San Francisco Examiner

“ There it lay, a constellation of lights, a golden radiance, dimmed by the distance. San Francisco the Impossible, the City of Miracles! Of it and its people many stories have been told, and many shall be; but a thousand tales shall not exhaust its treasury of Romance. Earthquake and fire shall not change it, terror and suffering shall not break its glad, mad spirit. Time alone can tame the town, restrain its wanton manners, refine its terrible beauty, rob it of its nameless charm, subdue it to the Commonplace. ”

“ Just as it is often for their little tricks or failings that we love people best, so it is with San Francisco. You may find her beautiful as she rises tier on tier on her many hills above the dazzling waters of the bay, you must admire the resolution and courage with which, out of her annihilation, she has risen more beautiful than before ”

“ San Francisco owes it to herself, and to our boasted civilization, to cleanse this Augean stable—to obliterate, to stamp out this plague-spot—to purge it, if need be, by fire—and she has not a day to lose in doing it. ”

“ Behold me pitched neck-and-crop from twenty days of the high seas into the whirl of California, deprived of any guidance, and left to draw my own conclusions. Protect me from the wrath of an outraged community if these letters be ever read by American eyes! San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people, whose women are of a remarkable beauty. ”

“ San Francisco has called to the world for its best, and the response has been so prompt that no country has failed to send its tribute and give the best thought of those who cater to the men and women who know. ”

“ I came to his assistance, "we Americans have a famous trick of living and enjoying a little in advance, of 'going ahead' of the hour, as it were. We find in San Francisco rather what it promises to be than what it is, and we take it at its word." ”

“ There is hardly a limit to the exceptional characters and exceptional doings to be heard of in San Francisco. Though the city affect -or has been driven into- a quiescent air now, it has hardly ever done anything like any other place. ”

“ You not only can have all that is exciting in San Francisco, watching a city trying to kick out of its long clothes, but you can saunter about the country and see the grandees in their towns and on their ranchos, to say nothing of the scenery, which is said to be magnificent. ”

“ San Francisco is not the back door of the continent. San Francisco is the front door. Every ship sailing out of its magnificent bay to the Orient, proclaims this fact. San Francisco will one day lead the continent. A city that cares for its poor and helpless, its children and dumb animals, that encourages art and learning, and never wearies in its prosecution of evil-doers—that city will eventually emerge triumphant from every cloud of evil report. Long live the dear city by the Golden Gate! ”

“ Do we not know that, under present conditions, just as that city over the bay grows in wealth and population, so will poverty deepen and vice increase; that just as the liveried carriages become more plentiful, so do the beggars; that just as the pleasant villas of wealth dot these slopes, so will rise up the noisome tenement-house in the city slums. I have watched the growth of San Francisco with joy and pride, and my imagination still dwells with delight upon the image of the great city of the future, the queen of all the vast Pacific—perhaps the greatest city of the world. ”

“ So the stranger beholds San Francisco, the Improbable. Its pageantry is unrolled for all to see at first glance. Never was a city so prodigal of its friendship and its wealth. She salutes one on every crossing, welcoming the visitor openly and frankly with her western heart. In every little valley where the slack, rattling cables of her car-lines slap and splutter over the pulleys, some great area of the town exhibits a rising colony of blocks stretching up and over a shoulder of the hill to one side and to the other. ”

“ Here follow two merry young Americans on horseback, each with a gayly-dressed sigñorita before him, both without bonnets, and laughing merrily; and hear those glad and happy shouts of children! Stretched away before me is the world of San Francisco—and what a world! How the tide of human life flows and dashes upon its shores! Crowds every day arrive, and other crowds every day leave. Old friends meet, exchange a few words, and hasten on to the shrine of Mammon. Multitudes die, the waves close over them, and they are forgotten. ”

“ In five years a newer and a prouder San Francisco arose from the ashes of the old, and greeted the world as the highest example of municipal greatness to which a community can rise at times when nothing is left to man but hope, and that hope is half despair. ”

“ No one does in San Francisco. People get them all the time, and no one pays any heed to them. That was no excuse for your treating my friends de-haut-en-bas, as you did. It was very rude of you—very rude to me. ”

“ I arrived in San Francisco, one of the most wonderful and beautiful cities in all the world, on Monday, February 8, and began at once my serious study of the problem I had come to investigate—the problem of the man who works but who may be playing in hard luck; the penniless man temporarily out of a job ”

“ WE make history too rapidly in this country, and are too accustomed to changes to notice details. In the continual ebb and flow of life in San Francisco we scarce note an absence. Men go round the world before they are missed from Montgomery street. ”

“ San Francisco is not so large a city but that by the turning of a corner you may not come across a friend. Ruth grew to study the sounds the different kinds of vehicles made; and the rolling wheels of a doctor’s carriage behind her would set her pulses fluttering in fright. ”

“ We believe that when future generations shall come to write our history they will find that in this city of San Francisco we have been true to our ideals; that we have struggled along as men who struggle, not always unfalteringly, but at least always with a good heart; that we have tried to do our duty by our town and by our country and by the people who look to us for light, and that history will be able to say of San Francisco that she has been true to her trust as the "Warder of two continents" ”

“ At San Francisco the need will continue to be awful, and there will doubtless be a crop of nervous wrecks before the weeks and months are over, but meanwhile the commonest men, simply because they are men, will go on, singly and collectively, showing this admirable fortitude of temper. ”

