Fascinating San Francisco by Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
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Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood >> Fascinating San Francisco
Fascinating San Francisco
"O Warder of Two Continents!"--Bret Harte
San Francisco
1924
Foreword
Enthroned on hills, San Francisco captivates the stranger who sees it
from the Bay by the vivacity of its landscape long before revealing any
of its intimate lures. Whether you approach in the early morning, when
gulls arc wheeling above the palette of tones of the Bay, or at night,
when illuminated ferryboats glide by like the yellow-bannered halls of
fable, the buoyancy of San Francisco is manifest.
It increases as you pass through the Ferry Building, the turnstile
behind the Golden Gate, whose blithe tower of the four clock dials is
reminiscent of the Giralda in Seville.
In another moment you are in the surge of Market street, the long bazaar
and highroad of this port of all flags. An invisible presence dances
before your footsteps as you sense the animation of the street. It is
the spirit of San Francisco, weaving its debonair spell.
Here Tetrazzini turns street singer and Jan Kubelik is a wandering
minstrel enchanting crowds at Lotta's Fountain under Christmas eve
stars.
From Dana to Stevenson, from Harte to Mencken, San Francisco has
captured the hearts of a train of illustrious admirers. Rudyard Kipling,
master of the terse, has tooled a brisk drypoint of the city in a few
strokes. "San Francisco has only one drawback," he writes. "'Tis hard to
leave."
Cradled as a drowsy Spanish pueblo, reared as a child of the mines, and
fed on all the exhilarants of the gold-spangled days of the Argonauts,
San Francisco is like a dashing Western beauty with the eyes of an
exotic ancestry.
Bristling with contradictions, the city presents the paradox of being
the most intensely American and yet the most cosmopolitan community on
the continent, with aspects as variable as the medley of alien tongues
heard on its streets.
A festival of life is staged at this meeting place of the nations,
farthest outpost of Aryan civilization in its westward march.
Inez Haynes Irwin in her Californiacs sounds a warning for the stranger
in San Francisco.
"If you ever start for California with the intention of seeing anything
of the state," she admonishes, "do that before you enter San Francisco.
If you must land in San Francisco first, jump into a taxi, pull down the
curtain, drive through the city, breaking every speed law, to Third and
Townsend, sit in the station until a train--some train, any train--
pulls out, and go with it. If in crossing Market street you raise that
curtain as much as an inch, believe me, stranger, it's all off; you're
lost. You'll never leave San Francisco."
This booklet aims to keep the curtain up.
Inside the Gate
If you turn a map showing the basin of San Francisco Bay so that the
Pacific Ocean is nearest your eye, you see a peninsula thrust out from
the California coast like a great boot.
San Francisco stretches for six or seven miles across the toe of the
boot. Dominated by hills, the city is flanked by the Pacific on the west
and by the Bay on the north and east. To the northwest, joining ocean
and bay, is the Golden Gate, the only gap in the coastal mountains.
Constantinople and Rio de Janeiro have been called the only maritime
cities that approach the natural beauty of situation of San Francisco.
The basin of the Bay, into which the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers
pour after watering the central garden valley of the state, is an
amphitheatre rimmed with peaks and ridges.
The Bay spreads out below San Francisco like an animated poster keyed in
blue and silver, with Yerba Buena, Alcatraz and Angel islands tinted
details in the foreground. Across the gleaming water the roofs of
Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda are shingled with sun crystals, and in the
distance Tamalpais and Mt. Diablo bulk against a curtain of azure.
Suavities of outline accent the horizons of San Francisco, where the
skyscrapers take on fantasy as they pile up on hills and recede into
vales. Most visitors cross the Bay and arrive at the city by way of the
Ferry Building, the gala tower of which has a clock at each point of the
compass. Travelers also arrive at the Third and Townsend street railroad
station, or, if they come by sea through the Golden Gate, at the piers
along the waterfront.
Market street stretches diagonally across the peninsula from the Ferry
Building to the base of Twin Peaks, the urban mountain which has been
tunneled to get rapid transit to residence parks.
Twin Peaks is practically the geographical center of San Francisco. By
keeping this in mind visitors will avoid the mistake of thinking that
the end of Market street is the western boundary of the city.
