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 Mattachine Society moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the 1950s. The Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club, a centrist LGBT Democratic Party organization, was founded around 1971. In 1975, the Gay Latino Alliance (GALA) was founded in San Francisco, spurred by an interest in creating a Latino float for the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade. It was one of the first gay Latino organizations to exist in the United States and was situated in the Mission District of San Francisco. The group was created in response to the lack of focus on intersectionality in the San