San Francisco's French connection

June 24, 9:15 PMSF Ethnic Communities ExaminerMiki Garcia

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San Francisco has already had an established French community long before the gold rush. After Tahiti and the Marquisas came under French rule, San Francisco became an essential port to get to French Polynesian territories. French explorers and missionaries were sent into the Pacific from here. And then, the largest migration in the history of France came when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, 1848. Unprecedented number of French people came to California.

According to Claudine Chalmers, the author of French San Francisco, San Francisco’s “Latin Quarter” emerged at the intersection of Grant Street and Broadway in the 1880s. It is called “Latin Quarter” because the area was populated mainly with Frenchmen and Italians. Chalmers wrote: “The area was filled with French hotels, restaurants, cafes, tables d’hotes, fashion stores, tailors and seamstresses, hairdressers, garages and mechanics, construction companies and laundries that remained a synonym of quality in the entire city for decades, as well as French bakeries.” French immigrant Isidore Boudin was the one who started baking sourdough French bread in 1849. He worked in a bakery on Dupont Street where he first kneaded a dough fermented with wild yeast and then formed it into the shape of a traditional French loaf. According to Chalmers, after his death in the 1890s, his wife Louise Boudin carried on the bakery business with the help of her two sons and two daughters, and eventually moved the store to 815 Broadway in the Latin Quarter just below today’s Broadway tunnel. And the rest is history.

The Bay Area's current French Quarter is around Belden Place where you can find a lot of cafes and bistros. This is not exactly like the one in New Orleans but it has got a good joie de vivre atmosphere.

French children learn about San Francisco through Jules Verne’s novel “Around the World in Eighty Days”. In the novel, main characters attempt to travel around the world in eighty days and San Francisco is one of the stopping over cities. It seems like the word “San Francisco” still captivates many as there are always elegantly dressed French tourists in the French Quarter.