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Pacifica

city in San Mateo County, California, USA

Pacifica is a city in San Mateo County, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Half Moon Bay.

With the nickname 'Scenic Pacifica,' this California town is beloved by its residents and relatively unknown by everyone else. ~ Chris Hunter

Quotes

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Alphabetized by author or source
 
Pacifica is fortunate that it retains its distinctive character and hasn’t become just another suburb. ~ Jerry Crow
 
Pacifica has a reputation for being a quarrelsome city, polarized on basic matters, but historically proud of being a bastion of democracy. ~ Bill Drake
  • In Spanish, where most words are either masculine or feminine, the Pacific Ocean is considered masculine, so it ends in an “o.” Ipso facto, Pacifico. But then we explained that when Pacifica was named, by vote at a public meeting, nobody there spoke Spanish, or at least not grammatically. And then we added that Americans associate fine lovely things with the female sex, and so maybe that’s why the name Pacifica sounded so nice to people of the city.
  • The site of the village where Portola first made local contact, Pruristac, looks inviting today. It was on the north bank of San Pedro Creek behind where the Sanchez Adobe now sits. The journals of the explorers referred to the population of “six or seven families” in the village. The Ohlone in this area made huts of tules tied over willow branch frames… When the Spanish explorers arrived, one of the thing they noticed was that the Ohlones were extracting lime from a small cave such as this one, on the site that became the Rockaway Quarry. The Indians made use of the mineral for body paint. Subsequently, the Spanish enlarged the diggings to provide whitewash for the mission and presidio buildings from San Francisco to San Jose from 1780-1782. The only other village in Pacifica evident to the explorers was Timigtac, near what is now the intersection of Reina Del Mar Avenue and Highway 1. There were no other villages along the coast from here to go to the Golden Gate because the soil was very sandy and the winds blew strongly much of the time. Explorers said that perhaps only one extended family lived on this site. A substantial shellmound, or midden, is on the site, an indication that quantities of “clams and mussels were consumed there over a period of many years. It may have been used mainly for periodic gathering of seafood, much as a hunting lodge is used.
    • Bill Drake, Pacifica, Pacifica Historical Society (2002, pp. 15-16)
  • Because of its ease of commuting to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, there have always been high-profile people who kept a low-profile presence in town. Some have even been known to simply drive out of Pacifica every morning without ever engaging the community in any way. A California Supreme Court Justice, for example, once lived in town without ever being interviewed in the local weekly newspaper. There have also been rumors of baseball players and movie stars living under the radar in Pacifica… Unlike typical tourist towns in California, Pacifica is more of a residential enclave with a public beach and a public pier. There are no longer any car dealerships or magnet shopping centers that attract people from “over the hill.” The primary sales tax generators are the grocery stores and the gas stations. That is a formula that is not common for cities of 40,000 people.
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