Selected American history

CHAPTER XII.

Life in the Metropolis of the Pacific

Brought up in a bountiful country, where no one really has to work very hard to live, nurtured on adventure, scion of a free and merry stock, the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southern is from the Yankee. He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather than immoral in his personal habits, and above all easy to meet and to know.

Above all there is an art sense all through the populace which sets it off from any other part of the country. This sense is almost Latin in its strength, and the Californian owes it to the leaven of Latin blood.

With such a people life was always gay. If they did not show it on the streets, as do the people of Paris, it was because the winds made open cafes disagreeable at all seasons of the year. The gayety went on indoors or out on the hundreds of estates that fringed the city. It was noted for its restaurants. Perhaps people who cared not how they spent their money could get the best they wished, but for a dollar down to as low as fifteen cents the restaurants furnished the best fare to be had anywhere at the price.

The country all about produced everything that a cook needs, and that in abundance—the bay was an almost untapped fish-pond, the fruit farms came up to the very edge of the town, and the surrounding country produced in abundance fine meats, all cereals and all vegetables.

But the chefs who came from France in the early days and liked this land of plenty were the head and front of it. They passed their art to other Frenchmen or to the clever Chinese. Most of the French chefs at the biggest restaurants were born in Canton, China. Later the Italians, learning of this country where good food is appreciated, came and brought their own style. Householders always dined out one or two nights of the week, and boarding houses were scarce, for the unattached preferred the restaurants. The eating was usually better than the surroundings.

Meals that were marvels were served in tumbledown little hotels. Most famous of all the restaurants was the Poodle Dog. There have been no less than four restaurants of this name, beginning with a frame shanty where, in the early days, a prince of French cooks used to exchange recipes for gold dust. Each succeeding restaurant of the name has moved farther downtown; and the recent Poodle Dog stands—or stood—on the edge of the Tenderloin in a modern five-story building. And it typified a certain spirit that there was in San Francisco.

On the ground floor was a public restaurant where there was served the best dollar dinner on earth. It ranked with the best and the others were in San Francisco. Here, especially on Sunday night, almost everybody went to vary the monotony of home cooking. Every one who was any one in the town could be seen there off and on. It was perfectly respectable. A man might take his wife and daughter there.

On the second floor there were private dining rooms, and to dine there, with one or more of the opposite sex, was risque but not especially terrible. But the third floor—and the fourth floor—and the fifth! The elevator man of the Poodle Dog, who had held the job for many years and never spoke unless spoken to, wore diamonds and was a heavy investor in real estate.

There were others as famous in their way—Zinkaud's, where, at one time, every one went after the theatre, and Tate's, which has lately bitten into that trade; the Palace Grill, much like the grills of Eastern hotels, except for the price; Delmonico's, which ran the Poodle Dog neck and neck in its own line, and many others, humbler, but great at the price.

To the visitor who came to see the city and who put himself in the hands of one of its well-to-do citizens for the purpose, the few days that followed were apt to be a whirl of mirth and sight-seeing, made up of breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, drives, little trips across the bay, dashes down the peninsula to the polo and country clubs, hours spent in Bohemia, trips around the world among all the races of the habitable globe, all of whom had their colonies in this most cosmopolitan of American cities.

In club life the Bohemian stood first and foremost, the famous club whose meeting place, with all its art treasures, is now a heap of ashes, but which was formerly 'Frisco's head-centre of mirth. Founded by Henry George, the world-famous single tax advocate, when he was an impecunious scribbler on the San Francisco Post, it grew to be the choicest place of resort in the Pacific metropolis.

Within its walls the possession of dollars was a bar rather than an "open sesame," the master key to its circles being the knack of telling a good story or the possession of quick and telling wit. Fun-making was the rule there, and the only way to escape being made its victim was the power to deliver a ready and witty retort. In this home of good fellowship all the artists, actors, wits, literati, fiddlers, pianists and bon vivants were members. Here an impoverished painter could square his grill and buffet account by giving the club a daub to hang on its walls. Here in days of old the Sheriff used to camp regularly once a month until the members rustled up the money to replevin the furniture. But these days of poverty passed away, and in later years the club came to know prosperity beyond the dreams of the good fellows who founded it.

