San Francisco is basically an island; it's surrounded on three sides by water and most of the land border in the south is dominated by the San Bruno Mountain. Oakland has better transportation connections and has much more room to expand. Most shipping traffic now goes to Oakland. And frankly, the weather is better and less foggy in Oakland too. One would think that after SF was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, Oakland would be a logical place to rebuild. However, since then, SF has been further entrenched by the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, and the Transbay Tube. Why has SF remained the center of the Bay Area despite its awkward location?
There’s no single reason the city on the peninsula became and remained dominant, but several interlocking reasons—including mere inertia.
First, the Presidio, which the Spanish had originally established to enforce their claim to San Francisco Bay, passed to the United States along with California. That provided a center of gravity as the first Anglo settlements began to arise around the bay, and the settlement at Yerba Buena prospered, only a short walk from the Presidio’s protection, personnel, and connections to the outside world. Second, San Francisco Bay is naturally deeper on its west side than its east, so piers and landfill out to water deep enough for anchorage of oceangoing ships was easier in San Francisco. The refusal of the owner of the Mexican rancho including what is now Oakland, Don Luís Peralta, to sell his land for development of a rival town meant that San Francisco dominated the matchless bay when the Gold Rush in 1849 brought tens of thousands of fortune-seekers. Though there were wagon roads to the Gold Country, Sacramento, Monterrey, Stockton, and the various new towns springing up around the bays and sloughs were most conveniently connected by water transportation to San Francisco. Railroads in California were still 15 years in the future.
When railroads came in the 1860s, including the transcontinental connection finished in 1869, there were dramas of mergers and acquisitions that swung back and forth, with the Big Four railroad tycoons playing the various interests on either side of the bay against each other. The rail line from the east via Stockton and Altamont Pass could almost as easily cross the shallow bay at Dumbarton to reach San Francisco as to turn north toward Oakland (or it was feared, a rival port on Yerba Buena Island). Even though the Central Pacific built its two-mile Long Wharf at Oakland in 1868, it displaced relatively little commerce from the San Francisco docks.
The 1906 earthquake and fire might seem at first like a chance to reconsider economic and geographic situations, but such disasters don’t change land ownership. Even a farsighted city plan by Daniel Burnham, ready for public release, lay untouched in boxes in San Francisco’s City Hall as the city’s business leaders rushed to rebuild the same city in the same place. By then, railroad connections down the Peninsula and thence eastward, and railcars ferried across the bay, provided good-enough freight handling for the city. More important, the banks, law firms, accountants, courts, and related institutions had set up in San Francisco, not Oakland. It’s worth noting that while Oakland had plenty of land (and drinking water) for the first several decades of settlement, the Berkeley Hills would eventually limit its inland growth.
The introduction of containerized shipping, and related labor strife, did eventually lead to Oakland and other East Bay ports becoming more important for marine commerce. But by then—much like Manhattan—San Francisco had developed an importance far beyond that of a mere port facility.
The first couple of chapters of Mel Scott’s book The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective give a concise summary of the changing fortunes of settlements on San Pablo and San Francisco bays, and how the one at the end of the Peninsula became “the mother of cities.”
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