San Francisco

“ Surface impressions of San Francisco assail the visitor like colors in a gypsy's scarf lustrous and salient. There is so much vivacity in the streets downtown, so much to see in the haunts talked about, that one is apt to overlook in a brief sojourn an outstanding characteristic of the city—its many distinctive homes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those who can look out over the world are those who dominate it.
History shows that every three hundred years a great city arises at some very necessary and strategic point on the international highway. Such an inevitable world city is San Francisco. Whether it is the ragged slope of Telegraph Hill, the heights of Twin Peaks, the rolling green-brown softness of the Potrero bluffs, or the contours of any of the other high places that confront the visitor approaching from the Bay, the hills of San Francisco arrest the eye and intrigue the imagination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How we all love a city that we have once contemplated making our home! Such a city to me is San Francisco, and but for unavoidable duties elsewhere, I would be there today. I loved that bright, beautiful city, and even the mention of its name sends my blood bounding more quickly through my veins. That might have been my city, and I therefore rejoice in its prosperity. I am distressed when calamity overtakes it—I never lose faith in its ultimate success. The heart of the city is sound. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But now on the first morning, veiled partly with clouds, San Francisco rises on the view, that city of so many memories by the waters of the Pacific, where many a one has been wrecked in body and soul as well as in fortune, while others have grown rich and have led useful lives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You are in San Francisco, at the Grand, at the Occidental, at the Lick House or the Cosmopolitan. In their luxurious beds you have slept off the fatigue of thirty-three hundred miles across the continent, and at their bountiful tables you have fed yourself into courage and spirit for new and further enterprise. You have come forth so fresh and brave that you feel ready for eight thousand miles more, straight across the tranquil Pacific; or climbing, unaided, the loftiest vertebral peak of that spinal range which furnishes the backbone of the continent. ”

“ San Francisco is a very cosmopolitan town. All nationalities are to be found there. In the first gold fever days crowds poured in from all parts of the world, and they or their descendants are there still. Perfect as San Francisco is as a city, it is not thirty years since a small fishing village alone stood there. How such a perfect town has been erected in the time is truly a wonder, more wonderful still that in so many respects it should excel other capitals. ”

“ True is it that San Francisco commands the riches of Alaska, the commerce of China and Japan, the wealth of the Sandwich Islands and of the Philippine Archipelago as well as the products of the South Seas, and what more can she desire? Her cup, a golden cup, is full to overflowing; and I see the years coming, in the visions of the future, when the city will cover, like a jewelled robe, the whole Peninsula as far south as San Jose and will embrace within her government the flourishing towns upon the beautiful shores of her great Bay. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Twenty years later, toward the close of 1918, I stepped from the gangplank of a China boat and for the first time in my life set foot in San Francisco. If you have always thought of San Francisco as the bonny merry city, the gay light-hearted city, I advise you not to enter it first when it is wrapped in the gloom of a tule-fog. ”

“ For myself, then, I found San Francisco as so many other travellers have described it, disorderly, breathless with haste, unkempt. Here and there, where trees have been planted, and there is the grace of flowers and creeping plants, the houses look as if rational people might really live in them. But for the vast majority of the buildings, they seem merely places to lodge in, dak-bungalows or rest-houses, perches for passing swallows, anything you like—except houses to pass one's life in. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sitting, like Rome of old, on its seven hills, San Francisco has long been noted for its beautiful site, clasped in, as it is, between the Pacific Ocean and its own splendid bay, on a peninsula of some five miles in width. Where this juts into the bay at its northernmost point rises a great promontory known as Telegraph Hill, from whose height homeless thousands have recently gazed on the smoke rising from their ruined homes. ”

“ San Francisco's cosmopolitanism is peculiar to itself. Here are represented the nations of earth in such distinctive colonies that one might well imagine himself possessed of the magic carpet told of in Arabian Nights Tales, as he is transported in the twinkling of an eye from country to country. It is but a step across a street from America into Japan, then another step into China. Cross another street and you are in Mexico, close neighbor to France. Around the corner lies Italy, and from Italy you pass to Lombardy, and on to Greece. ”

“ 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 was, as I pictured it in advance, a city of gaiety, gold money, twenty-five cent drinks, flowers, Chinamen, hospitality, night restaurants, mysterious private dining rooms, the Bohemian Club, open-hearted men and unrivaled women—superb, majestic, handsomely upholstered, six-cylinder self-starting blondes, with all improvements, including high-tension double ignition, Prestolite lamps, and four speeds forward but no reverse. ”

“ It is a shrine at which all San Francisco worships. Wrapped in mystery it stands, for when it was placed there no one knows. It comes to us out of the past—a token left by the Spanish padres. Three times it has fallen into decay, but always loving hands have reached forward to restore it, and as long as San Francisco shall last, a cross will rise from the summit of Lone Mountain. ”

“ Many go and never return. A few come back to breathe again the stimulating air of California, to see with new eyes its fresh, vivid color, its poetry, its romance. To have gone East and to have returned without abject failure is here, in the eyes of the vulgar, Art's patent of nobility. Of those who have been content to linger peaceably in the land of the lotus, some are earls without coronets, but one and all share a fierce, hot, passionate love of the soil. San Francisco has become a fetish, a cult. Under its blue skies and driving fogs is bred the most ardent loyalty in these United States. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is never too hot, never too cold, to work—a fact which of itself secures a grand future for San Francisco. The effect upon national type is marked. At a San Franciscan ball you see English faces, not American. Even the lean Western men and hungry Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple of the winds. The high metallic ring of the New England voice is not found in San Francisco. As for old men, California must have been that fabled province of Cathay, the virtues of which were such that, whatever a man‘s age when he entered it, he never grew older by a day. ”

“ I am not much on allegory nor sermonizing, but I declare San Francisco gets me started. And when walking along about one’s business, one sees such a vivid picture, the allegory forces itself. The grandeur of yesterday, the serious beauty of today, and then the wild flowers that covered the hills before man interfered and will live on after man has gone into dust to make new flowers. ”

“ 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. ”