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San Francisco Before And After The Earthquake

The Californian is the second generation of a picked and mixed ancestry. The merry, the adventurous, often the desperate, always the brave, deserted the South and New England in 1849 to rush around the Horn or to try the perils of the plains. They found there a land already grown old in the hands of the Spaniards—younger sons of hidalgo and many of them of the best blood of Spain. To a great extent the pioneers intermarried with Spanish women; in fact, except for a proud little colony here and there, the old, aristocratic Spanish blood is sunk in that of the conquering race. Then there was an influx of intellectual French people, largely overlooked in the histories of the early days; and this Latin leaven has had its influence. 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. 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. 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, they had to be to live and leave descendants. The bones of the weaklings who started for El Dorado in 1849 lie on the plains or in the hill-cemeteries of the mining camps. 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. 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. Women in so-called "society" took no part in this function. 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. Latin, too, were the gay costumes of the women, who dressed brightly in accord with the city and the climate. This gaiety of costume was the first thing which the Eastern woman noticed—and disapproved. Give her a year, and she, too, would be caught by the infection of daring dress. In this parade of tall, deep bosomed, gleaming women, one caught the type and longed, sometimes for the sight of a more ethereal beauty—for the suggestion of soul within which belongs to a New England woman on whom a hard soil has bestowed a grudged beauty—for the mobility, the fire, which belongs to the Frenchwoman. The second generation of France was in this crowd, it is true; but climate and exercise had grown above their spiritual charm a cover of brilliant flesh. It was the beauty of Greece. 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. The life careless went on indoors or in the hundreds of pretty estates—"ranches" the Californians called them—which fringe the 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. If one should tell exactly what could be had at Coppa's for fifty cents or at the Fashion for, say thirty-five, no New Yorker who has not been there would believe it. The San Francisco French dinner and the San Francisco free lunch were as the Public Library to Boston or the stock yards to Chicago. A number of causes contributed to this. The country all about produced everything that a cook needs and that in abundance—the bay was an almost untapped fishing pound, the fruit farms came up to the very edge of the town, and the surrounding country produced in abundance fine meats, game, all cereals and all vegetables. But the chefs who came from France in the early days and stayed because they liked this land of plenty were the head and front of it. They passed on 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 establishments of this name, beginning with a frame shanty where, in the early days, a prince of French cooks used to exchange ragouts for gold dust. Each succeeding restaurant of the name has moved further downtown; and the recent Poodle Dog stands—stands or stood; one mixes his tenses queerly in writing of this city which is and yet is no more—on the edge of the Tenderloin in a modern five story building. 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. 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 who never spoke unless spoken to, wore diamonds and was a heavy investor in real estate. There were others as famous in their way—the Zinkand, 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 to its own line; and many others, humbler but great at the price. 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; and his accent was as thick as his peasant soups. The patrons were Frenchmen of the poorer class, or young and poor clerks and journalists who had discovered the delights of his hostelry. The place exuded a genial gaiety, of which Louis, throwing out familiar jokes to right and left as he mixed salads and carried dishes, was the head and front. First on the bill of fare was the soup mentioned before—thick and clean and good. Next, one of Louis' three cherubic little sons brought on a course of fish—sole, rock cod, flounders or smelt—with a good French sauce. The third course was meat. This came on en bloc; the waiter dropped in the centre of each table a big roast or boiled joint together with a mustard pot and two big dishes of vegetables. Each guest manned the carving knife in turn and helped himself to his satisfaction. After that, Louis, with an air of ceremony, brought on a big bowl of excellent salad which he had mixed himself. For beverage, there stood by each plate a perfectly cylindrical pint glass filled with new, watered claret. The meal closed with "fruit in season"—all that the guest cared to eat. I have saved a startling fact to close the paragraph—the price was fifteen cents! If one wanted black coffee he paid five cents extra, and Louis brought on a beer glass full of it. Why he threw in wine and charged extra for after-dinner coffee was one of Louis' professional secrets. Adulterated food at that price? Not a bit of it! The olive oil in the salad was pure, California product—why adulterate when he could get it so cheaply? The wine, too, was above reproach, for Louis made it himself. Every autumn, he brought tons and tons of cheap Mission grapes, set up a wine press in his back yard, and had a little, festival vintage of his own. The fruit was small, and inferior, but fresh, and Louis himself, in speaking of his business, said that he wished his guests would eat nothing but fruit, it came so cheap. The city never went to bed. There was no closing law, so that the saloons kept open nights and Sundays at their own sweet will. Most of the cafes elected to remain open until 2 o'clock in the morning at least. This restaurant life, however does not express exactly the careless, pleasure-loving character of the people. In great part their pleasures were simple, inexpensive and out of doors. No people were fonder of expeditions into the country, of picnics—which might be brought off at almost any season of the year—and of long tours in the great mountains and forests. Hospitality was nearly a vice. As in the early mining days, if