Whether true or not, the American satirist and novelist Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, (1835 – 1910) is often quoted as saying: “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” What is factually known, is that Twain arrived in ‘Bagdad by the Bay’ in 1864, less than twenty years after the Gold Rush. He lived and worked as a news reporter in what is today known as the Financial District. During the mid-19th century, the City by the Bay was a much different place than the…
