Market Street (San Francisco)
Market Street is a major thoroughfare in San Francisco, California. It begins at The Embarcadero in front of the Ferry Building at the northeastern edge of the city and runs southwest through downtown, passing the Civic Center and the Castro District, to the intersection with Portola Drive in the Twin Peaks neighborhood. Beyond this point, the roadway continues into the southwestern quadrant of San Francisco. Portola Drive extends south to the intersection of St. Francis Boulevard and Sloat Boulevard, where it continues as Junipero Serra Boulevard. Market Street is the boundary of two street grids. Streets on its southeast side are parallel or perpendicular to Market Street, while those on the northwest are nine degrees off from the cardinal directions. Market Street is a major transit artery for the city of San Francisco, and has carried in turn horse-drawn streetcars, cable cars, electric streetcars, electric trolleybuses, and diesel buses. Today Muni's buses, trolleybuses, and heritage streetcars (on the F Market line) share the street, while below the street the two-level Market Street subway carries Muni Metro and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). While cable cars no longer operate on Market Street, the surviving cable car lines terminate directly adjacent to the street at its intersections with California Street and Powell Street. History Initial surveying and clearing In 1839, the first street grid was laid in the Mexican trading post of Yerba Buena by Jean Jacques Vioget, largely aligned with the cardinal directions, with blocks measuring . Yerba Buena was renamed to San Francisco in 1847 after it was captured by United States troops during the Mexican–American War. Market Street, which cuts across the city for from the waterfront to the hills of Twin Peaks, was laid out originally in an 1847 survey by Jasper O'Farrell, a 26-year-old trained civil engineer who had immigrated there. Market Street was described at the time as an arrow aimed straight at "Los Pechos de la Chola" (the Breasts of the Maiden), now called Twin Peaks. Property owners forced O'Farrell to retain the earlier Vioget-drawn north-south Yerba Buena street grid rather than conform the roads to the hilly topography; they also forced him to establish the diagonally-offset grid south of Market with larger blocks aligned with Mission Street for Happy Valley. Market was laid out to transition between the two competing street grids, parallel to and one block north of Mission. O'Farrell first repaired Vioget's original layout of the settlement centered around Portsmouth Square, and then established Market Street as the widest street in town: between property lines. However, the width of Market also aroused the ire of property owners, who felt the new street was excessively wide and potentially encroached on their holdings; they made preparations to lynch O'Farrell. In Forgotten Pioneers, T. F. Prendergast recounts: When the engineer had completed his map of Market Street and the southern part of the city, what was regarded as the abnormal width of the proposed street excited part of the populace, and an indignation meeting was