The Financial District is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, United States, that serves as its main central business district and had 372,829 jobs according to U.S. census tracts as of 2012-2016. It is home to the city's largest concentration of corporate headquarters, law firms, insurance companies, real estate firms, savings and loan banks, and other financial institutions. Multiple Fortune 500 companies headquartered in San Francisco have their offices in the Financial District, including Wells Fargo, Salesforce, PG&E, Uber, Gap, and Williams-Sonoma. Since the 1980s, restrictions on high-rise construction have shifted new development to the adjacent South of Market area surrounding the Transbay Transit Center. This area is sometimes called the South Financial District by real estate developers, or simply included as part of the Financial District itself. However, the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has accelerated the exodus of business from the downtown core of San Francisco. The area is marked by the cluster of high-rise towers in the triangular area east of Kearny Street, south of Washington Street, west of the Embarcadero that rings the waterfront, and north of Market Street. The district includes San Francisco's two tallest buildings, the Salesforce Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid. Montgomery Street (sometimes called "Wall Street of the West") is the traditional heart of the district. History Under Spanish and Mexican rule, the area was the site of a harbor named Yerba Buena Cove with a small civilian outpost named Yerba Buena that served to support the military population of the Presidio and the Mission Dolores. The sandy, marshy soils of the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula discouraged the Spanish, and later Mexican governments from establishing a preeminent town there, who focused their pueblo settlement efforts in the Pueblo of San José with its extremely fertile land. It was not until 1835 that the first settlers established themselves on the shore of Yerba Buena Cove, with the first town plan surveyed in 1839. Yerba Buena's potential as a seaport made it the eventual center for European and American settlement. After gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada Foothills in 1848, Yerba Buena's location on the natural harbor of San Francisco Bay acted as a magnet for European and American settlers, as well as gold and job seekers from a multitude of countries. Following Californian independence and American annexation and the California Gold Rush, the area boomed rapidly and the Bay