Castro District (San Francisco, California)

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The Castro District, better known as The Castro, is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, which is also known as Eureka Valley. Castro Street was named for José Castro (1808-1860), a leader of Mexican opposition to U.S. rule in California in the 19th century. The neighborhood now known as the Castro was born 1887 when the Market Street Cable Railway built a line linking Eureka Valley to downtown.

From 1910 to 1920, the Castro was known as "Little Scandinavia" on account of the number of people of Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish ancestry who lived there. The Castro became a working-class Irish neighborhood in the 1930s and remained so until the mid-1960s. The Castro came of age as a gay center following the controversial Summer of Love in the neighboring Haight Ashbury district in 1967. The gathering brought tens of thousands of middle-class youth from all over the United States. The neighborhood, previously known as Eureka Valley, became known as the Castro, after the landmark theatre by that name near the corner of Castro and Market Streets.