San Francisco Relocation Guide - Antevia

Street to the north and Powell Street and Columbus Avenue to the west, where the
southwestern corner of Telegraph Hill overlaps with the North Beach neighborhood.
History
Originally named Loma Alta by the Spaniards, the hill was then familarly known as Goat
Hill by the early San Franciscans, and became the neighborhood of choice for many Irish
immigrants. From 1825 through 1847, the area between Sansome & Battery, Broadway
and Vallejo streets was used as a burial ground for foreign non-Catholic seamen.
The hill owes its current name to a semaphore, a windmill-like structure erected in
September 1849, for the purpose of signaling to the rest of the city the nature of the ships
entering the Golden Gate. Atop the newly built house, the marine telegraph consisted of a
pole with two raisable arms that could form various configurations, each corresponding a
specific meaning: steamer, sailing boat, etc. The information was used by observers
operating for financiers, merchants, wholesalers and speculators. As some of these
information consumers would know the nature of the cargo carried by the ship they could
quickly predict the upcoming (generally lower) local prices for those goods and
commodities carried. Those who did not have advance information on the cargo might
pay a too-high price from a merchant unloading his stock of a commodity - a price that
was about to drop.
On October 18, 1850, the ship Oregon signaled to the hill as it was entering the Golden
Gate the news of California's recently acquired statehood. A redundant station was built
at Point Lobos in 1853. However, with the advent of the electrical telegraph in 1862, the
system quickly became obsolete and was eventually dismantled, but the hill and its
surrounding neighborhood have retained the name of Telegraph Hill.
In the 1920s, Telegraph Hill became with North Beach a destination for poets and
bohemian intellectuals, dreaming of turning it into a West Coast West Village.
Movies featuring Telegraph Hill
After the Thin Man
Dark Passage
The House on Telegraph Hill
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
The Enforcer, the third film in Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series