Portsmouth Square: The Cradle of San Francisco

Why is it significant?

Step into the lively, sunlit plaza of Portsmouth Square and watch the elderly Chinatown residents gathered around concrete tables intently playing Chinese chess, Xiangqi, and card games.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step into the lively, sunlit plaza of Portsmouth Square and watch the elderly Chinatown residents gathered around concrete tables intently playing Chinese chess, Xiangqi, and card games. You are standing in the literal birthplace of San Francisco: the historic plaza of the Mexican village of Yerba Buena before it was ever named San Francisco.

On July ninth, eighteen forty-six, during the Mexican-American War, Captain John B. Montgomery marched his sailors ashore from the USS Portsmouth in the bay and hoisted the American Stars and Stripes on a wooden flagpole right on this square, claiming California for the United States.

Two years later, in May eighteen forty-eight, merchant Sam Brannan ran into this exact plaza waving a quinine bottle filled with gold dust, shouting to the crowds: Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River! His shout sparked the California Gold Rush, drawing three hundred thousand forty-niners from across the globe.

Look in the northwest corner for the bronze galleon monument to author Robert Louis Stevenson, who loved to sit on these benches in eighteen seventy-nine daydreaming of Treasure Island. Now head through the Dragon Gate onto Grant Avenue.