From the sweep of Market street radiate practically all of the city's
important arteries. A resplendent thoroughfare by day, 100 feet wide,
Market street takes on a sorcery all its own at night, when the
electroliers designed by D'Arcy Ryan, light wizard of the Panama-Pacific
Exposition, flood it with radiance. Market street is then the most
dazzling of boulevards, every aspect of it in motion--crowds, taxis,
cars and the colors of advertising displays.
The junction formed by Market, Kearny, Geary and Third streets is the
heart of downtown San Francisco. It is the newspaper center, and close
by are big and little hotels, shops, restaurants and sidewalk flower
stalls. Here traffic eddies around Lotta's Fountain, presented to the
city by Lotta Crabtree, stage idol of the yesteryears. Beside it is one
of the bronze bells and iron standards that mark El Camino Real--the
King's Highway--which the padres trod in making their rounds of the
early California missions. Lotta's Fountain has two tablets. One has its
donor's name, and the other is inscribed to Luisa Tetrazzini, whose
soprano was first acclaimed to the world from San Francisco, and who
crossed the continent to sing Christmas carols to the people on this
street corner in 1910. One block east, Montgomery street leads into the
financial center of the Pacific. To the west are Union Square and its
shaft, commemorating Dewey's victory at Manila Bay, and Powell street,
with its cafe and theatre crowds.
A short walk out Market street takes you to the Civic Center, with the
City Hall, Library, Auditorium and State Building grouped about a formal
garden. The War Memorial, with its Opera House and American Legion
Museum, will face the City Hall on Van Ness avenue.
Fronting the Pacific, San Francisco, which covers a trifle over 42
square miles of territory, has an ocean beach extending for three miles
on its western boundary and overlooked by automobile highways. Street
cars, starting at the Ferry Building, arrive at the beach after
traversing residence districts and scenic routes, unfolding views of
hills, forests, parks, forts, lighthouses and seals on rocks lashed by
surf.
Between the Ferry Building and the ocean front--what a sweeping canvas
it would take to suggest all this even in broad outline!
The "ships, towers, domes, theatres" which Wordsworth saw from
Westminster Bridge in London are here, and so are the added motifs of
San Francisco's own song of seduction.
Sea Glamour
Ever has the glamour of the sea enveloped San Francisco. From the sea
came Don Juan Manuel Ayala in the San Carlos in 1775, charting a course
through the fog and opening the Golden Gate. From the, sea also came the
Argonauts, transforming the somnolent Yerba Buena into the city, of San
Francisco. And from the sea, up to the time of the railroad, came
practically all of the goods with which the merchants of the city did
business. Today with the sea ebbs and flows the tide of wealth that
makes San Francisco the key port of the Pacific. The banks and exchanges
of California and Montgomery streets, the foreign trade and insurance
offices of Pine street, the downtown skyscrapers--all reflect in some
way San Francisco's debt to the sea.
From the sea also comes health. The breezes that blow from it and the
fogs that drift down over the ridges combine to give San Francisco a
paradoxical climate--winters as warm as those in the south and summers
that are matchless for their exhilarating coolness.
San Francisco shows a higher per capita industrial output than any other
American city of its class because of its ideal working conditions.
A city conscious of its obligation to the sea, San Francisco has always
been interested in its waterfront, which perpetuates Spanish origins in
its expressive name of Embarcadero--the embarking place.
The skyline of the city is no longer stenciled by the towering masts of
sailing ships discharging or loading cargo, or lying in the stream or in
Richardson's Bay awaiting charters, as in the days when wheat was king
of California's great central valley. The virility of the waterfront of
San Francisco, however, is as persistent as in the age that provided
Frank Norris with his epic themes.
The masts and yards of older outline have given place to stubby cargo
booms of liners, freighters and tramps of multiple flags and
nationalities. Along the Embarcadero they disgorge upon massive concrete
piers silk, rice and tea from the Orient, coffee from Central America,
hemp and tobacco from the Philippines, and all manner of odds and ends
from everywhere. On the piers commodities are piled in apparent
confusion, yet each lot moves with precision in or out of yawning holds
at the shrill blast of the foreman's hoist whistle.
Along the Embarcadero you may see craft of every rig under the sun from
a Chinese junk to a Transpacific passenger liner. Human types are even
more contrasting, knots of Chinese and Singalese strolling behind South
Sea Islanders, Portuguese or Cornishmen, whose speech recalls snatches
you may have heard on the East India Dock Road in London.
Jack London heard and answered the call of the sea from the Embarcadero
of San Francisco, and Stevenson found the atmosphere of his Wreckers
there.
