When the private finance web site WalletHub lately named San Francisco as 2024’s healthiest American metropolis, my response was extra smile than shock. The reality is that San Franciscans have been giving themselves excessive well being marks for greater than a century.
Certainly, within the March 8, 1921 “Well being and Local weather Property” concern of San Francisco Enterprise, a 10-cent weekly produced by the Chamber of Commerce, the town was proclaimed the general public well being and local weather champion of America underneath the headline “Golden Gate Radiates Well being.”
Whereas WalletHub based mostly its rating on 4 classes — well being care, health, inexperienced area, and meals — San Francisco’s earlier boosters listed productiveness and industrial effectivity, extra annual hours of sunshine (2869!), and trendy drainage programs as a few of the key well being yardsticks. However what would possibly give present-day readers pause is the San Francisco Business reference to rats, milk, and youngsters.
In 1921, the catastrophic earthquake and fireplace of 1906 was nonetheless a traumatic reminiscence for a lot of. But within the ensuing 15 years, San Franciscans had warmed to the unintended penalties of city reconstruction. As Metropolis Well being Officer William C. Hassler favorably commented, “The hearth of 1906 eradicated without end the districts designed as slums.”
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