they liked the stranger the people took him in. At the first meeting the San Francisco man had him put up at the club; at the second, he invited him home to dinner. As long as the stranger stayed he was being invited to week end parties at ranches, to little dinners in this or that restaurant and to the houses of his new acquaintances, until his engagements grew beyond hope of fulfilment. Perhaps there was rather too much of this kind of thing. At the end of a fortnight a visitor with a pleasant smile and a good story left the place a wreck. This tendency ran through all grades of society—except, perhaps, the sporting people who kept the tracks and the fighting game alive. These also met the stranger—and also took him in. Centres of man hospitality were the clubs, especially the famous Bohemian and the Family. The latter was an offshot of the Bohemian; and it had been growing fast and vieing with the older organization for the honor of entertaining pleasing and distinguished visitors. The Bohemian Club, whose real founder is said to have been the late Henry George, was formed in the '70s by newspaper writers and men working in the arts or interested in them. It had grown to a membership of 750. It still kept for its nucleus painters, writers, musicians and actors, amateur and professional. They were a gay group of men, and hospitality was their avocation. Yet the thing which set this club off from all others in the world was the midsummer High Jinks. The club owns a fine tract of redwood forest fifty miles north of San Francisco on the Russian River. 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. On the last night they put on the Jinks proper, a great spectacle in praise of the forest with poetic words, music and effects done by the club. In late years this has been practically a masque or an opera. It cost about $10,000. It took the spare time of scores of men for weeks; yet these 750 business men, professional men, artists, newspaper workers, struggled for the honor of helping out on the Jinks; and the whole thing was done naturally and with reverence. It would not be possible anywhere else in this country; the thing which made it possible was the art spirit which is in the Californian. 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 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. 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; but the Chinese had added to them, had rebuilt them, had run out their own balconies and entrances, and had given the quarter that feeling of huddled irregularity which makes all Chinese built dwellings fall naturally into pictures. Not only this; they had burrowed to a depth of a story or two under the ground, and through this ran passages in which the Chinese transacted their dark and devious affairs—as the smuggling of opium, the traffic in slave girls and the settlement of their difficulties. In the last five years there was less of this underground life than formerly, for the Board of Health had a cleanup some time ago; but it was still possible to go from one end of Chinatown to the other through secret underground passages. The tourist, who always included Chinatown in his itinerary, saw little of the real quarter. The guides gave him a show by actors hired for his benefit. In reality the place amounted to a great deal in a financial way. There were clothing and cigar factories of importance, and much of the Pacific rice, tea and silk importing was in the hands of the merchants, who numbered several millionaires. Mainly, however, it was a Tenderloin for the house servants of the city—for the San Francisco Chinaman was seldom a laundryman; he was too much in demand at fancy prices as a servant. The Chinese lived their own lives in their own way and settled their own quarrels with the revolvers of their highbinders. There were two theatres in the quarter, a number of rich joss houses, three newspapers and a Chinese telephone exchange. There is a race feeling against the Chinese among the working people of San Francisco, and no white man, except the very lowest outcasts, lived in the quarter. On the slopes of Telegraph Hill dwelt the Mexicans and Spanish, in low houses, which they had transformed by balconies into a semblance of Spain. Above, and streaming over the hill, were the Italians. The tenement quarter of San Francisco shone by contrast with those of Chicago and New York, for while these people lived in old and humble houses they had room to breathe and an eminence for light and air. Their shanties clung to the side of the hill or hung on the very edge of the precipice overlooking the bay, on the verge of which a wall kept their babies from falling. The effect was picturesque, and this hill was the delight of painters. 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 unpoetic Americans had renamed it Twin Peaks. At its foot was Mission Dolores, the last mission planted by the Spanish padres in their march up the coast, and from these hills the Spanish looked for the first time upon the golden bay. Many years ago some one set up at the summit of this peak a sixty foot cross of timber. Once a high wind blew it down, and the women of the Fair family then had it restored so firmly that it would resist anything. It has risen for fifty years above the gay, careless, luxuriant and lovable city, in full view from every eminence and from every valley. It stands tonight, above the desolation of ruins. The bonny, merry city—the good, gray city—O that one who has mingled the wine of her bounding life with the wine of his youth should live to write the obituary of Old San Francisco! <h1>The City That Was (1910)</h1> Will Irwin, a San Franciscan in exile at the time of the 1906 disaster, wrote and published in the New York Sun under the title The City That Was, a magnificent tribute to the old town. He sprinkled the ashes with his tears. The article, in book form, became widely known in the literature of the catastrophe. Today, his tears long since forgotten, Mr. Irwin pays a different tribute to the city that he loves. I first came into the new San Francisco in August 1907 during the era of rebuilding. I returned, I remember, to weep. I was in the condition that morning of a man preparing for a sentimental Jag. I parted at the Oakland Mole with my train friends of the overland journey. I wanted to go to my sorrow alone. As I sat by the front rail of the boat, watching that indescribable swell of the bay surge down on us, I was startled by a laugh beside me. I turned with the feeling of indignation. It was unseemly mirth at a funeral. I had to shake myself to remember that these