Sailors--trade winds--ships--what lurking thoughts of adventure,
realized or denied, do they not summon in all of us?
Historic Background
In 1579, before Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, or New
Amsterdam were settled, Sir Francis Drake, British explorer, careened
and repaired his ship, the Golden Hind, on the shore of what is now
Drake's Bay, an indentation on the California coast just north of the
Golden Gate. This was nearly two hundred years before Padre Junipero
Serra led his band of zealots and soldiers up out of New Spain into Alta
California.
At Drake's Bay the chaplain of the Golden Hind held the first religious
service in the English language on the American continent--a service
that is commemorated by a Celtic cross set up on a hill in Golden Gate
Park, San Francisco. Though close by, Drake did not find the Bay and
site of San Francisco.
It was not until October 31, 1769, that the peninsula and Bay of San
Francisco were discovered by an expedition headed by Don Gaspar de
Portola, Governor of Baja or Lower California. This expedition had set
out overland from San Diego for the purpose of locating Monterey Bay,
discovered in 1603 by Sebastian Vizcaino, Portuguese navigator in the
service of Spain.
Six years after the Portola discovery, Don Juan Manuel Ayala sailed the
first vessel, the San Carlos, through the Golden Gate. The following
year the first permanent settlement by white men on the site of San
Francisco was made when Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza established a
military post at the Presidio beside the Golden Gate. In this same
month, July, 1776, the Liberty Bell was ringing in Philadelphia. But
there was no thought then that the embattled farmers of the Atlantic
coast should inherit before many years this potential Spanish settlement
on the Pacific.
In October, 1776, Padre Junipero Serra founded the Mission Dolores, the
third of the chain of missions extending from San Diego. Subsequently a
settlement was made at Yerba Buena Cove, and there was established the
pueblo of Yerba Buena which has grown into the city of San Francisco.
Things moved slowly in those days--so slowly that in 1784 the pueblo
had but fourteen houses and sixty inhabitants.
Let us turn back the hands of the clock to the time when the pueblo
straggled over the sand hills which faced the water of the bay of Saint
Francis, under the shadow of Loma Alta. What do we see? Where today the
Merchants Exchange Building, central office of San Francisco's
commercial life, heaves its bulk into the air was the cabin of Jacob
Leese, trader. Houses were few and far between, and business was
something to be done when there was nothing else to do.
From the Plaza, then but a block or so from the waterside, two main
roads trailed off through the sand dunes. One went to the southwest,
winding among the hills toward the Mission Dolores, and the other in a
generally northwesterly direction out past the lagoon of the washerwomen
to the Presidio of San Francisco, the seat of the military government.
Sleepy, content to bask in the sunshine that flooded its sand hills and
kept back the banks of fog that loomed above the higher eminence's
separating the cove from the ocean, Yerba Buena dreamed, not of the
future in store for it, but of the next fiesta, of the coming barbecue
at Miguel Noe's rancho, or of the projected cock fight on Sunday at the
Mission Dolores.
To this port came occasionally a Yankee whale ship for fresh water, or
some enterprising trader with shawls and combs and trinkets for the
women, to barter for hides and tallow with the dons from the south and
the great interior ranchos.
Up the coast some Russians had established a settlement, much to the
disquiet of the authorities, who looked upon this as an encroachment of
barbarians menacing Spanish power. Rezanov, plenipotentiary of the Czar,
was a man of charming personality, however, and was able to lull the
suspicions of the indolent Spanish officials and lay his plans for a
coup that never took place. From afar Britain looked with interest upon
this strip of coast with its matchless harbor, and regretted that Drake
had not discovered it when he wintered his ship close by in 1579. Thus
Yerba Buena sprawled and dreamed in the sunshine, unmindful of the web
of destiny being woven about it.
Followed then the war with Mexico and the occupation by the officers and
men of the United States sloop-of-war Portsmouth under Commodore John
Montgomery, who broke the American flag to the breeze in the Plaza.
In 1848 gold was discovered by James W. Marshall in the tail-race of
General Sutter's mill, El Dorado county, and almost overnight San
Francisco was transformed from a hamlet into a pulsing city, overcome
with the rush of newcomers, the population in two years growing almost
to twenty thousand.
