Looking Down Nob Hill – Mason Street below California Street, San Francisco, California

Nob Hill is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, centered on the intersection of California Street and Powell Street. It is an affluent district, home to many of the city’s upper-class families as well as a large young urban professional population, and a growing Chinese immigrant population from Chinatown to the east. Nob is disparaging British slang abbreviation of "noble/nobility" referring to newly rich. The location is also derisively referred to as Snob Hill.

It is one of San Francisco’s 44 hills, and one of its original "Seven Hills." Prior to the 1850s, Nob Hill was called California Hill (after California Street, which climbs its steep eastern face). It was renamed after the Central Pacific Railroad’s Big Four – called the Nobs – built mansions there. The area was settled in the rapid urbanization happening in the city in the late 19th century. Because of the views and its central position, it became an exclusive enclave of the rich and famous on the west coast who built large mansions in the neighborhood. This included prominent tycoons such as Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University and other members of The Big Four. For this reason, its early citizens were known as nabobs, which was shortened to nob, giving the area its eventual name. The neighborhood was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, except for the granite walls surrounding the Stanford, Crocker, Huntington and Hopkins mansions. Those walls remain and you can see black scars caused by smoke from the intense fires that burned after the quake.

While the neighborhood was able to maintain its affluence following the quake, every mansion owner moved or rebuilt elsewhere. Some rebuilt mansions further west in San Francisco, for example, in Pacific Heights and Cow Hollow. In place of where the mansions had been located, swank hotels were erected. Hotels built over the ruins of the former mansions include the Mark Hopkins, Huntington and Stanford Court.