Will Irwin

“ It was all more like Italy than anything in the Italian quarter of New York and Chicago — the very climate and surroundings, the wine country close at hand, the bay for their lateen boats, helped them.
Over by the ocean and surrounded by cemeteries in which there are no more burials, there is an eminence which is topped by two peaks and which the Spanish of the early days named after the breasts of a woman. ”

“ The mixed stock has given her that regularity of features which goes with a blend of bloods; the climate has perfected and rounded her figure; out-of-doors exercise from earliest youth has given her a deep bosom; the cosmetic mists have made her complexion soft and brilliant. At the University of California, where the student body is nearly all native, the gymnasium measurements show that the girls are a little more than two inches taller than their sisters of Vassar and Michigan.
The greatest beauty-show on the continent was the Saturday afternoon matinee parade in San Francisco. ”

“ It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights, feel that it can never be the same. It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman had passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different. ”

“ If it rises out of the ashes it must be a modern city, much like other cities and without its old atmosphere.
San Francisco lay on a series of hills and the lowlands between. These hills are really the end of the Coast Range of mountains, which stretch southward between the interior valleys and the Pacific Ocean. Behind it is the ocean; but the greater part of the town fronts on two sides on San Francisco Bay, a body of water always tinged with gold from the great washings of the mountain, usually overhung with a haze, and of magnificent color changes. ”

“ THE old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest hearted, most pleasure loving city of the western continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of refugees living among ruins. ”

“ The climate of California is peculiar; it is hard to give an impression of it. In the region about San Francisco, all the forces of nature work on their own laws. There is no thunder and 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 in the morning there is a little film of ice on exposed water. Neither is there any hot weather. Yet most Easterners remaining in San Francisco for a few days remember that they were always chilly. ”

“ This, under the leaden sky of a San Francisco morning, had a depressing effect on first sight and afterward became a delight to the eye. For the color was soft, gentle and infinitely attractive in mass.
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. It is unnecessary to say that no teams ever came up this street or any other like it, and grass grew long among the paving stones until the Italians who live thereabouts took advantage of this herbage to pasture a cow or two. ”

“ Above all there is an art sense all through the populace which sets it off from any other population of the country. This sense is almost Latin in its strength, and the Californian owes it to the leaven of Latin blood. The true Californian lingers in the north; for southern California has been built up by "lungers" from the East and middle West and is Eastern in character and feeling. ”

“ These rare hot days are the only times when one sees women in light dresses on the streets of San Francisco.
Along in early May the rains cease. At that time everything is green and bright, and the great golden poppies, as large as the saucer of an after-dinner coffee cup, are blossoming everywhere. Tamalpais is green to its top; everything is washed and bright. By late May a yellow tinge is creeping over the hills. This is followed by a golden June and a brown July and August. The hills are burned and dry. The fog comes in heavily, too ”

“ 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 Southerner is from the Yankee. He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather than immoral in his personal habits, and easy to meet and to know. ”

“ The place was simply three blocks of solid dance halls, there for the delight of the sailors of the world. On a fine busy night every door blared loud dance music from orchestras, steam pianos and gramaphones, and the cumulative effect of the sound which reached the street was chaos and pandemonium. Almost anything might be happening behind the swinging doors. ”

“ The institutions of learning in Massachusetts account for her pre-eminence; the art spirit does it for California. The really big men nurtured on California influence are few, perhaps; but she has sent out an amazing number of good workers in painting, in authorship, in music and especially in acting.
"High society" in San Francisco had settled down from the rather wild spirit of the middle period; it had come to be there a good deal as it is elsewhere. There was much wealth; and the hills of the western addition were growing up with fine mansions. ”

“ 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. There is no such thing as a change of clothing for the seasons. And after becoming acclimated these people find it hard to bear the changes from hot to cold in the normal regions of the earth. Perhaps once in two or three years there comes a day when there is no fog, no wind, and a high temperature in the coast district. ”

“ Outside of the city, at Burlingame, there was a fine country club centering a region of country estates which stretched out to Menlo Park. This club had a good polo team, which played every year with teams of Englishmen from southern California and even with teams from Honolulu.
The foreign quarters are worth an article in themselves. Chief of these was, of course, Chinatown, of which every one has heard who ever heard of San Francisco. A district six blocks long and two blocks wide, housed 30,000 Chinese when the quarter was full. The dwellings were old business blocks of the early days ”

