Fascinating Facts about San Francisco

By Betsy Malloy, About.com Guide

In 1850, gold seekers abandoned over 600 vessels in the bay. Some became landfill, now lying beneath the Jackson Square Historic District where the city's few surviving nineteenth century commercial buildings include Ghirardelli's first chocolate factory.

A.P. Hotaling & Co.'s Jackson Street whiskey warehouse was also among those surviving the 1906 earthquake and fire, confounding local clergymen who proclaimed the natural disaster a divine retribution for the city's sins and prompting poet and wit Charles Kellogg Field to write:

If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling's whiskey?