Civic Center, San Francisco Civic Center, San Francisco The Civic Center in San Francisco, California, is an area of a few blocks north of the intersection of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue that contains many of the city's largest government and cultural institutions. It has two large plazas (Civic Center Plaza and United Nations Plaza) and a number of buildings in classical architectural style. The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium (formerly the Exposition Auditorium), the United Nations Charter was signed in the War Memorial Veterans Building's Herbst Theatre in 1945, leading to the creation of the United Nations. It is also where the 1951
LGBT culture in San Francisco gay bar owners in 1962 as a response to continued police harassment and closing of gay bars (including the Tay-Bush Inn raid), and continued until 1995. San Francisco became linked with the LGBT community in the media as a result of a June 1964 "Life" article, "Gay San Francisco," which stated that San Francisco was the "gay capital of America." The Society for Individual Rights (SIR), founded in San Francisco in 1964, published the magazine "Vector" and became within two years the largest homophile organization in the United States. SIR focused on community building, public identity and legal and social