Selected American history

CHAPTER XI.

San Francisco of the Past

The story of San Francisco's history and tragedy appeal with extraordinary force to the imagination of all civilized men. For several generations the city was looked upon as an Arabian Night's dream—a place where gold lay in the streets and joy and happiness were unlimited. Its settlement, or, rather, its real rise as a city, was as by magic. It was first a city of tents, of shanties, of "shacks," lying on the rim of a great, spacious bay. Ships of all sizes and rigs brought gold-seekers and provisions from the East, all the way round Cape Horn, after voyages of weary months, and at San Francisco their crews deserted and hundreds of these craft were left at their moorings to rot. Ashore was a riot of money, prodigious extravagance, mean, shabby appointments, sudden riches, great disappointment, revelry, improvidence and suicide.

The streets that now lay squares from the water were then at the water's edge and batteaus brought cargoes ashore. Long wharves—one was for years called the Long Wharf even after there were others built much longer—led out over the shallow water. These shallows were later filled and streets built upon them, and upon them arose warehouses, hotels, factories, lodging houses and business places.

The city grew rapidly in the direction away from the bay. But in its early days it was a city with no confidence in its own stability, and its buildings were accordingly unstable. A few minor earthquakes shook some of these down years ago and established in the minds of the people a horror of earthquakes. Frame houses became the rule.

In its ensuing life San Francisco developed the attributes of a city of gayety tempered by business. The population, for the most part, affected light-hearted scorn of money, or, rather, of saving money. It made mirth of life, habituated itself to expect windfalls such as miners and prospectors dream of, developed a moderate amount of business, and enjoyed the day while there was sunlight and the night when there was artificial light. The windfalls grew less frequent, mining became a costly and scientific process, and agriculture succeeded it. But, though it was only necessary to tickle the land with a hoe and pour water upon the tickled spot, to have it laugh with two, three or even four harvests a year, agriculturists continued scarce. The Chinese truck farms, some of which lay within the city's lines, supplied the small fruits and vegetables. Across the bay white men farmed, and grapes, fruits, vegetables and flowers of prodigious variety and monstrous dimensions were grown. But Eastern men came to do the farming. The Californian who himself was an "Argonaut," or whose father was an Argonaut, found no attractions in the steady labor of farming.

There followed a period of depression, ascribed by many to the influx of the Chinese and their effect upon the labor market, though the army of the unemployed were as a rule unwilling to do the work their Celestial rivals engaged in, that of truck farming, fruit raising, manual household labor, wood cutting and the like. A heavy weight settled on the city; business grew slack; the army of the unemployed, of ruined speculators and moneyless newcomers grew steadily greater, and for an era San Francisco saw its dark side.

But this was not a long duration. There was fast developing a new and important business, resulting from the development of the real resources of the State—the fruits, particularly the citrous fruits that grew abundantly in the warm valley. Fortunes were made in oranges, lemons, limes, grapes, almonds and pears. Raisins, whose size defied anything heretofore known, were made from the huge grapes that grew in the San Joaquin Valley. Sonoma sent its grapes to be made into wine. Capital flowed in from every side. Eastern men in search of health, others in search of wealth, came to the Golden State. No matter who came, where they came from, or where they were going, they spent a few days, or many, and some money, or much, in "'Frisco." The enterprise of the second edition pioneers quickly transformed the State and city.

Luxury was startling. San Francisco's mercantile community equaled the best, the stores and shops were as beautiful as anywhere in the world and proportionately as well patronized. Theatres, music halls, restaurants, hotel bars and the like were ablaze with lights at night, and patronized by a gay throng. Sutro's bath, near the Cliff House, was a species of entertainment unequaled anywhere. The Presidio, as the army post is still known, as in the Spanish nomenclature, gave its drills, regarded as free exhibitions for the people. Golden Gate Park was an endless daily picnic ground.

The crowds in the streets of San Francisco were noticeably well dressed and usually gay, without that fixed, drawn, saturnine look noticeable among the people of the East. It is doubtful whether, upon the whole, the earnings of the San Francisco man equaled those of his Eastern brother, but his holidays were frequent and his joys greater. The grind of life was not yet steady—men had not become mere machines.

The climate of California is peculiar; it is hard to give an impression of it. In the first place, all the forces of nature work on laws of their own in that part of California. There is no thunder or lightning; there is no snow, except a flurry once in five or six years; there are perhaps half a dozen nights in the winter when the thermometer drops low enough so that there is a little film of ice on exposed water in the morning. Neither is there any hot weather. Yet most Easterners remaining in San Francisco for a few days remember that they were always chilly.

