the history of diversity in the Bay Area, one of the first regions to be born as multiracial in what was at that time a very two-tone America. It then turns to the question of segregation, starting with how what became known as the “suburban wall” helped form ideas of segregation. It examines how segregation has changed, moving beyond debates about whether American is still segregated, and instead focusing on what segregation means in the twenty-first century. It argues that the partial erosion of the “suburban wall” does not mean segregation is dead, but simply that it has changed form and geography.

If some titanic convulsion of the earth were to drain San Francisco Bay of all its waters, it would look merely like one of those shallow, hill-rimmed valleys which stretch away from its upper and lower reaches. Through a gap in the chain of hills along its eastern edge, a great river would pour into its upper end and, winding southward, flood out to sea through a deep gorge hollowed in the coastal range. Within the recent geologic past the Bay was just such a valley, the Golden Gate such a river canyon. However, as time went on, the valley sank until ocean waters came flooding through the Gate to submerge all but the peaks of its hills. Last of all in the long series of the earth's transformations from which emerged that part of the planet known as California was the Bay's creation.

The Golden Era's youthful founders, Rollin M. Dagget, who was only nineteen years old when he arrived on the Coast, and J. MacDonough Foard, who was only twenty-one, had followed Horace Greeley's own advice: “Go West, young man!” The phenomenal success of their attempt to spread enlightenment on such matters as education, literature, and the fine arts through the Era's columns, beginning in 1852, when the infant city could not yet supply itself with even the common necessities of life, was indicative of that hunger for all the arts and refinements of civilization which inspired the Argonauts almost as much, it would seem, as the quest for gold. “To encourage virtue and literature” had been one of the announced objectives of the founders of the Bear Flag Republic in 1846. Certain it is that “virtue and literature”—and art, and learning, and architecture—have received rare encouragement in the cities around San Francisco Bay.

This chapter describes the nature and effects of pollution and habitat alteration effects on California marine fishes. At present, the coastal population of the Californias is distributed unevenly with high population centers in southern California and in the San Francisco Bay area. Because of the high human population densities in these areas, these are the primary areas of pollution and habitat alteration that has affected fish populations. In addition to accumulating in marine organisms, contaminants can have detrimental effects on individual fish, populations and assemblages, fish predators, and human consumers of fish. This chapter describes health risks to humans and to bird and mammal predators that consume them.

It was not until 1965 that a state law was passed to regulate the unrestricted filling of the San Francisco Bay. By then, 92 percent of the bay's wetlands had already been destroyed. The law ushered in a new era of debate over the limits of private-property rights and the nature of public interest in protecting bay resources in an undeveloped condition. After initial US Supreme Court decisions affirming the public's right to restrict development in wetlands, recent decisions equivocate on the topic, raising questions about the future direction of federal wetland regulation, as well as about the future of a large-scale program of wetland restoration currently underway in San Francisco Bay.

This introductory chapter explains the book's core arguments. The first core argument is that the profound changes in the race and class geography of the San Francisco Bay Area is fundamentally about segregation. The second core argument is that this new form and map of segregation, and the foreclosure crisis it helped to enable, was produced by the highly specific way in which the politics of space and place during the more recent era reacted to the ghosts of postwar urbanism. What has occurred is not simply some path-dependent aftermath of the postwar era, the result of a postwar model destined to fail. Nor is it simply the result of neoliberalism or bad decisions in the 1980s and beyond. Rather, it is the end result of a “neoliberal era,” that period from the mid-1970s until the foreclosure crisis of 2008, built on the ghosts of the postwar era.

In the first half of the twentieth century, San Francisco hosted two major world fairs: in 1915 and in 1939–40. A comparison of musical programming for these two enormous undertakings highlights changes in artistic taste and expression prompted, in part, by a new social awareness and an increased attention to diversity. Both fairs marked the end of difficult periods in city's history while nominally celebrating massive engineering feats. The Panama–Pacific International Exposition—February 20 to December 4, 1915—came at the end of the city's recovery from its most devastating local catastrophe, the quake and fires of 1906; yet officially it commemorated the opening of the Panama Canal. The Golden Gate International Exposition, which ran from February 18 to October 29, 1939, was widely viewed as a partial cure for the economic problems of the Depression; yet officially it heralded the completion of the Golden Gate and San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridges.

Emerging contaminants in aquatic environments, including the San Francisco Bay, are of increasing concern to regulatory agencies, ecosystem managers, and the public. There is increasing evidence that many emerging contaminants have properties similar to those of the legacy contaminants such as PCBs, dioxins, and chlorinated pesticides, in that they are persistent, they bioaccumulate, and they are toxic to aquatic organisms. However, information on scope of contamination and effects of many emerging contaminants is lacking. This chapter gives a brief overview of several classes of emerging contaminants, including flame retardants, nanomaterials, pesticides, musks, antimicrobial compounds, pharmaceuticals, and perfluorinated compounds. A brief discussion on detection of emerging contaminants and the use of biomarker responses to investigate effects is also included.

This chapter illuminates how the production of vulnerability proceeds through—and is supported by—interconnected economic development and resource use activities across city and regional scales. It explores the connection between lucrative resource extraction, realty speculation, reforestation, and home construction activities in the Tunnel Fire area. These Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire activities and resulting forms of vulnerability are linked to the development of the San Francisco Bay Area. The historically resource-rich Oakland Hills “countryside” played a crucial role in shaping and facilitating San Francisco's post-Gold Rush economic ascendance. These resource-provisioning activities generated roadways that several decades later fell under the speculative eye of housing developers in search of suburban homes and vacation retreats for the region's new elite. This transition from resource extraction to real estate speculation was instantiated in the landscape, as several logging paths in Oakland became arterial roads populated by municipal infrastructure, flammable tree cover, and eventually a vast collection of new home developments in high fire risk areas.

At the heart of the rich Santa Clara Valley lies San Jose, ten miles below the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Center of a rich agricultural region, San Jose's busy downtown district is dominated by tall modern office buildings; but the greater number of its business blocks date from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Along the shaded residential streets are hundreds of well-kept, old frame houses dating from the 1870s and 1880s, set among trim lawns and pleasant gardens. Despite its having been for 70 years a town where only Spanish was spoken, San Jose has retained surprisingly little of this heritage. For three generations it has been predominantly American. The Latin languages heard most frequently today are Italian and Portuguese.

This chapter examines the introduction of Mario Savio to the civil rights movement and the roots of the Fee Speech Movement (FSM). It discusses Savio's participation in the Mississippi Summer Project in April 1964 and describes a series of demonstrations that rocked the San Francisco Bay Area from October 1963 through to the summer of 1964 led by Martin Luther King Jr. It explains that these protests broke the ground for the FSM by sensitizing students to civil rights and providing a model for action.