30 stunning World War II era photos of San Francisco



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Few time periods capture the American imagination as much as the 1940s. It was a decade of Hollywood glamour, heroism and tragedy, endlessly revisited in popular culture.

New York City tends to get all the glory in American imagery, but photos from the Library of Congress reveal how stunning San Francisco looked during this period too.

Many of the photos are from the war effort and depict locals on the job. Thousands of workers streamed into the Richmond Kaiser Shipyards on a daily basis, building an astonishing 747 vessels in four years, a rate that has never been matched. During the height of production, almost 250,000 people worked in Bay Area shipyards.

Other pictures show locals helping out at the Red Cross, enlisting in the Marines and tending their victory gardens. Over 1.6 million soldiers and civilian personnel passed through San Francisco on their way to the Pacific; San Francisco was truly the arsenal of democracy.

But San Francisco wasn't all constructive patriotism during the war. The city saw its Japantown, the biggest concentration of ethnic Japanese outside of Japan, dismantled when its thousands of Japanese American citizens were sent to internment camps. Many never recovered the businesses and homes they lost during the war.

In the years following the war, many servicemen and women who had visited San Francisco on their way to Pacific deployment decided to take up permanent residence in the city. The postwar boom led to the creation of many modern-day neighborhoods like the Sunset and Visitacion Valley.

For more historic pictures of San Francisco, check out these galleries:

28 beautiful photochrom prints of California

Pre-earthquake photos of San Francisco

Haunting Depression-era images of San Francisco