San Francisco 3D Timelapse: 1776 to 2026

From a Spanish fort and a mission on empty hills to one of the most famous skylines in the world. Every building in San Francisco rises on its real footprint, at its real height and on the real hills, in the year it was built. Watch the Gold Rush fill the cove with ships, the 1906 earthquake and fire burn the city for three days, and the bridges cross the bay. Building footprints, heights and ground levels come from DataSF (LiDAR). Construction years come from the San Francisco Assessor's tax roll. Terrain is USGS 3DEP. The shapes of the tallest towers come from OpenStreetMap. Buildings that were later demolished are not in that data, so the lost city of each era is shown as generic houses spreading out with the historical edge of the city. Population figures are US Census counts. 0:00 1776, the Presidio and the Mission 0:20 Yerba Buena 0:30 The Gold Rush 0:40 Built on ships 1:06 Cable cars 1:39 The 1906 earthquake and fire 1:49 Ruins 2:04 The World's Fair 2:30 Alcatraz and the bridges 3:00 The Embarcadero Freeway 3:15 The Transamerica Pyramid 3:31 Loma Prieta 3:41 Dot-com 3:58 Salesforce Tower and San Francisco today Data: DataSF (Building Footprints, Assessor tax roll). USGS 3DEP. © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). US Census Bureau. Music by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Clear Air, Heroic Age, Vivacity, Inspired