“ Atop every crest one is confronted with farther districts lying not only beneath but opposite, across lower levels and hollows, flanking one's point of vantage with rival summits. San Francisco is agile in displaying her charms. As you are whirled up and down on the cable-car, she moves stealthily about you, now lagging behind in steep declivities, now dodging to right or left in stretches of plain or uplifted hillsides, now hurrying ahead to surprise you with a terrifying ascent crowned with palaces. ”

“ But oh, the thousands and thousands of mere mortals that are mired in their ruts and no longer even plan to climb out! There is no more chance for those people—who are in some little business, or are clerks, or small professional men, or fractions in the great corporations—to mention but a few examples—no more chance for them than in any of the older cities; for San Francisco has gone at such a pace that she has as many ruts as if centuries had plowed her, and those in the ruts might as well be on Lone Mountain. ”

“ The night was dark in San Francisco—that city far away on the confines of the Pacific. And far other scenes and other deeds are witnessed there than it ever entered into the imagination of the dwellers on the Atlantic sea-board to conceive of. Description is at fault; words cannot paint the mingled web, and fancy has no colors sufficiently vivid to depict the peculiar state of society in the newly-risen metropolis of California. ”

“ If the people and government of the United States will consider for a moment the importance to the nation of a well-fortified and imposing city and seaport at San Francisco bay; the importance to the army and navy, to art and science, to commerce and manufactures; of the effect of a city with its broad surroundings, at once elegant and impressive, upon the nations round the Pacific and on all the world, there should be little trouble in its accomplishment. ”

“ Such thoughts come to you as you gaze on the rich gardens of San Francisco and note their wealth of bright blossoms, brightening man's life and filling his soul with poetry and sentiment and longing for the beautiful and for the good.
As we walk through the city we note that it is rapidly extending itself towards the south and the slopes of the Pacific, and new homes are constantly appearing in its suburbs, even climbing up the hills to the west. ”

“ Nobody knows really what a city is except that it is something more than a collocation of houses. From Telegraph Hill, where the old semaphore stood, which signalled the far-between arrivals of ships around the Horn, you can see the trade of the world pass and repass the pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided warships. But none of these things really explain how San Francisco came to be clinging there to the leeward of a windy spit of land, like a great, grey sea-bird with palpitating wings. ”

“ On this gray afternoon the cold little parlor, with its bulge of bay window looking out on the dreariness of the street, seemed impregnated with an air of dejection. In common with many poor dwellings in that city of extravagant reverses, it was full of the costly relics of better days. San Francisco has more of such parlors than any city in the country. ”

“ Yes, as you say, society is becoming very mixed and frivolous everywhere, and you'd scarcely know San Francisco now. So delighted, however, to have made your acquaintance, and regret my business prevents my waiting to see your good husband. ”

“ The newspapers spoke of him with pity and respect, and all San Francisco took time, in the midst of its roar-and-rush fever of perpetual excitement, to give a kind thought to the dead man who had passed over to the life where all delusions are laid aside, where the mystery of life shall be revealed, and where we shall see that through all its tangled web ran the golden thread of mercy. ”

“ The author is a man of marked intellectual power, of independent convictions, and of strong human sympathies, lie lives in San Francisco, where he has been for thirty years, watching the growth of society in a forming State. ”

“ Stone sends me, and I see that these “forty-one vote papers” include all of the biggest reactionary sheets in America. One after another I look for those which I have pilloried in this book—they are all here! The “Los Angeles Times” is here, and de Young’s “San Francisco Chronicle,” and the “San Francisco Bulletin,” of the itching palm, and the “San Francisco Examiner,” which sent out my Shredded Wheat story, and the “Sacramento Union,” which was sold to the Calkins syndicate. Here is the “Pueblo Chieftain,” which circulated the foul slanders about Judge 274Lindsey and the miners’ wives. ”

“ Stretching barely from the foot of Telegraph Hill, at Jackson street, nine blocks, to a full stop at Market street, it was really the whole town. During the busy hours of the day you could meet there every man worth knowing in San Francisco, and in the afternoon, every woman with a pretty face or a handsome gown to show. This gave a wonderful facility for acquaintance and general good-fellowship. Everybody knew everybody. That was what made the old San Francisco the most charming and fascinating city in the world from a social standpoint. ”

“ San Francisco's godparents were but common humanity, traders and adventurers, later gold-seekers and pot politicians, intelligent, bold, and for the most part honest; few intending long to remain, few dreaming of the great city to arise here; few caring how the town should be made, if one were made at all. ”

“ Every one we knew seemed to have visited San Francisco. There we all submitted to inevitable fate, and left our negatives behind us, but the Duke was captured by a rival photographic institution, and had a sitting all to himself.
The aspect of a crowd in a large American city differs from that of the passers-by in the street of an English town, most of all in the appearance of such a large proportion of coloured people. ”

“ It is evident that San Francisco thinks well of the Pacific coast member of this Commission, and none the worse because he seems to have been chosen for the post merely on account of his being peculiarly fit for it. The city gladly takes the rest of you on faith, believing that the same rule of selection must have been applied in the cases with which it has not the happiness to be quite so familiar. ”

“ Then I began to understand why my pleasant and well-educated hosts in San Francisco spoke with a bitter scorn of such duties of citizenship as voting and taking an interest in the distribution of offices. Scores of men have told me with no false pride that they would as soon concern themselves with the public affairs of the city or State as rake muck. Read about politics as the cultured writer of the magazines regards 'em, and then, and not till then, pay your respects to the gentlemen who run the grimy reality. ”

“ Some child is now growing up in the city, who some day will be far away when there will come to him a whiff, perhaps of acacia, and in an instant there will come surging over him all the feel and urge and thrill and wistfulness and dreams of his childhood, and he will be once more in the atmosphere of San Francisco. ”