California became a state in 1850 without ever having gone through a
probationary period as a territory. In the late sixties the great
Comstock Lode, in Nevada, poured a flood of wealth into San Francisco,
and in 1869, one hundred years after the first white man looked upon San
Francisco Bay, came the railroad, bringing an increasing influx of
people from the East. The opening of the markets of China and Japan led
to the establishment of a trade that has made San Francisco the focal
port of the West.
These were the beginnings of San Francisco. Burned to the ground three
times in the early years of its existence, the city displayed an
invincible fortitude and each time capitalized disaster to build anew
with larger faith in its destiny. When again, in 1906, earthquake and
fire devastated the city its phoenix spirit came to life. The Argonauts
lived once more, magnificent in their resolution. The renaissance was a
prodigy that made onlookers exclamatory. Jules Jusserand, Ambassador of
France to the United States, phrased the wonder of it in majestic prose:
"The page written by the inhabitants of San Francisco on the moving
ashes of their city is not one that any wind will ever blow away."
Survivals of the Past
Stand at the Ferry Building, looking up Market street, and imagine the
beginning of the city that spreads before you. First of all you must
realize that this point of observation would, in those days, have been
offshore, on the shallow water of Yerba Buena Cove. To the right is the
scarp of Telegraph Hill, from which ships coming through the Golden Gate
were sighted, and to the left is the lesser Rincon Hill, which is being
cut away to provide a light manufacturing district. These marked the
headlands of the cove, and the waterfront curved inland as far as what
is now the site of the Donahue monument to mechanics at Market and
Battery streets.
Seeking survivals of the past, you must realize that San Francisco is
one of the most modern of the comparatively old American cities. Most of
the area that saw its beginning and early history has been wiped clean
by fire. The San Francisco of today may be said to date from its
rebuilding following 1906, since which time something like a half
billion dollars' worth of new construction has been done. Yet something
of early San Francisco remains, either beyond the reach of the
devastation of eighteen years ago or in miraculous islands of safety in
that sea of fire.
The Presidio, beside the Golden Gate, is several miles from the area
that burned. It is one of the largest military posts in the United
States, 1,500 acres of forested hills between the inner and the outer
harbor. The adobe building in which Rezanov, envoy of the Czar, wooed
Senorita Arguello, daughter of the commandante of the Presidio, is
preserved in the center of the reservation. You can read about this sad
romance in Bret Harte or in Gertrude Atherton.
Over the hills southward from the Presidio, in a sheltered valley, where
it was spared from the fire, stands Mission Dolores, with its ancient
churchyard and headstones. The old mission, whose adobe walls are four
feet thick, stands beside a new church of Spanish architecture. Near the
entrance to Mission Dolores, set in red tiles on the floor, is a marble
slab marking the tomb of the Noe family, Spanish grandees. Interesting
relics are in evidence. Early mission bells hang in the facade of the
old building. The tomb of Don Luis Arguello, first governor of
California under the Mexican regime, is in the churchyard. Inscriptions
on many of the stones in this burial place are footnotes to San
Francisco's early history.
Within the burned area of 1906, above the original waterfront of the
days when the water came up to Montgomery street, there are several
blocks of buildings which were spared by freaks of fate. These buildings
stand near the original Plaza now called Portsmouth Square. It was here
Commodore John Montgomery landed from the "Portsmouth" and raised the
Stars and Stripes on July 4, 1846, almost the seventieth anniversary of
the establishment of the Spanish Presidio. The site of his landing, at
what is now Clay and Montgomery streets, has been marked by one of the
bronze tablets on which the order of the Native Sons of the Golden West
has graven many of the historic episodes of California. Not far away, on
the south side of Sacramento street, between Davis and Front, there is a
brick building marked by a tablet as the site of Fort Gunnybags,
headquarters of the Vigilance Committee, which in 1856 hanged Casey and
Cora, two enemies of law and order, from its windows. In Portsmouth
Square itself, token of a gentler spirit, there stands a drinking
fountain in memory of Robert Louis Stevenson. That prince of idlers and
of prose spent many an hour on the sunny benches of this square. The
streets nearby, where stand the few buildings that escaped the fire,
echo the footsteps of Stevenson, of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. The Hall
of justice faces the square.
The Parrott building, erected in 1853 by Chinese labor with stone
brought from China, remains standing at California and Montgomery
streets.
Around the Plaza centered the life of the pueblo and of the early city
of San Francisco, but now on three sides of it is Chinatown, the
fashionable homes having long been gone from this section.
