When the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire wiped the city's slate clean, the wealthy stood around the burned rubble of their Nob Hill homes and took a cool, hard look at San Francisco Bay.
The best view in the city was in Pacific Heights, and with that swathe of real estate now up for grabs the big money built there and settled in.
Through the Great Depression and both World Wars, the residents of Pacific Heights built mansions in an ex-frontier town that now sell for nearly $3,280 per square foot.
Today's buyers, however, have given this slice of San Francisco the name "Billionaire's Row." And those billionaires include a lot of tech names mingling with San Fran's "Old Money" crowd.
In the 1870s, the highest hills overlooking San Francisco Bay were filled with laborers enjoying a building boom in America's tenth largest city — thousands of miles beyond the frontier.
Source: ZPub
The building boom of the 1870s, however, was just a shadow of the rebuilding that took place after the the 1906 'quake.
In the years after 1906, many of Nob Hill's wealthy residents moved to Pacific Heights and changed it from a place of plain homes built for about $1,000 on small lots, to a place like this:
Source: StreetAdvisor
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