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The Castro District, better known as The Castro, is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, which is also known as Eureka Valley. San Francisco’s gay village is most concentrated in the business district that is located on Castro Street from Market Street to 19th Street. San Francisco's gay village is mostly concentrated in the business district that is located on Castro Street from Market Street to 19th Street.

It extends down Market Street toward Church Street and on both sides of the Castro neighborhood from Church Street to Eureka Street. San Francisco's Castro district is the center of one of America's most vibrant gay and lesbian communities. Visitor information to visit the Castro and best spots. The vibrant and welcoming Castro District, nestled in the heart of San Francisco, holds a unique place in the city's history, symbolizing LGBTQ+ power, resilience, and inclusivity.

Find the best gay bars, dance clubs, gay-rated hotels, and gay cruise clubs in San Francisco. Check reviews, photos, and more on Eureka Valley, named for one of the Twin Peaks the other was called Noe , began as sparsely populated ranchos that belonged to Mexican land barons like Jose Castro and Jose de Jesus Noe. In the s when Irish, German and Scandinavian families homesteaded on the slopes of Twin Peaks, a village of dairy farms and Victorian houses flourished.

With the opening of the Castro Street segment of the Market Street Cable Railway in , Eureka Valley became a desirable and accessible neighborhood. It was every working man's dream: buy a cheap piece of land and build a stately Victorian, big enough for several generations of the family. And it was not just who lived in one house that was family but everyone who lived around you.

It was a total neighborhood by its truest definition. There was economic solidarity; everyone was working class. They worked in the trades, public-service sectors and on the waterfront. There were bakeries, butcher shops and poultry and fish markets. Eureka Valley had its own commercial autonomy. And there were bars everywhere. The bars were always an important social meeting ground for residents of this neighborhood, and this remains unchanged today.

There was religious unity; everyone was predominantly Catholic. The Holy Redeemer Church was more than a place to worship: it was the focus of social activities and the school for all the neighborhood children. Scattered houses soon yielded to whole city blocks. The area remained basically unchanged until after World War II. The decline in the neighborhood in the post-war years, FHA-backed mortgages and the increase of automobiles caused a mass exodus to the suburbs.

In the s, during its post-industrial years, San Francisco experienced an explosion of white-collar workers. Many well-educated, middle-class gay men with capital and a real appreciation for old architecture found Eureka Valley a perfect place to settle. Castro Theater Credit: Dan Nicoletta. San Franciscans rode out the Depression with their usual verve and gusto for food, fun and frivolity. Seventeen million people from around the world came to San Francisco to enjoy the Exposition.

San Francisco was moving from the mood of frivolity to one of defense. Treasure Island became a major embarkation and naval training center. Thousands of servicemen and -women came to San Francisco on their way to and from the Pacific battlefronts. The War Years, like the Gold Rush a hundred years earlier, drew masses of people out of their accustomed walks of life, threw them together with a group of minorities and separated them into sex-segregated settings.

This was also the first time the US military actively sought out gay and lesbian service members and dishonorably discharged them solely on the basis of their sexual orientation.

San Francisco had become known as a city of tolerance with a long history of relative openness. It was therefore understandable that to the two million men and women who passed through the Golden Gate, San Francisco was a city of magic, a world far different from what they had known back home. San Francisco's homosexual population has been growing steadily since World War II when a number of military personnel from the Pacific area were dishonorably discharged in the Bay Area for their sexual orientation.

Many other homosexual veterans remembered San Francisco as a tolerant, open-minded city and returned after the war. By it was estimated that 17 percent of the city's population, , people, were homosexual. Propelled by the great migration to the suburbs during the s, a new group of of migrants were attracted by the Victorian houses of the Eureka Valley: white-collar gay men and gay couples with money.