“ Across the bay to the north lies Mount Tamalpais, about 3,000 feet high, and so close that ferries from the waterfront take one in less than half an hour to the little towns of Sausalito and Belvidere, at its foot.
Tamalpais is a wooded mountain, with ample slopes, and from it on the north stretch away ridges of forest land, the outposts of the great Northern woods of Sequoia sempervirens. This mountain and the mountainous country to the south bring the real forest closer to San Francisco than to any other American city. ”

“ San Francisco was famous for its restaurants and cafes. Probably they were lacking at the top; probably the very best, for people who do not care how they spend their money, was not to be had. But they gave the best fare on earth, for the price, at a dollar, seventy-five cents, a half a dollar, or even fifteen cents. ”

“ There are two varieties of big trees in California: the Sequoia gigantea and the Sequoia sempervirens. The great trees of the Mariposa grove belong to the gigantea species. The sempervirens, however, reaches the diameter of 16 feet, and some of the greatest trees of this species are in the Bohemian Club grove. It lies in a cleft of the mountains: and up one hillside there runs a natural out of doors stage of remarkable acoustic properties.
In August the whole Bohemian Club, or such as could get away from business, went up to this grove and camped out for two weeks. ”

“ With such a people, life was always gay. If the fairly Parisian gaiety did not display itself on the streets, except in the matinee parade, it was because the winds made open-air cafes disagreeable at all seasons of the year. ”

“ It runs in the blood.
"Who's Who in America" is long on the arts and on learning and comparatively weak in business and the professions. Now some one who has taken the trouble has found that more persons mentioned in "Who's Who" by the thousand of the population were born in Massachusetts, than in any other state; but that Massachusetts is crowded closely by California, with the rest nowhere. ”

“ The deep coves of Belvidere, sheltered by the wind from Tamalpais, held a colony of "arks" or houseboats, where people lived in the rather disagreeable summer months, coming over to business every day by ferry. Everything there invites out of doors. ”

“ Heredity began it; climate has carried it on. All things that grow in California tend to become large, plump, luscious. Fruit trees, grown from cuttings of Eastern stock, produce fruit larger and finer, if coarser in flavor, than that of the parent tree. As the fruits grow, so the children grow. A normal, healthy, Californian woman plays out-of-doors from babyhood to old age. ”

“ And it typified a certain spirit that there was in San Francisco.
For on the ground floor was a public restaurant where there was served the best dollar dinner on earth. At least, if not the best it ranked with the best, and the others were in San Francisco. There, especially on Sunday night, almost everyone went to vary the monotony of home cooking. Everyone who was anyone in the town could be seen there off and on. It was perfectly respectable. A man might take his wife and daughter to the Poodle Dog. ”

“ It belonged to the middle class, but the "upper classes" have no monopoly of beauty anywhere in the world. It had grown to be independent of the matinees. From two o'clock to half-past five, a solid procession of Dianas, Hebes and Junos passed and repassed along the five blocks between Market and Powell and Sutter and Kearney—the "line" of San Francisco slang. Along the open-front cigar stores, characteristic of the town, gilded youth of the cocktail route gathered in knots to watch them. There was something Latin in the spirit of this ceremony—it resembled church parade in Buenos Ayres. ”

“ The Chinese, although they occupied an abandoned business district, had remade their dwellings Chinese fashion, and the Mexicans and Spaniards had added to their houses those little balconies without which life is not life to a Spaniard. ”

“ Until the last decade almost anything except the commonplace and the expected might happen to a man on the waterfront. The cheerful industry of shanghaing was reduced to a science. A citizen taking a drink in one of the saloons which hung out over the water might be dropped through the floor into a boat, or he might drink with a stranger and wake in the forecastle of a whaler bound for the Arctic. ”

“ Almost has the Californian developed a racial physiology. He tends to size, to smooth symmetry of limb and trunk, to an erect, free carriage; and the beauty of his women is not a myth. The pioneers were all men of good body ”

“ 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 the comfort of an unacclimated person, especially indoors. Californians, used to it, hardly ever think of making fires in their houses except in a few days of the winter season, and then they rely mainly upon fireplaces. ”

“ Listen! O ye starved amidst plenty, to the tale of the Hotel de France. This restaurant stood on California street, just east of Old St. Mary's Church. One could throw a biscuit from its back windows into Chinatown. It occupied a big ramshackle house, which had been a mansion of the gold days. Louis, the proprietor, was a Frenchman of the Bas Pyrenees ”