AHC: Keep San Francisco as the most important west coast US city

Up until LA's rise in the 1st half of the 20th century and certainly throughout the 19th century SF was the most important west coast US city.

Obviously the earthquake of 1906 shifted things but can anyone think of way where SF still holds that designation? bonus points for it being the US's second largest city today.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Los Angeles' rise depended greatly on two things;

the Southern Pacific and the Los Angeles Aqueduct; Los Angeles Harbor and then the Colorado River Aqueduct didn't hurt, either. Los Angeles/southern California is definitely an engineered environment, more so than almost anywhere else on the (US) Pacific Coast.

Keeping the policymaking/lobbying/bribery that allowed for all three in check, and I coukd certainly see the San Francisco Bay Area becoming a metropolis along the lines of New York, rather than Los Angeles.

The City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County (two different entities) would still be important, but presumably more as a agricultural and then as a (more limited) manufacturing and financial center; Philadelphia to San Francisco's New York, so to speak.

Which makes San Diego Baltimore, I suppose.

Best,
 
Having the UN HQ in San Francisco rather then New York is near ASB. New York was a much larger more important city. Even if it did the UN is not nearly important enough to change San Francisco that much!
 
Up until LA's rise in the 1st half of the 20th century and certainly throughout the 19th century SF was the most important west coast US city.

Obviously the earthquake of 1906 shifted things but can anyone think of way where SF still holds that designation? bonus points for it being the US's second largest city today.
This is easy enough if you allow a POD before the end of the Mexican-American war. A less successful war/treaty negotiation which leaves OTL southern California inside Mexico means San Francisco is likely to stay the preeminent western city.
 
What about have the Southern Pacific terminate in San Diego? I don't much about Southern California but it seems more constrained by geography than LA and so less likely to overtake San Francisco.
 
San Francisco, per se, is pretty small, hemmed in on the end of a peninsula.

If it had grown like LA, encompassing otls Silicon Valley, Oakland and Berkeley, basically the whole Bay Area, it would be more important.
 
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