In Golden Gate Park, beside a lake reflecting their outline, stand
marble columns that once flanked a doorway on Nob Hill, which rises
above the Oriental quarter. This relic has been named "Portal of the
Past." It symbolizes the old San Francisco that is gone save for a few
traces, for this is, after all, a new city.
It is in the San Francisco of today, with a historic background that
survives in spirit instead of in material reminders, that interest is
dominant.
Cafes and Bright Lights
"There's a diabolical mystery to your San Francisco!" Enrico Caruso once
exclaimed. "Why isn't everyone fat in this city of such excellent
cafes?"
The Argonauts who came to California in quest of the Golden Fleece were
hearty, eaters, and they laid the foundation for a tradition of abundant
table fare that has been handed down since the days of the bonanza
kings.
Good things to eat have been provided by successive generations of chefs
who have achieved virtuosity. By and large, the moderation of prices has
been a matter of bewilderment to visitors. The cheapness of savory food
was one of the outstanding traits of San Francisco, in the opinion of
the army of newspaper correspondents attracted to the Democratic
national convention in 1920. Maurice Baring, the British author and
globetrotter, goes into raptures over the cooking he discovered in a
Pine street restaurant. Read his Round the World in Any Number of Days
and satisfy yourself that a sophisticated observer from London town can
become as ecstatic as a Gaul in the presence of soup a l'oignon. There's
a diversity to the restaurants of San Francisco that makes it difficult
to single out any one type. French and Italian restaurants appear to
predominate, but the number of other places, including Spanish, Greek,
Mexican, Hungarian and Slavonic--not to mention Chinese--makes the
array a long and polyglot one. In the vicinity of Broadway, Kearny and
Columbus avenue, streets that penetrate the heart of the Latin Quarter,
and along upper Montgomery street, there are sufficient individual cafes
to keep any explorer after atmospheric epicurism busy for many days.
Neither Soho nor Montmartre is plagiarized in these places. They are
foreign in tone, but they belong very much to San Francisco. What
affectation and posturing there may be in Greenwich Village are not in
evidence here. Joy was at times given boisterous expression in the days
before the great drought came upon the land. But the eighteenth
amendment and its restrictions have not deprived any of these places of
their inherent buoyancy, even though they may not be as noisy as Coffee
Dan's.
Table d'hote courses are customary not only in the French restaurants
but in most of the Italian as well. Some of these places combine or
interchange the menus of French, Italian and Swiss chefs, a piquant
entree, or shellfish served bordelaise, being followed by a paste like
lasagne, spaghetti or tagliarini, or by those geometric ravioli whose
delights are in inverse ratio to their square. If you want fare of the
realm the dining rooms and grills of the hotels are at your service, as
are the restaurants along Market, Powell and other streets. The
cafeteria has come northward and the tea-room and the Southern inn
westward by way of New York. The typical San Francisco restaurant,
however, is an institution as firmly imbedded in the life of the people
as is Mile Rock in the current of the Golden Gate.
The sea glamour is upon the dining places of San Francisco. Any
impression of them would be lacking without some reference to sea food.
Every variety of fish is sold fresh in the markets daily. A number of
so-called fish grottos specialize in fish caught the same morning,
keeping them swimming in illuminated window-tanks. Crabs, shrimps,
oysters, clams and other varieties of shell fish, including the abalone
with its rainbow-tinted shell, together with sanddabs, pompano and rex
sole, serve to remind one that San Francisco is washed on three sides by
tides of the Pacific.
Perhaps when Bret Harte referred to San Francisco as "serene,
indifferent of Fate," he was thinking of Sidney Smith's declaration:
"Fate cannot harm me--I have dined today!"
When you think of eating in San Francisco you think of bright lights and
dancing. In addition to the hotels, you may dance at innumerable cafes.
Influences of Old Spain dowered San Francisco with an infatuation for
the fiesta. The city has always been dance-minded. Art Hickman, virtuoso
of jazz orchestration, was called to New York to have the Follies on The
Roof dance to the exuberant strains he had evolved in San Francisco.
Patterns of new dance forms were derived by Pavlowa from the wild
rhythms she found on the old Barbary Coast.
The Palais Royal, Marquard's, Tait's-at-the-Beach, the Cliff House--but
where is one to stop when he starts to name the San Francisco cafes that
attract dance crowds? Let's leave it to the classified lists in the
telephone directories.