The Bohemian is gone, but the spirit that founded and made it still exists, and we may look to see it rise, like the phoenix, from its ashes.

San Francisco was often called the wickedest city in America. It was hardly that, it was simply the gayest. It was not the home of purity; neither is any other city. What other cities do behind closed doors San Francisco did not hesitate to do in the open.

In Eastern cities the police have driven vice into tenements, lodging houses and apartments. San Francisco did not do that. She had certain quarters where, according to unwritten law, vice was allowed to abide, and she did not try to hide the fact that it could be found there. She was not secretly immoral; she was frankly unmoral.

She did not believe in driving her vice from the open where it could be recognized and controlled—prevented from doing any more harm than it was possible to stop—into districts of the city where good people dwell and purity would feel its contaminating influence. There were regions in which the respectable never set foot, haunts of acknowledged vice which for virtue to enter would be to lose caste.

As for its gayety, San Francisco was proud of the reputation of being the Paris of America. Its women were beautiful, and they knew it. They liked to adorn their beauty with fine clothes and peacock along the streets on matinee days. If you asked a San Francisco girl why she wore such expensive clothes, she would say, frankly, "Because I like to have the men admire me," and she would see no harm in saying it. There was very little sham about the San Francisco women. Their men understood them and worshiped them. They bore themselves with the freedom that was theirs by right of their heritage of open-air living, the Bohemian atmosphere they breathed, the unconventional character of their surroundings. Their figures were strong and well moulded, their faces bloomed with health like the roses in their gardens. They drew the wine of laughter from their balmy California air. Sorrow and trouble sat lightly on their shoulders.

There was no end of enjoyments. After the theatre they would go to Zinkaud's, Tate's, the Palace or some other of the many places of resort, for a snack to eat and a spell under the music, which was to be heard everywhere.

Another part of the gay life of the city was for a private dance to keep going all night in a fashionable residence, and at daylight, instead of everybody going to bed, to jump into automobiles or carriages or take the trolley cars and whizz off to the beach for a dip in the cold salt water pool at Sutro's baths, and then, with ravenous appetites, sit down on the Cliff House balcony to an open-air breakfast while watching the ships sail in and out at the Golden Gate and hearing the seals barking on the rocks. After that home and to rest.

The city never went to sleep altogether. It was "an all-night" town. Few of the restaurants ever closed, none of the saloons did. Always during the whole twenty-four hours of the day there was "something doing" in the Tenderloin. No hour of the night was ever free of revelry. It was marvelous how they kept it up. The average San Franciscan could stay awake all night at a card game, take a cold wash and a good breakfast in the morning, and go straight downtown to business and feel none the worse for it.

It was a gay town, a captivating, piquant, audacious, but not especially wicked city. A Frenchy, a risque city it might justly have been called, but it was not wicked in the sense that sordid vice, vulgar crime and wretched squalor constitute wickedness.

It was a lovable place that everybody longed to get back to, once having been there. A woman, leaving it for years, watched it from the ferryboat, and, weeping, said, "San Francisco, oh, my San Francisco, I am leaving thee."

Will those who left it after the fire ever get back to their old city again? We have already expressed our doubt of this. The old San Francisco is probably gone, never to return. The new San Francisco will be a cleaner, saner and safer city, destitute of its rookeries, its tenements and its Chinatown. It will be a greater and more sightly city than that of the past, but to those who knew and loved the old San Francisco—San Francisco the captivating, the maddest, gayest, liveliest and most rollicking in the country—there must be something impressibly sad to its old inhabitants in the reflection that the new city of the Golden Gate can never be quite the same as the haven of their early affections.