people had been dwelling in crushed San Francisco for a year and that a year is a long time to pack around any grief. There they were talking business, reading their newspapers, flirting with their girls. I, I alone was living through a new grief. I looked at the Bear Hill below the Fairmont at the bump where the Hopkins Institute used to crown the Citadel of the town and got ready to shed not unmanly tears when I should stand in the midst of that ruin and wreckage. At the station, I waived aside the omnibus and prepared to walk up through the wreck of dear old scenes alone. I might have wept there. It was the only chance I had, as it turned out. But for a fellow, I knew. We fell into each other's arms. Before I had fairly wrenched away, he had pulled the blueprint on me. Ten stories concrete, he said. See her up there? That skeleton on battery street? You remember the old three story shack? Bill, honest, I'm glad she burned down. Ain't that the greatest sight that ever was? And he pointed up Market Street. There it was. A city rising. Market Street torn up to its very entrails. A forest of steel skeletons as far as the eye carried. The Donahue Fountain in appropriate setting for once fringed with bricks and mortar and girders, a chorus of ratchets making music on steel. As we stood there watching, a news boy shoved a paper in my face and made gesting remarks as San Francisco News boys will do on the shape of my hat. A man in overalls rolled up and addressed me not with the professional wine of the Eastern Panhandler, but with the democracy of the unrivaled Pacific Coast product. You look like a nice young fellow if you do have a funny face, he said in effect. Say, I'm just in from Bellingham, beat out of my pay and want two bits for a drink. As I came across, a sound of music pierced the noise of the ratchets. Beside the ferry entrance, a Schizzenfest Park picnic had stacked up, waiting for transportation. Girls in white dresses and white caps, men in white trousers and sashes, details of ribboned canes and official badges, and baskets, and plump mothers, and noisy babies. There it was, just as though the town had not burned down. That touch finished me. I turned to the fellow I knew. He recalled to me yesterday what I said, Hell, I doubt that introductory word, but he says I slipped it in my excitement. This would be the same old town if they moved it to the top of Mount Hamilton, and my not unmanly tears are unched to this day. Never did I notice any difference in the people, either then or now. They remained the same easy, lovable, open minded sulfites that they were when the line ran from the bald one to Bush, that they were when Dennis Kearney ran the sand lots, that they were doubtless when the two original inhabitants sat on the Bay Shore at Montgomery Street and ultimately divided their food supply and worked politics on each other over the division of town lots. They changed their roofs above them, but not their hearts. But the new city, on its physical aspect, has been a matter of deep and personal concern to exiled Californians. We have debated upon it with a horror less our builders would remake San Francisco on the pattern of one of those middle Western cities which seem to have been ordered by the sides from Grand Rapids. Ugly as were the old buildings of the downtown district in detail, their massing and their coloring of a greenish gray from accumulated sea moss made them curiously attractive en masse. The artist appreciated this consciously, and I suppose that the passionate devotion to San Francisco in the mass of Northern Californiaans was due in part to an unconscious appreciation of this hidden beauty. New buildings and porcelain bathtubs and 20th century plumbing were all very well, we told each other. But would the new city run also to castile soap pillars and gilded plaster and pressed glass mirrors? It was a great thing to have a fine new business equipment and to be mistress of the Pacific. But could there be anything of the old physical charm about the modern San Francisco? The miracle has happened. Modern architects have built the new city out of modern materials, on modern plans, and the external charm of the place remains. It is just as hard to say why as it ever was to explain the allurement of San Francisco for the eye. Much of the new architecture is good, most of it is passable, a very little is as bad as that old fancy work architecture of San Francisco, which Gillett Burgess used to satirize as chaos Avenue. On the whole, it is certainly better work than any Eastern city would erect where it called upon to rebuild. That is a tribute, not so much to our architects as to their clients. Nowhere in the United States is the art sent so general among people of means as in San Francisco. If our builders here have nearly worked out a new American school in the adaptation of the Redwood Bungalow style to city uses, the people in general deserve half the thanks. It is a wonderful new city with all its old distinction saved. It becomes now my mission to dry the tears of exiled Californians. There are only five American cities which stand apart from the rest for appearance. Boston, New York, Charleston, New Orleans, and San Francisco. We are preserved forever in that column now. For example, I had done a lot of worrying about the crest of Russian Hill as seen from the Southeast. I heard that buildings were going up fast in that district. They'll ruin it, I said. I came up Taylor Street last Monday in the twilight and found that they had not ruined Russian Hill. They had made it. Nowhere in the United States is there a vista so satisfying to the eye, so suggestive of romance as that summit as seen from Taylor and Broadway. I remembered then the old picture of gray rooftops and lanes of yellow light, which we used to admire from our windows on Russian Hill. I looked down. There was only one change in the picture. What had been gray was now white, and beyond that, eternal among these changes of man, was that golden Bay with its surge as of a river and its distant lights. That, and the hills, and the mists would make us distinctive, I suppose, were we to replace our buildings by Patterson, New Jersey or Chelsea, Massachusetts. It is a larger city, a more convenient city. And since it is also a more beautiful and more distinctive city, I announce myself a complete convert. This city that was business is the old stuff. End of section 3, The City That Is. End of San Francisco Before and After the Earthquake by Will Irwin. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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