> The skyscraper came late to this city, a shipping and manufacturing hub for much of its existence. Huh? The Pac Bell building (which Yelp is now in) is a cla

> The skyscraper came late to this city, a shipping and manufacturing hub for much of its existence. Huh? The Pac Bell building (which Yelp is now in) is a classic 1920s skyscraper [1]. San Francisco never ended up with as many tall buildings as say NYC, but that's also partly a function of city size. NYC had 5.6M people in 1920 [2], while San Francisco was about 500,000 [3]. Even if you compare just to Manhattan to avoid metropolitan area comparisons, we're talking about 2.5M almost (so 5x). If anything, it would be apt to say that skyscrapers never caught on in San Francisco like they did in Manhattan. New York currently has ~10x as many skyscrapers (buildings taller than 150m) than San Francisco [4 and 5]. The article even goes on to point out that early newspaper folks competed over tall buildings: > San Francisco has always been like this. There were so few skyscrapers in the city’s first century that the ones that were built tell a tale of rampant egos and unrestrained power. At the end of the 19th century, the city’s newspapers had hubris and wealth to rival today’s internet companies. In 1890, the owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, M. H. de Young, erected a 10-story building worthy of his publication. It was the tallest building on the West Coast. The Bay Area is just spread out compared to NYC. It developed much later and wasn't a big city before automobiles were popular (and didn't have a real metro until 1980!). With Silicon Valley being in the peninsula, and tech only developing somewhat recently, San Francisco simply wasn't that big of a commercial city (in comparison to New York) to dictate large skyscrapers. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/140_New_Montgomery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/140_New_Montgomery [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Y... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_San_Francisco https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_San_Francisco [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_New_York_City https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in... [5] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_San_Francisco https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in...