Vallejo, California, United States

🇺🇸 Vallejo is a waterfront city in Solano County, California, located in the North Bay sub-region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Vallejo is geographically the closest North Bay city to the inner East Bay, so it is sometimes associated with that region. It is the most populous city in Solano County.

Vallejo is named after Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the famed Californio general and statesman. The city was founded in 1851 on General Vallejo's Rancho Suscol to serve as the capital city of California, which it served as from 1852 to 1853, when the Californian government moved to neighboring Benicia, named in honor of General Vallejo's wife Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo. The following year in 1854, authorities founded the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which defined Vallejo's economy until the turn of the 21st century.

Economy As the largest city in the North Bay region of the Bay Area, Vallejo is a regional economic hub for the North Bay and specifically Solano County.

Economy: Top employers According to a recent Financial Report, the top employers in the city include: 1 Kaiser Permanente Medical Center; 2 Six Flags Discovery Kingdom; 3 Vallejo City Unified School District; 4 Sutter Solano Medical Center; 5 City of Vallejo; 6 Touro University California; 7 California Maritime Academy; 8 Meyer Corporation; 9 Safeway Inc.; 10 Costco Wholesale.

Arts and culture In recent years, Vallejo has attracted a large community of artists to the region in search of lower rent and larger work-spaces. Artists pushed out of larger Bay Area cities like San Francisco and Oakland have been working with city leaders to revitalize the once blighted downtown area.

The artist-run Vallejo Art Walk scheduled on the second Friday of every month in downtown Vallejo has been recognised as a hub for artists in the Bay Area and the entirety of California.

LGBT community As early as the 1940s and before, Vallejo is known to have had a well-formed gay community, which was a short drive or boat ride away from San Francisco. At one time Vallejo boasted eight gay bars. After a migration of gays and lesbians from San Francisco in the decade 2000–2009, openly gay members of the community encountered what they described as a backlash against them. The school district was threatened by the ACLU to be sued for harassment of a 17-year-old lesbian by school administrators. The school settled the lawsuit with the student. The school agreed to pay her $25,000, adopt a more stringent non-discrimination policy and include a curriculum that positively portrayed gay and lesbian people.