The Spanish called it Loma Alta. During the Gold Rush, a semaphore station on the summit signaled arriving ships to commodity traders below. In 1853, California’s first telegraph line replaced it — and the name stuck.
The quarry years
Quarrying began almost immediately after American settlement. The rock went everywhere — ballast for ships, fill for the Bay, stone for the seawall.
By the 1890s, George and Harry Gray were blasting the east face with no regard for the homes above:
- 1894 — an explosion crushed a duplex on Vallejo Street
- 1909 — the Grays used July 4th cannon fire from the Presidio to mask illegal blasting
- 1914 — a worker owed $17.50 in back wages shot George Gray dead; he was acquitted to cheers
The cliff face the Grays left behind — nearly 200 feet high at Green and Sansome — still stands.
Surviving 1906
Most of San Francisco burned after the earthquake. Telegraph Hill did not. Italian and Spanish residents doused flames with buckets of red wine and wine-soaked blankets.
The wooden cottages they saved are among the city’s rarest structures:
- 228 Filbert (1869) — built by a seaman-turned-stevedore, the district’s most significant building
- 9 Calhoun Terrace (1854) — the third oldest in the district
- Carpenter Gothic and Italianate workers’ houses dating to the 1850s
Coit Tower
Lillie Hitchcock Coit — cigar smoker, trouser wearer, gambler in men-only North Beach establishments. At fifteen she helped the short-handed Knickerbocker Engine Co. No. 5 beat rival companies to a fire. She became their honorary member.
She left a third of her estate to “add to the beauty of the city.” The result: Coit Tower (1932–33).
The murals
Twenty-five artists painted murals inside under Victor Arnautoff, a student of Diego Rivera. At least four were Communist Party members. When the 1934 longshoremen’s strike hit, the art became explosive — a hammer and sickle in one panel, a Western Worker banner in another. The tower was closed, windows whitewashed, opening canceled. It finally opened October 12, 1934, after the most overt imagery was painted over.
The steps and the garden
The Filbert and Greenwich Steps descend the eastern slope along old quarry edges — a pedestrian-only village of 1850s cottages connected by boardwalks.
In 1949, Grace Marchant (age 63, spinal arthritis) began transforming a garbage dump along the Filbert Steps into a garden. She worked for 33 years. When she died in 1982, the neighborhood saved it from development.
The parrots
A flock of cherry-headed conures — escaped pets that bred in the wild — became the hill’s most recognizable residents. Mark Bittner, an unemployed musician living rent-free in a hillside cabin, named individual birds and documented their lives. His story became a 2003 documentary. In 2023, San Francisco made the parrots the city’s official animal.
Telegraph Hill is shaped as much by what was taken away as by what was built. The architecture that remains is significant not for its grandeur but for its survival.