Quote:
SAN FRANCISCO — Well before anyone thought of this place as the center of the tech economy, the Bay Area built ships. And it did so with the help of many parts of the country.
Douglas fir trees logged in the Pacific Northwest were turned into lumber schooners here. Steel from the East, brought in by railroad, became merchant vessels. During World War II, workers assembled battleships with parts from across the country: steam turbines from Schenectady, N.Y., and Lester, Pa.; gear winches from Tacoma, Wash.; radio equipment from Newark; compasses from Detroit; generators from Milwaukee.
Most of these links that tied the Bay Area’s prosperity to a web of places far from here have faded.
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This was true of a particular period in Bay Area history but there has been a "before" as well as an after. "Before", San Francisco entreprenuers built those railroads (at least as far eastward as Colorado) that later brought the manufactured parts for the ships and built them largely not with labor from the heartland but with labor imported from China (maybe the same places in China that now build iphones). And San Francisco was already wealthy from gold mined (or panned) in the nearby "gold country" of the Sierra foothills and the silver mines of Nevada on the other side of the same mountain range. And it was already connected to the east by the stage coaches of Wells Fargo which is a Bay Area native.
Before that even, California had a prosperous ranching economy as part of "New Spain" but had virtually no connection with the Anglophne nation to its east.
So yeah, for maybe 50-75 years out of it's 300+ years history in the hands of Europeans, the Bay Area's economy was unusally tied to heartland cities. But that isn't how the city got rich and it was a transient thing.