For the Gate is a big funnel, drawing in the winds and the mists which cool off the great, hot interior valley of San Joaquin and Sacramento. So the west wind blows steadily ten months of the year and almost all the mornings are foggy. This keeps the temperature steady at about 55 degrees—a little cool for comfort of an unacclimated person, especially indoors. Californians, used to it, hardly ever think of making fires in their houses except in the few exceptional days of the winter season, and then they rely mainly upon fireplaces. This is like the custom of the Venetians and the Florentines.

But give an Easterner six months of it, and he, too, learns to exist without a chill in a steady temperature a little lower than that to which he is accustomed at home. After that one goes about with perfect indifference to the temperature. Summer and winter San Francisco women wear light tailor-made clothes, and men wear the same fall-weight suits all the year around.

Except for the modern buildings, the fruit of the last ten years, the town presented at first sight to the newcomer a disreputable appearance. Most of the buildings were low and of wood. In the middle period of the 70's, when a great part of San Francisco was building, there was some atrocious architecture perpetrated. In that time, too, every one put bow windows on his house, to catch all of the morning sunlight that was coming through the fog, and those little houses, with bow windows and fancy work all down their fronts, were characteristic of the middle class residence districts.

Then the Italians, who tumbled over Telegraph Hill, had built as they listed and with little regard for streets, and their houses hung crazily on a side hill which was little less than a precipice. For the most part the Chinese, although they occupied an abandoned business district, had remade the houses Chinese fashion, and the Mexicans and Spaniards had added to their houses those little balconies without which life is not life to a Spaniard.

The hills are steep beyond conception. Where Vallejo Street ran up Russian Hill it progressed for four blocks by regular steps like a flight of stairs.

With these hills, with the strangeness of the architecture, and with the green gray tinge over everything, the city fell always into vistas and pictures, a setting for the romance which hung over everything, which has always hung over life in San Francisco since the padres came and gathered the Indians about Mission Dolores.

And it was a city of romance and a gateway to adventure. It opened out on the mysterious Pacific, the untamed ocean, and most of China, Japan, the South Sea Islands, Lower California, the west coast of Central America, Australia that came to this country passed in through the Golden Gate. There was a sprinkling, too, of Alaska and Siberia. From his windows on Russian Hill one saw always something strange and suggestive creeping through the mists of the bay. It would be a South Sea Island brig, bringing in copra, to take out cottons and idols; a Chinese junk with fan-like sails, back from an expedition after sharks' livers; an old whaler, which seemed to drip oil, back from a year of cruising in the Arctic. Even, the tramp windjammers were deep-chested craft, capable of rounding the Horn or of circumnavigating the globe; and they came in streaked and picturesque from their long voyaging.

In the orange colored dawn which always comes through the mists of that bay, the fishing fleet would crawl in under triangular lateen sails, for the fishermen of San Francisco Bay are all Neapolitans, who have brought their costumes and sail with lateen rigs shaped like the ear of a horse when the wind fills them and stained an orange brown.

The "smelting pot of the races" Stevenson called the region along the water front, for here the people of all these craft met, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Lascars, Kanakas, Alaska Indians, black Gilbert Islanders, Spanish-Americans, wanderers and sailors from all the world, who came in and out from among the queer craft to lose themselves in the disreputable shanties and saloons. The Barbary Coast was a veritable bit of Satan's realm. The place was made up of three solid blocks of dance halls, for the delectation of the sailors of the world. Within those streets of peril the respectable never set foot; behind the swinging doors of those saloons anything might be happening, crime was as common here as drink, and much went on of which the law was blankly ignorant.

Not far removed from this haunt of crime was the world-famous Chinatown, a district six blocks long and two wide, and housing when at its fullest some 30,000 Chinese. Old business houses at first, the new inmates added to them, rebuilt them, ran out their own balconies and entrances, and gave them that feeling of huddled irregularity which makes all Chinese built dwellings fall naturally into pictures. Not only this, they burrowed to a depth equal to three stories under the ground, and through this ran passages in which the Chinese transacted their dark and devious affairs—as the smuggling of opium, the traffic in slave girls and the settlement of their difficulties, by murder if they saw fit. The law was powerless to prevent or discover and convict the murderers.

Chinatown is gone; the Barbary Coast is gone; the haunts of crime have been swept by the devouring flames, and if the citizens can prevent they will never be restored. The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest-hearted, most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate and have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights feel that it can never be the same. When it rises out of its ashes it will probably doubtless resemble other modern cities and have lost its old strange flavor.